inTRoducTion • 15role in shaping the meanings of lived spaces. The theme of
memory will reoccur later in the book.
PasT sTudies
When representations of the city’s spaces are probed
with an eye to indigenous presences, they yield a different
understanding of the city’s sixteenth-century history. By
emphasizing indigenous presence, rather than assuming
its absence, in representations of space and lived spaces,
this book makes a novel contribution to both the history of
Mexico City and early modern urbanism. It draws inspira-
tion from a slim volume and map that the architect Luis
González Aparicio published in 1973 on the pre-Hispanic
city, in which he laid out the extensive environmental
manipulation—the building of dikes and causeways, roads
and aqueducts—undertaken by the peoples of the Val-
ley of Mexico to make their highland lacustrine environ-
ment habitable, paralleling a similar study of the hydraulic
environment published by Ángel Palerm the same year. 31
González Aparicio posited that the pre-Hispanic build-
ers of the valley cities consciously connected the urban
nuclei—the urban network clustered around the lake—
with great visual axes that tied together the built environ-
ment and in turn connected urban dwellers to the sacred
mountain peaks that surrounded the valley. In doing so,
he underscored both the genius of indigenous hydraulic
engineers as well as the ideological drives behind their
great urbanistic feats, as they created a built environ-
ment in harmony with the natural one, particularly the
mountains and bodies and currents of water. His work
has been confirmed and amplified by others. Archeolo-
gists working on the Templo Mayor, the main temple of
the Mexica that was revealed in the center of Mexico City
in 1978, have underscored the manifold ways that the ideal
concept of the altepetl (a word that means the ideal socio-
political community and translates literally as “water hill”)
was given expression in the architecture and urban design
of pre-Hispanic Tenochtitlan, discussed in chapter 2. The
geographer Alain Musset has explored the ideologies of
water and the manipulation of the lacustrine landscape
in the Valley, as has the anthropologist Gabriel Espinosa
Pineda, among others. 32
A decade before the publication of González Aparicio’s
work, Charles Gibson’s masterful history of 1964, The
Aztecs under Spanish Rule, looked at the social and politi-
cal history of the post-Conquest valley and underscored
the enduring presence and practices of indigenous peoples
in the Valley of Mexico. 33 Gibson’s enterprise was fur-
thered by James Lockhart, particularly in The Nahuas after
the Conquest, of 1992; Lockhart worked through the vast
archive of documents written in Nahuatl to construct a
new history about the indigenous past, one that under-
scored indigenous agency in the colonial period. 34 More
recently, historians have homed in on Mexico City and
given us a better picture of the workings of the indigenous
city and its government in the post-Conquest period. Wil-
liam Connell’s After Moctezuma looked at the history of
the indigenous government that was set up in the capital
in the wake of the Conquest, a government that was struc-
tured similarly to the Spanish cabildo that ruled over the
center of the city: publications by María Casteñeda de la
Paz, Emma Pérez-Rocha, Perla Valle, and Rafael Tena
have focused on the actions of indigenous elites, bring-
ing to light new understandings of these key players and
new documentary sources. 35 Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, who
has studied the role of Crown officials in shaping the early
economy of the region around Mexico City, has also turned
her attention to the role of indigenous elites in the city,
revealing the complicated political currents among them,
Franciscans and Spanish encomenderos (who held Crown
grants of indigenous labor); a recent collection edited by
Felipe Castro Gutiérrez, including essays by him, Rebeca
López Mora, and Margarita Vargas Betancourt, has
focused attention on the indigenes of Tenochtitlan and
Tlatelolco, as well as their counterparts in other cities of
New Spain. 36
Yet these two avenues of study have not yet come
together: archeologists and architects have amply revealed
the extraordinary feats of the Mexica in creating the pre-
Hispanic city and the compelling ideologies that drove
them; at the same time, historians have brought new
understanding of the actions and agency of indigenous
peoples, particularly elites in the post-Conquest city. But
to date, no one has focused extensively on the role of indig-
enous peoples in shaping the built environment and lived
space in sixteenth-century Mexico City. In order to fully
understand the lived space of the indigenous city, this book
avoids a periodization that posits a definitive break between
the pre-Hispanic and post-Conquest city—a corrective
to the trope of the death of Tenochtitlan—and treats
the creation of the indigenous city as an ongoing process
that spans the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with new
challenges—but not insurmountable ones—introduced