The ciTy in The conquesT’s wake • 93maize, beans, greens, fruit, meat, fish, and tortillas—this
tianguis was not just a food market. Indigenous luxury goods
were to be found here, in the western stalls nearest the palace
of the indigenous rulers: cozcatl, or jewels (identified with
a necklace likely of jade beads), are seen, as well as shells
(used to decorate clothing and for other adornments); that
an entire square is devoted to bells suggests their extensive
use as sonic elements for dress, or perhaps for music in pro-
cessions. Textiles of different varieties were abundant, and
it is this class of objects that shows the greatest influence of
Spain. Of the seven loan words identifiable in the glosses,
six of them refer to textiles or clothing—sayal, seda, frazada,
cordon, sombrero, capan—and the seventh, Castilla tlaxcalli,
is used to distinguish wheat bread from the native maize
tortilla. Indigenous makers were almost certainly creating
fine clothes for Spanish consumers in the city, and native
elites were wearing them as well, at the same time that
indigenous makers were adopting textiles of once-foreign
origin. 56 Note how silk—a material introduced soon after
the Conquest and produced locally—was being sold next
to hanks of thread labeled as yahualli icpatl, “round thread,”
as well as tochomitl, “rabbit fur,” which was spun and woven
into luxury fabric or made into the tomitilmatli (fur cloaks)
sold in another market plot. 57
So while markets in general were places where buyers
could encounter imported and exotic goods, where they
could look at, touch, and smell the material traces of far-
off peoples, what is remarkable about the tianguis is how
conservative the material culture was—the tianguis was
dominated by the same foods, beverages (atole and foamy
cocoa), and stimulants (tobacco) that would have been sold
here in its pre-Hispanic incarnation, the same reed mats
and pottery vessels. 58 Given the strong smells of chilies,
fish, and tropical fruits, the tianguis also carried forth a
similar smellscape, another powerful connection it offered
to its pre-Hispanic counterpart. As did sound—we can
imagine the hawkers (speaking in Nahuatl) and the bell
sellers pushing their products and promoting one intro-
duced item, the Spanish guitar, by its Nahuatl name, meca-
huehuetl, meaning “corded upright drum.”
The conTesTed sPace
of The TianGUiS
Because of its centrality to the economy of the city, the
Tianguis of Mexico was a contested space, and both the
city’s indigenous cabildo and the city’s Spanish cabildo,
whose spatial jurisdiction did not extend to indigenous
lands, laid claim to it. Battles surface in the lawsuits that
were fought in the city’s audiencia, or royal court, which
often mediated cases between Spaniards and indigenes.
For a dispute to reach the court, it meant that it was not
resolved in any of the informal ways (face-to-face negotia-
tion) or formal ones (appeal to market authorities) that
people could use, and we can only surmise that for every
contest that reached the court, there were many other dis-
putes that never reached that level.
One of the rights that Spanish cabildos in the New
World exercised was the ability to grant land within their
cities, established by royal decrees of 1532 and 1563; the
Spanish cabildo of Mexico City had also been given this
right as the outcome of a lawsuit of 1530, when the Council
of the Indies confirmed that they could “apportion lots in
order to build houses.” 59 In the early actas, the Spanish
cabildo underscored that land grants were to be made on the
traza—by which it meant not a bounded “Spanish” space,
but rather along the planned grid that was being rolled
out to regulate future development of the city. Construc-
tions that impinged on the traza by violating the straight
lines of planned streets were ordered to be torn down. For
instance, although initially, in 1524–1526, the cabildo had
made grants within what would become the Plaza Mayor,
it decided after 1526 to allow for a larger public space in the
center of the city, and revoked these grants; the large plaza
we see in figure 4.3 was this cleared-out space. 60 With the
creation of this large plaza, the cabildo, both in theory and
in practice, established an important public space within
the city, one it controlled, whose land was thenceforth not
granted to private individuals.
But the tianguis was not the same kind of public space
as the Plaza Mayor because the same royal directives that
established the cabildo’s right to grant land and control
communal goods also gave express protection to indige-
nous lands. Thus the indigenous gobernadores understood
the tianguis to be their space. For support, they could point
to royal directives that stated that Spanish cabildos were to
“leave Indian properties alone.” 61 They could (and would)
draw on pre-Hispanic precedent (where the market was
overseen by native judges), early colonial customs (which
continued the offices of indigenous judges), and the Span-
ish laws defining the rights of cabildos, all to justly exercise
control over the land of and activities in the tianguis, as
they did over indigenous land in other parts of the city.
For instance, in 1533, the indigenous governor don Pablo