210 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
the palace constructed by Cortés along the eastern edge
of the main plaza in the 1560s to serve as the seat of the
viceroy, that royal doppelganger. It would be reworked over
three centuries to “forcefully [assert] the presence and per-
sistence of kingly authority in New Spain” 2 (figure 4.3). By
the end of the sixteenth century, the Spanish Habsburgs
would seize on the model it offered of a spacious central
plaza defined by orderly architecture as a metaphor for the
order and centrality of royal power beyond Mexico City.
They took this prototype, one developed on the periphery,
and carried it back to the center. Beginning in the 1580s, a
spacious main plaza, also called the Plaza Mayor, began
to be constructed in Madrid, echoing that of the Ameri-
can capital, whose “order and regularity . .. symbolized
the good government the Spanish Habsburgs wished to
impart to all of Spain.” 3
Mexico City, and its process of becoming a place where
royal authority was inscribed on plaza and building alike,
paralleled that of the earlier and coterminous Mexica city of
Tenochtitlan, which had been reclaimed from the shallow
swamps around an island in Lake Tetzcoco as its people
fashioned an ideal altepetl modeled on Aztlan, their place of
origin. They understood the surrounding environment to
be filled with divine presences that made themselves mani-
fest in the fall of rain and the sweep of the tides; controlling
the excesses of that environment was a constant battle, one
likened to warfare both in representations of the city and
in practice. If colonial Mexico City was a conquered city,
so was its predecessor, Tenochtitlan, but the battle waged
and fitfully won was against the surrounding lakes. Seiz-
ing the lead in the battles, both against enemy states and
against the ever-encroaching lake, was the altepetl leader,
or huei tlatoani. Just as his later Habsburg counterparts
would increasingly mark Mexico City with their presence,
both in the figure of the viceroy and in the architecture
of its center, the Mexica tlatoani used representations to
anneal his person to that of the altepetl as a whole. Thus the
manipulations of the surrounding environment that were
necessary to create and then maintain the altepetl—the
watery hill and ideal human community—were credited
to this leader.
Most histories of the city have assumed that the
Mexica historical trajectory ended with the Conquest, as
if the deaths of the huei tlatoque Moteuczoma and then
Cuauhtemoc were equivalent to the death of Tenochtitlan.
But it did not, as can be seen otherwise on a number of
fronts. When powerful indigenous men were reseated as
rulers of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, it was they who rebuilt the
city, reestablishing freshwater supplies and marketplaces
and a new government center. Indigenous knowledge and
technologies also continued to inform water management
in the sixteenth-century city. The indigenous ideology of
the altepetl was no less a force than the imported Euro-
pean ideology of civitas in the sixteenth-century city, and
the former, like the surrounding lakes and groundwater
springs, was constantly welling up and flooding through
the sixteenth-century city.
Spanish conquerors would destroy the altepetl temples
but perhaps the most dramatic injury to the altepetl was
not the Conquest itself, but the gradual denial of the first
of the two essential Nahua ideas in the word altepetl: atl,
“water.” Spaniards and Creoles, their idea of an ideal city
forged in bone-dry Extremadura, had little tolerance for
the watery world that was modeled on Aztlan, and their
vision of Mexico City as a flood-free city, which meant a
water-free valley, led to the agonizing desagüe (literally, the
“de-watering” of the city) over the next four centuries. By
the early nineteenth century, Alexander von Humboldt
would point out that the pre-Hispanic verdure of the val-
ley environment had given way to arid plains resembling
those of Tibet and the great salt plains of Central Asia. 4
For better and worse, the space of Mexico City was shaped
by a constant interplay between the ideal—manifested in
verbal and visual representations—and realized actions.
This was true within the indigenous spheres of the city,
as the discussion of the representations of the urban spaces
in the previous chapters has shown. Because if Spanish
residents struggled to find a horizon against which to
situate Mexico City, so too did its indigenous rulers in the
colonial period, and this horizon was both a global one
and a local one. Some of this struggle was captured in the
featherwork produced under don Diego Huanitzin, the
only known work of art we can attribute to his patron-
age, which aimed, in part, to find a place for Mexico City
within the new framework of a global Christian empire.
Later, his successor, don Esteban de Guzmán, would
situate indigenous rule in the city, as represented through
the tecpan, in relation to the power hierarchy established
by the viceroy. Surely the other sixteenth-century native
gobernadores did more along these lines—like creating the
banner representing the line of native governors that hung
from the tecpan, preserved only via its description in native
accounts—but the vagaries of history and the systematic
disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples by the colonial