58 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
to have had both a social and a spatial dimension. 18 Even
in the enormous sixteenth-century city after the Conquest,
residents of a number of the extant tlaxilacalli located their
origins in the clans of the initial migrants. While different
histories offer differing accounts of the number of early set-
tling clans, the Codex Mendoza shows us ten clan leaders
settling Tenochtitlan in 1325, and histories connect some of
these leaders to specific places in the pre-Hispanic city. 19
For instance, the tribal leader Xomimitl (arrow foot), who
is to be found in the right-hand quadrant of folio 2r in the
Codex Mendoza, was the leader of the tlaxilacalli of Yopico
in Moyotlan (see figure 1.3). 20
Fragmentary evidence from the colonial period sug-
gests that members of the colonial elite were affiliated
with particular quadrants within the city—that is, they
may have seen themselves as members of the altepetl of
Moyotlan or the altepetl of Teopan first and foremost,
even before they saw themselves as Mexica. 21 The affilia-
tions with one of the four quadrants of the city may have
pertained to the pre-Hispanic rulers as well. The 1524
map that accompanied Cortés’s Second Letter labels the
urban complexes of Moteuczoma II with long texts—the
pleasure houses where concubines lived, his gardens—and
they are set within Moyotlan, the quadrant that appears
in this western-oriented map between nine o’clock and
twelve o’clock on the map’s surface, suggesting that this
ruler belonged to this part of the city and marked his pres-
ence in that quadrant with extravagant architectural works
(see figure 1.11).One of Moteuczoma’s sons reportedly lived
along the Tlacopan causeway right between Moyotlan and
Cuepopan, but at present the evidence is too scarce to
definitely assign pre-Hispanic rulers to the different parts
of the city. 22
The ruler was able to link himself with places through
architecture, thereby availing himself of, and adding to,
the embedded meanings of lived spaces. By moving along
axes during public processions and ritual within the city,
he was also able to imbue these spaces of the city with his
presence. These same axes also could extend through space
to connect the great cities of the valley, stretching from
temple-top to temple-top. 23 Post-Conquest histories at
times reveal where rulers moved, and many emphasize the
movement along the causeways and roads that extended
from the central ceremonial precinct where the royal pal-
aces lay. Causeways, which had the double function of
dikes, connected the city to the surrounding lakeshore;
as we saw in the last chapter, the principal ones were the
Tepeyacac causeway to the north, the Ixtapalapa causeway
to the south, and Tlacopan to the west (see figures 1.10 and
2.7). The causeways were raised above the lakebed and in
their extension into the city were set above the city streets,
an effect still visible along the Tlacopan (now known as
the Tacuba) causeway today, which is called San Cosme
in its western extension and still rises slightly above the
surrounding streets. Leading into the central ceremonial
precinct, these causeways created long and narrow raised
platforms within the city on which the ruler could display
himself. The open plazas of the precinct served as stages for
ritual. So did the stepped façades of the pyramids, dozens
of which rose in the precinct, providing ladderlike stages
upon which processions could array themselves vertically
and be visible throughout the low city. In these consciously
designed spaces, the ceremonial life of the city unfolded,
brilliantly, with the monarch at its center.
To greet the Spanish conquistadores, for instance,
Moteuczoma traveled along the century-old causeway lead-
ing south toward Ixtapalapa. Other reconstructions of the
ruler’s movements are somewhat conjectural: Moteuczoma
almost certainly visited the hot springs of Tepetzinco for
ritual bathing or en route to make pilgrimages to Teotihua-
can, and his passage would have taken him along the main
eastern street to the docks on the city’s eastern littoral to
complete the rest of the journey, about nineteen miles, by
canoe (see figure 1.1). 24 But the most important axis within
the city would have been the causeway of Tlacopan, which
stretched across the western laguna to link to Chapultepec.
It would have been this road where the public caught their
first glimpse of the newly anointed huei tlatoani. During
a ruler’s coronation rites, he spent days kept from public
view in the central precinct, but then was made visible in
the last phases of the rites, when he visited two shrines, the
first, Tlillan, a temple to the female deity Cihuacoatl on the
north side of the Templo Mayor. 25 His visit to the second
shrine, the Temple of Yopico, dedicated to Xipe Totec, an
important patron deity of the Mexica rulers, would have
brought him into public view. The Yopico temple has
been suggested through excavations by Carlos González
González as having been located in the southwest quad-
rant of the city in the tlaxilacalli of Yopico in Moyotlan; the
tlatoani’s most likely route to reach this temple would have
him move from the Templo Mayor out to the Tlacopan
causeway to the west, along the route of the aqueduct of
Chapultepec, as it flowed inward to the temple precinct. 26
Thus this principal axis in the city, the one that carried its