The TLaTOani in TenochTiTlan • 71military victor would be entirely consistent with the earlier
establishment of Chapultepec as the site where the victori-
ous huei tlatoani was welcomed back into the city. 72 Xipe is
an ancient deity, best known for the gruesome costume of
flayed skin of his teixiptla. Worn over days, the skin would
split off its wearer like the splitting of the outer skin of a
seed before sprouting, a signifier of Xipe’s power to make
things grow—he was celebrated in important springtime
rituals. The Mexica rulers connected themselves to this
life force by making offerings at his temple at Yopico in
Moyotlan as the last phase of their coronation rituals. 73
In addition to being a freshwater source, Chapultepec
was the last stopping point of the Mexica migration before
the founding of Tenochtitlan, the end of one chapter of the
Mexica history of peregrination and the beginning of the
next. By placing his image at the site, Moteuczoma II con-
veyed his crucial ability to bridge liminal temporal periods,
as he did with the celebration of New Fire in 1507, when
a new era was ushered in. He thus further inflected the
place with traces of his own presence, now known through
the surviving half-legible sculpture. At the same time, he
was able to draw on age-old conceptions of the ruler as
the controller and protector of the variable and dangerous
forces of nature to give added meaning to the site. Near
the waterworks, archeologists found the remains of the
trunks of two great ahuehuetl (cypress) trees, which flanked
the aqueduct (figure 3.5). Only yards away still stands the
trunk of another great ahuehuetl tree, which survived into
the twentieth century and would have been a large tree
in the fifteenth. In formal speeches, the ruler was likened
to a great tree; consider the oration that Nezahualcoyotl
is believed to have delivered to Moteuczoma: “You well
know, great prince, that all your subjects, nobles as well
as the common people, are under your shade for you have
been planted here like a great cedar tree under which men
wish to rest in order to take pleasure in the freshness of
your friendship and love.” 74 Thus in landscape works like
Chapultepec, the ruler reiterated his control over the natu-
ral world, linking his presence to charged sites through
indelible sculptural works as well as natural features.
concLusion
The control of the surrounding environment, par-
ticularly the flow of water, preoccupied Mexica rulers
in fifteenth-century Tenochtitlan. The building of great
dikes, causeways, and aqueducts was parallel to the mili-
tary campaigns through which the Mexica expanded the
reach of their tributary empire beyond the valley, since the
freshwater system that provisioned the growing city of
Tenochtitlan was of equal importance. In certain monu-
ments created under Ahuitzotl and Moteuczoma II, these
rulers commissioned representations of themselves that
showed their control over the surrounding environment,
embedding the ideologies of ruler as master of the aquatic
environment in lived spaces of the city and its environs.
Our exploration of the ideas of teotl, which allowed inani-
mate forces like the flow of water to be accorded an agency,
particularly agency within the spaces of the city, and the
teixiptla, wherein costumed priests and rulers could take
on the identity of deities, has allowed us to better under-
stand the way the Mexica themselves understood the three
spheres of space to inflect each other. The pluralistic nature
of the teixiptla—which could be animate performers or
stone bundles—has led us to posit that sculptural works
could also exert some of teotl’s efficacious agency, particu-
larly those sculptures set in important sites, like the entry
of the Acuecuexco aqueduct into the city or the hill of
Chapultepec.
The potent combination of performance and artwork
marked key sites within the city of Tenochtitlan, imbu-
ing spaces themselves with certain valences, particularly
those of the ruler’s efficacious actions of environmental
control. When the Spanish entered Tenochtitlan from the
south, they saw Moteuczoma II gloriously arrayed and
surrounded by a nimbus of green quetzal feathers, but
had little idea that the ground beneath their feet was the
great causeway of Ixtapalapa, that first successful attempt
of the Mexica rulers of Tenochtitlan to control the watery
environment, built by Moteuczoma’s great-grandfather
Itzcoatl. Its construction had been made possible by the
defeat of Xochimilco, one of the chinampa-rich cities to the
south, whose conquered peoples provided the labor. Nor
did they understand that at this moment, Moteuczoma
showed himself as master of distant territories that were
the sources of his feathers and his gold, as well as control-
ler of the immediate environment by the massive earth-
work that stretched beneath his feet. At that moment, his
power—and that of the city that he had helped shape—
was at its height.