94 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
Xochiquentzin ordered indigenous houses to be torn
down to clear land in the city. Later lawsuits make clear
that the indigenous cabildo granted land in the indigenous
areas of the city. 62 But while indigenous jurisdiction over
most of the indigenous zones and properties elsewhere in
the city was largely tolerated by the Spanish cabildo in the
first half of the sixteenth century, it was at issue within the
tianguis as early as the 1520s.
The Spanish cabildo made its first move to control the
Tianguis of Mexico with the appointment of an alguacil
de tianguis (who was something like a sheriff ) in 1526. 63
However, the efficacy of this lone officeholder at such an
early date is questionable. He was likely aided or perhaps
enabled by his indigenous peers in the oversight of this
enormous market because when later edicts went out
about market activities, they were often directed to native
government. 64 In the early years after its reestablishment
in 1533, as seen in the early Map of Santa Cruz, the great
Tianguis of Mexico is shown as a vague open space with
a somewhat desultory collection of houses and structures
at its eastern edge, as well as the church of San Lázaro to
the west, identified as “S. Lazaro” above “el mercado” (fig-
ure 4.8). Since by 1535 the Spanish cabildo had made no
grants in this area, the houses in the Map of Santa Cruz
were almost certainly occupied by indigenous residents. 65
The Spanish cabildo’s official records make no mention of
monies spent in regular maintenance of this space, so its
upkeep and improvement were the responsibility of the
native governors, as court cases from later in the century,
discussed in chapter 9, also reveal. The ordered spaces seen
in figure 4.11 were almost certainly created under the aus-
pices of the native government, and as we shall see, the
indigenous government continued to claim control of the
tianguis lands through the sixteenth century.
PRocessionaL RouTes
in The new ciTy
Thus far, we have seen how crucial the indigenous gov-
ernors and residents were in the reconstruction and the
functioning of the lived spaces of the island city, par-
ticularly the zones outside of the traza around the Plaza
Mayor. The example of the Tianguis of Mexico reveals the
extent of quotidian practices in shaping urban spaces, and
complementary to these were ceremonial practices, like the
spectacular processions of the huei tlatoani seen in the last
chapter. And just as quotidian spaces like the tianguis were
contested, so were the meanings of the major ceremonial
route in the city, the causeway of Tlacopan, which carried
vital freshwater from Chapultepec and had been the prin-
cipal axis for the display of the Mexica huei tlatoani.
Quickly after the refoundation of the city, its Spanish
residents began to occupy the lots around the Plaza Mayor,
with Cortés beginning construction of his palaces and
other leading conquistadores following his lead by con-
structing their urban houses close to the Plaza Mayor or
along the causeways. As more residents moved into the city,
the streets of the initial cruciform Spanish core gradually
pushed out into the lands around it, as Spaniards bought
up land from pressured Mexica residents. Simply waiting
for land to become vacant was another quite effective strat-
egy for Spanish residents of the city because the epidem-
ics that swept through the city in the following decades
cleared urban lands with efficient regularity. Concurrently,
the Spanish cabildo began to organize the ceremonial life
of the city, through which lived spaces would absorb the
meanings that ritual practice imbued them with. More-
over, a sense of collective identity and purpose would
be forged among the urban residents. Two ritual cycles
determined city life. The first was the set festivals of the
Catholic Church, most of them dedicated to remembering
and reenacting events in the life of Christ on a yearly cycle,
events that climaxed in Holy Week, which commemorated
the last week of Jesus’s life, leading up to his crucifixion
on Good Friday, and Easter, marking Jesus’s miraculous
resurrection from the dead. Such reenactments “recall the
religious past and make it present” for urban residents. 66
In Mexico City, in the years after the Conquest, such col-
lective celebrations by the city’s Spanish residents took on
the added valence of being performed in a still-pagan land;
recall that many of them were soldiers before they were
city dwellers, so joining in the collective processions and
expressions of piety at great civic masses evoked the con-
solidation of the troops on the battlefield.
The second set of rituals that punctuated the even
rhythms of city life were the civic rituals marking events in
the life of the royal family, the deaths of kings (infrequent
in the sixteenth century, which was marked by the long
reigns of Charles V [1519–1557] and Philip [1557–1598])
and queens (more frequent, as Philip had four wives),
the births of heirs, and the jura, the swearing of an oath
of loyalty to a newly anointed monarch. These were cel-
ebrated with fervor in the colonies and were a principal
way that Spaniards maintained their status as a separate