no Tes T o Pages 125–139 • 221Cuepopan was near present-day San Fernando,
and that of San Juan was near the plaza of
San Juan. See Caso, “Los barrios antiguos de
Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco,” 11, 19, 27, 30. Short
of urban excavation, it will be difficult to prove
or discredit this claim. See, however, Saúl Pérez
Castillo, “La equidistancia de algunos elementos
urbanos de origen prehispánico, localizados
dentro de los límites que tenían las ciudades de
Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco.”
- Romero Galván, “La ciudad de México.”
The other minor basilicas are San Lorenzo and
Santa Cruz de Jerusalem. Other sites in the
early city were soon given these “leftover” names.
A church of San Lorenzo appears in the city in
the 1530s adjacent to the tianguis, but disappears
from that site, to reappear as the leper hospital
on the eastern side of the city in the 1580s. - García Icazbalceta, “Historia de los
Mexicanos,” 3:248; see also Luis Chávez Orozco,
ed., Códice Osuna: Reproducción facsimilar de la
obra, 48. - Other writers have argued for the
precedence of Jerusalem, which was undoubtedly
a general model used throughout New Spain.
Antonio Rubial García, “Civitas Dei,” 34. - Romero Galván, “La ciudad de México,”
13–32; Moreno de los Arcos, “Los territoriales
parroquiales de la Ciudad Arzobispal.” While
Moreno de los Arcos assigned colors, year signs,
and deities to the four parts of the city, drawing
from a generic central Mexican template, his
particular associations are not corroborated by
any Mexica source on the city. - González González, “La ubicación e
importancia del Templo de Xipe Tótec.” - Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana,
bk. 5, pt. 1, ch. 19, 611; life of Hernando de Tapia
to be found in Pérez-Rocha and Tena, La
nobleza indígena, 40. - Bejarano, Actas de cabildo, July 31, 1528.
- Lira González, Comunidades indígenas,
42–43, 316–319. - That Moyotlan had two patron saints
is confirmed in Archivo General de la Nación,
Mexico, Indios 344, fol. 96, which also discusses
other locally important feasts. - Joaquín Montes Bardo, Arte y espirituali-
dad franciscana en la Nueva España, siglo XVI:
Iconología en la provincia del Santo Evangelio,
247–248. - Chávez Orozco, Códice Osuna, 48:
“Los dias de San Pedro y San Pablo, que es la
vocación del dicho barrio” (The [feast] days of
Saint Peter and Saint Paul, which is the devo-
tion of the neighborhood). The source docu-
ment is Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico,
Civil 644. However, this appellation does not
survive in midcentury documents, where it is
simply called San Pablo.
50. Caso, “Los barrios antiguos de
Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco,” 50–59, gives tributary
population counts for early seventeenth-century
tlaxilacalli. Torquemada, Monarquía indiana,
vol. 3, bk. 15, ch. 16, 36, also names it as the most
populous of the four parts in the 1520s.
51. Torquemada, Monarquía indiana, vol. 1,
bk. 3, ch. 26, 300, writing ca. 1605, describes this
as “new.” He also mentions the causeway con-
taining an aqueduct built to bring water from
Chapultepec, whose construction is discussed
in chapter 9.
chaPTeR 7
Material in this chapter was adapted from
Barbara E. Mundy, “Place-Names in Mexico-
Tenochtitlan,” Ethnohistory 61, no. 2 (Spring
2014): 329–355.- Roberto L. Mayer, “ Trasmonte y Boot:
Sus vistas de tres ciudades mexicanas en el siglo
XVII.” - According to Whittaker, “The city name
might seem to have several possible etymologies,
but only one works well: an assimilated form of
*me:tz-xic-co, meaning ‘in (-co) the centre (xic-;
literally, navel) of the moon (me:tz-). The exact
equivalent is found in Otomi for the Aztec capi-
tal. And we know that a cc cluster can become
‘c (hc) in Nahuatl dialect. Cf. tt: itta ‘ s e e ’, w h i c h
is now i’ta (ihta) in most dialects. So the Mexica
are not so much the people of Mexi (even if they
liked this folk etymology) as the people from the
centre of the moon (lake = Metztliapan, today
Lake Texcoco).” Personal communication, 2012. - On shifts in toponymy, see Gordon
Whittaker, “The Study of North Mesoamerican
Place-Signs,” 18–20. - Bejarano, Actas de cabildo, June 7, 1529. The
word “ciudad” was often spelled “cibdad” in the
sixteenth century. - The network of ciudad/pueblo preserved
the indigenous geopolitics, in part, as important
indigenous centers (Cholula, Tlaxcala) were
granted the title of “ciudad,” although in Velasco’s
text the term “pueblo de indio” is affixed. In
this network were the emergent network of
“ciudades de españoles” (México, Puebla), whose
Spanish populations, although often dwarfed by
indigenous counterparts, heavily counted toward
their city status. See Juan López de Velasco,
Geografía y descripción universal de las Indias,
2nd pt., 186. - Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life,
91–110. - Bejarano, Actas de cabildo, June 17, 1549.
- Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, 32.
- Charles Gibson, Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth
Century, 165. - Reyes García, Celestino Solís, and
Valencia Ríos, Documentos nahuas de la Ciudad
de México.- George Kubler, “The Name Tenochtitlan,”
surveys the Spanish literature, but Kubler did
not have access to the Nahuatl corpus. - Tezozomoc, Crónica mexicayotl, 76.
- Valero de García Lascuráin, Los códices de
Ixhuatepec, 46. - Tenochtitlan held a number of off-island
properties through the colonial period. Gibson,
The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, 47. - Tezozomoc, Crónica mexicayotl, 3, 5.
- Reyes García, Celestino Solís, and
Valencia Ríos, Documentos nahuas de la Ciudad
de México, 84. - British Museum Mss. Cat. Add. 13994.
Many place-names were written down as part
of the names of different chapels in the city by
the religious chronicler Agustín de Vetancourt,
whose interest was in documenting Catholic
parishes in his contemporary city. That he knew
so many of them in a book published in 1698
signals their endurance nearly two centuries
after the Conquest. Vetancourt, Teatro mexicano,
pt. 4, tratado 2, 42–43. - For more on the relation between the
Caso and Alzate maps, see Barbara E. Mundy,
“Place-Names in Mexico-Tenochtitlan.” - Calnek, “ Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco”;
Truitt, “Nahuas and Catholicism in Mexico
Tenochtitlan.” - The evolution of this government is
treated in Connell, After Moctezuma, 13–21. - The text reads “Ca yn nehoatl don Baltha-
zar Tlilancalqui yoan nonamic Juana Tlaco
tichaneque yn inpan in ciudad Mexico Sanctiago
Tlatilulco totlaxilacaltia Sancta Ana Xopilco.”
My translation; the document is Archivo Gen-
eral de la Nación, Mexico, Tierras 49, exp. 5, and
is reproduced with Spanish translation in Reyes
García, Celestino Solís, and Valencia Ríos, Docu-
mentos nahuas de la Ciudad de México, 1 8 7. - Reyes García, Celestino Solís, and
Valencia Ríos, Documentos nahuas de la Ciudad
de México, 201, 80, 93. - R. Joe Campbell, A Morphological
Dictionary of Classic Nahuatl, 61–62. - I have been unable to find evidence of
public rogations, or circumambulations, that
would have defined the boundaries of the
tlaxilacalli within the urban fabric. - Victor M. Castillo Farreras, “Unidades
nahuas de medida.” - Hanns J. Prem, “Aztec Writing”; Gordon
Whittaker, “The Principles of Nahuatl Writing,”
48–49, 52. - Gordon Whittaker, “Nahuatl
Hieroglyphic Writing and the Beinecke Map,” - An exception might be the chalice of Saint
John the Evangelist, which is usually shown