209zuazo: Now here is the plaza. Look carefully, please, and
note if you have ever seen another equal to it in size and
g randeur.
aLfaRo: Indeed, none that I remember; and I don’t think that
its equal can be found in either hemisphere. Good heavens!
How level it is and how spacious! How gay! How greatly
embellished by the superb and magnificent buildings that
surround it on all sides! What order! What beauty! What
a situation and location! Truly, if those colonnades that we
are now facing were removed, it could hold an entire army.
zuazo: The reason for the great size of the plaza is to pre-
vent goods from being offered for sale in other places. For
whereas in Rome there was a market-place for swine, one
for vegetables, another for cattle, the Livian market, the
Julian market, the Aurelian market and the one for delica-
cies, this one market-place is for all the people of the City
of Mexico. In this one market-place weekly market days
were established; here the auctions are held; here is found
whatever there is for sale; and to this place the merchants
of the whole province bring and import their wares. To this
market-place also, to sum it up, flow in whatever things are
most desirable in Spain. 1
In this imaginary dialogue created in 1554 by Francisco
Cervantes de Salazar between two characters who walk
through the streets of Mexico City, they arrive at the great
main plaza of the city and are unabashed in their admi-
ration of its size; Alfaro, a new arrival, is unable to find
anything like it in the cities cached in his memory. His com-
panion, Zuazo, offers the markets of ancient Rome as a
comparison, but they are divided by type, whereas here, all
the goods from home and abroad are put on display in one
place. The dialogue, a Latin primer for students at the newly
founded university that lay not far off the Plaza Mayor, is
one of the few written descriptions of the city from this
midcentury period, and it neatly captures the pride of the
emergent Creole class in their city, whose markets rival and
transcend a pagan Roman model and bring together “the
most desirable” goods of the transatlantic trade. As an early
literary work about the city, it has been an influential rep-
resentation of the urban space of the New World capital,
the characters’ trajectory through the city establishing an
order that begins in the Spanish Plaza Mayor and moves
outward, its narrative structure following their itinerary,
establishing the city’s center and relative peripheries.
This dialogue also captures some of the difficulty that
city residents had in establishing a horizon against which
to situate Mexico City, a place that European writers,
looking to the New World from across the Atlantic, set
somewhere within the vague outlines of that region that
maps called “America.” The market of Zuazo’s “Mexico,” for
instance, hovers between the Roman markets of the classi-
cal past and the markets of the future, with vast quantities
of goods coming from near and far to be displayed upon
its paved expanse. For Habsburg rulers concerned with
centralizing their power and funding European ambitions,
Mexico City’s main plaza was the future, with transatlantic
and transpacific goods representing the growing reach of
their overseas empire. Within this plaza, they would offer
an architectural reminder of their own presence by buying