RemembeRing TenochTiTLan • 211state have meant that very little of their city has survived.
This book has tried to focus attention on that which has.
To do so has meant not only closely scrutinizing the
objects we use to understand the past, but also shifting
the frameworks employed and questioning the metaphors
that have shaped the city’s history. Taking into account
the presence of the city’s indigenous residents who vastly
outnumbered their Spanish neighbors has meant mov-
ing away from thinking of the city only as the product of
its elite political class or as existing only in architecture.
Instead, paying attention to the urban practices, be they
the actions of building dikes and walking (now ephemeral)
processional routes, and granting them a role in the cre-
ation of the lived spaces of the city has been a way to bring
attention to indigenous presences in the city. Nonetheless,
representations have always been in the foreground of our
picture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Tenochtitlan
and Mexico City, given how their agendas—battling ones
after the Conquest—shaped both the lived spaces of the
city and its subsequent historical representations.
If the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan offered to its indig-
enous residents comforting reminders of their seamless
integration into the larger cosmic order in both its layout
and its animating rituals, its Spanish conquerors saw the
indigenous city around them as a bloodstained place, where
the “idolatrous” ritual they witnessed or heard gossiped
about in their terrified encampments was like a poison,
seeping up through the city’s soils and through the cracks
in the walls. Once the Conquest was over and the city reoc-
cupied, the markers of this perceived idolatrous past were
to be dismantled, the temples destroyed and the “idols” cast
from the altars. The conquistadores hoped that the past
of the city could be forgotten, and later the Franciscans
hoped, even believed, the same. They targeted its symbolic
architecture, razing the altepetl pyramids along with the
great Templo Mayor, its useful stone piled nearby to be
recut for the parcialidad churches and the Cathedral. As
the city’s leading evangelizers, the Franciscans were even
more concerned with individual memories, and thus they
sought also to reach into the minds of the city’s indigenous
residents and make them forget Tenochtitlan as the condi-
tion for creating a new Christian republic on its spaces.
This historical amnesia was doubled in the histories of
the city written after the Conquest, with the emphasis on
Spanish exploits and the reliance on Spanish narratives.
This pattern would continue through the sixteenth century.
Cervantes de Salazar was hired as the Spanish cabildo’s
historian, and in his dialogue above, for instance, nothing
in the verbal narration of the city suggests that it had a deep
Mexica history before the Spanish Conquest. In fact, the
market Zuazo describes in the opening quote with such
eloquence was, in fact, a very minor market for most of
the city’s residents, holding mostly expensive and imported
goods in the sixteenth century. Instead, the city’s lifeblood
flowed through the great indigenous markets, particularly
the Tianguis of Mexico, that were to be found on the city’s
western side, appearing only later in this same dialogue.
To be aware of indigenous presence is thus to confront the
powerful metaphor of indigenous erasure, an erasure that
was established in the first historical accounts of the city
(Cortés’s letters) and carried forth by the city’s Franciscan
evangelizers and in its official Spanish histories.
In creating a new narrative about Mexico City that
shows its historic connections to pre-Hispanic Tenochti-
tlan and the importance of indigenous Mexico-Tenochtitlan
to its sixteenth-century identity, I have been compelled by
the challenge posed by Michel de Certeau, who asks those
of us thinking about the urban form to move from flying,
with its distance, to the point of view of the walker, moving
along created and creative itineraries within the city. And
I have been aided by the schema of Henri Lefebvre, who
posits three intersecting spheres that constitute space: the
representations of space; lived space; and practice. While
Certeau takes up the figure of the walker in synchronic
time, in the actual experience of lived space, human mem-
ory adds the diachronic. Thus cities are inescapably marked
by their pasts, pasts embedded in the layout of streets
and the presence of buildings, with traces of calamitous
events—the stain of the high-water mark, the jagged scar
of the seismic convulsion—indeed, for city residents, time
loops back on itself in the patterned repetitions of city life,
of festival and market. And ceremony. The work of human
memory meant that the city’s spaces were layered with
historical deep associations that even the bloody battles
of conquest could not blot out; they were like those clut-
tered memory palaces of classical theory that Franciscans
imported into New Spain, their mnemonic traces difficult
to obscure. This metaphor of city as memory palace sets
continuity over rupture and allows me some leave to trace a
through line from the pre-Hispanic period to the sixteenth
century, in an attempt to bridge the traditional historical
cleavage that has rent pre-Hispanic Tenochtitlan apart
from viceregal Mexico City.
In fact, rather than flying or walking, the experience