The TLaTOani in TenochTiTlan • 53both by members of the elite and then by a larger public,
that the ruler and his associated authority was made tan-
gible within specific urban spaces. At the same time, as an
analysis of ruler costume below will show, the Mexica huei
tlatoani used costume to bring representations of distant
spaces to the urban core. By wearing costumes fashioned
of feathers, he represented the geographically peripheral
spaces of the tributary empire, and by costuming himself
as specific deities, he brought the usually separate levels of
the otherworldly realms, particularly those twelve upper
layers of the sky and their inhabitants, down to the earthly
plane, the first layer of the multitiered universe.
Not just any spaces were marked with the presence of
the huei tlatoque, and after discussing the means by which,
and the spaces in which, rulers were visible in the city, we
turn to a triad of Mexica rulers, Moteuczoma I, Ahui-
tzotl, and Moteuczoma II, who marked their presence,
both through ephemeral performance and in permanent
sculpture, in spaces that were associated with the harness-
ing of freshwater for the city. While in the last chapter we
looked at the enormous projects meant to control the lakes
that surrounded Tenochtitlan, in this one we will turn
our attention to two important sources of fresh, potable
water—aqueducts coming from Chapultepec in the west
of the city and the springs at Acuecuexco to the south—
and the performances and sculpture that attended their
creation. Delving into these inaugural rituals that took
place in the streets and along the canals of Tenochtitlan
allows us better insight into urban practices, that third
constituent sphere of space that so often lies beyond the
recoverable horizon of the urban historian but that inflects
urban spaces with so much of their meaning. In doing so,
we will encounter again the idea of teotl, introduced in
chapter 2, and the teixiptla, a costumed person who was
understood to be the living representative, or delegate, of
a deity, a figure whose performances marked urban spaces
and endowed them with meaning. 2
The sPaTiaL RuLeR
One of the few eyewitness accounts of the last Mexica
emperor, Moteuczoma II, written by the conquistador
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, mentions the ruler’s visual inac-
cessibility: “Not one of these chieftains dared even to
think of looking at him in the face, but kept their eyes
lowered with great reverence, except those four relations,
his nephews, who supported him with their arms.” 3 Given
the ruler’s frequent public appearances, such a prohibition
only served to heighten the importance of his visibility, and
for those who encountered him, this unseeable ruler would
have left an even keener mental impression of both him-
self and the particular location of his appearance. Perhaps
because of this quality of memorability, the informants of
the Dominican historian Diego Durán, some of whom may
have seen the ruler firsthand as youths, were able to pro-
vide many descriptions full of fresh detail about Moteuc-
zoma. Those Nahuatl-speaking intellectuals who wrote
the Florentine Codex were able to do the same. Since it is
unlikely these elite Mexica invented such remembrances
out of whole cloth, the vivid descriptions in these histories
suggest that the ruler was often fully visible among the
elite class (from whom the Florentine writers and Durán’s
informants descended) and that he was at times also visible
to a larger public.
Cloaked as they were in the rhetoric of unseeability,
Moteuczoma II’s appearances would have been memo-
rable, as they were to both Cortés and Bernal Díaz, who
were so impressed by what they saw that they offered
lengthy descriptions of Moteuczoma and his retinue
upon their first encounter in 1519. This took place along
the Ixtapalapa causeway, one of the first great earthworks
built under Itzcoatl (r. 1427–1440) nearly a century before,
and they described his jade-laden costumes and the four
lords who held up a canopy over his head. 4 For a viewer
at any distance, as Bernal Díaz would have been, the most
prominent feature of the ruler was this feathered and
jeweled canopy—whose green color suggests that it was
composed of nothing less than the most precious of all
feathers, those of the quetzal bird, a bird not native to the
valley but imported as part of the tribute demanded of
conquered provinces, a bird whose feathers were featured
in the famed headdress of Moteuczoma II, whose nearly
six-foot expanse gives us some notion of the visual spec-
tacle that feather costumes offered (see figure 1.14). A page
from the Codex Mendoza, a sixteenth-century book whose
image of the foundation of Tenochtitlan and depiction of
the conquests of Moteuczoma was discussed in chapter 1,
also includes one of two extant lists of the tribute that the
Mexica rulers in the valley demanded from conquered
provinces. Figure 3.1 shows the goods expected from Toch-
tepec, which lay to the east of the valley, along the Gulf
Coast (see figure 1.15). While many of the tribute provinces
in the empire were expected to deliver rather prosaic items,
like the beans and corn that were the mainstay of the diet,