80 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
estimated at 150,000 people before the Conquest, and
we have no very reliable census figures for the city until
the 1560s, when the indigenous population was about
75,000. 14 Taking into account the effect of the deadly
epidemic of 1545–1548, the city may have had more than
100,000 indigenous people in the years after the Conquest.
And while the residents grew maize, squash, and greens in
backyard plots, Mexico City was not a city that could feed
itself, nor had been the earlier Tenochtitlan; it depended on
the agricultural products brought in from outside, many of
them coming in from tributary zones around the southern
lake, the heart of the chinampa zone. The system of urban
distribution had two keys: the first was a functioning canal
system to transport goods, particularly from the south,
and the second was an urban marketplace for the traffic
of locally manufactured products, like the ceramic vessels
and woven mats of everyday use, and foodstuffs from both
within the city and outside of it.
Markets, in short, were essential to the survival of the
city. While it is Tlatelolco’s pre-Hispanic market that is
often written about, Tenochtitlan had one of equal size. 15
The markets of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco were marvel-
ous places, and their size and the wealth of the goods in
them were riveting to early Spanish observers. Cortés’s
biographer Francisco López de Gómara, after noting that
Tlatelolco had a large market, goes on to describe the mar-
ket of Tenochtitlan, which after the Conquest was known
as the Tianguis of Mexico:
The marketplace of Mexico is wide and long, and sur-
rounded on all sides by an arcade; so large is it, indeed, that
it will hold seventy thousand or even one hundred thou-
sand people who go about buying and selling, for it is, so
to speak, the capital of the whole country, to which people
come, not only from the vicinity, but from farther off.After hundreds more words of description, López de
Gómara finally concludes, “I should never finish if I were
to list all the things they offer for sale.” 16 The markets were
first and foremost distribution points for foodstuffs and
quotidian items like building materials and fuel, but we
should also be aware of the quantities of exotic goods being
brought into them. Bernal Díaz lists the “skins of tigers and
lions, of otters and jackals”; Cortés describes the “ornaments
of gold and silver, lead, brass, copper, tin, stones, shells,
bones and feathers . . . [and] as many colors for painters as
may be found in Spain and in excellent hues.” 17 Bernardino
de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex, created by native scribes,
or tlacuiloque, interested in such matters, provides an even
larger list of the tlapalli, or different colors of pigment, that
were available to them. The codex sets the exotic pigments
like xochipalli and achiotl, pigments from “the hot lands,”
into lists alongside tlilli, local carbon black, and tecozehuitl,
ochre or yellow stone, beginning with pure pigments and
then moving on to composite pigments, offering a concep-
tual framework for categorizing the known and absorb the
n e w. 18 Markets in the city were similar, highly structured
and ordered spaces that provided the framework and the
opportunity for the encounter with new and often exotic
goods. For such reasons, markets are now appreciated for
their role in the formation and transformation of visual
and material cultures.
This market of Mexico in the years right after the Con-
quest has escaped the attention of many historians of the
city, but it helps us understand how the early city came to
be rebuilt. Before the Conquest, as we will see, Tenochti-
tlan’s great market sat in the southwestern quadrant of the
city, accessible from the southern lakes via canals coming
in from the south, as well as the causeway of Ixtapalapa by
foot. But this market was abandoned during the Conquest,
and during the rebuilding of the city a new market was
set up on the western side of the city, right off the cause-
way from Tacuba, the city’s main artery, allowing direct
access by foot traffic along that causeway in a zone that
coincides with today’s Alameda park. Freshwater, an essen-
tial commodity in the city, reached this market directly, as
the aqueduct from Chapultepec, newly restored after the
Conquest and running along the causeway from Tlacopan,
later Tacuba, reached here. 19 Boat traffic may have reached
it via the western Laguna of Mexico.
The early market appears in a number of the records of
the Spanish cabildo, and they call it the “ Tianguis de Juan
Velázquez.” No one of this name appears among the names
of the city’s early Spanish residents, and the only high offi-
cial to bear that name was don Juan Velázquez Tlacotzin.
He was the grandson of Tlacaelel, who served as cihuacoatl
under his brother Moteuczoma I and whose portrait was
carved along with his brother’s on the cliff at Chapulte-
pec. 20 And like his grandfather, Tlacotzin too served as
cihuacoatl, under Moteuczoma II. His biography shows
him to be one of the most important and underappreciated
figures during and immediately after the Conquest. The
powerful “ Tlacotzin Cihuacoatl” was remembered, decades
after his death in 1525, as “very close to Moteuczoma [II]”