The ciTy in The conquesT’s wake • 95and distinct class through their connection to the Span-
ish monarchy. Such festivals would take on an even larger
role in the city’s collective life with the arrival of a viceroy
in 1535, himself a direct representative of the king and the
cynosure of royal power in New Spain. But even before
the city’s Spanish cabildo would develop the protocols for
celebrating the royal person, it would create a festival that
celebrated the conquistadores, many of whom were cabildo
members, and their achievements. This climax of Mexico
City’s festival year came with the feast of San Hipólito,
dedicated to a minor saint in the church’s festival calen-
dar whose feast day coincided with the day that Mexica
forces under Cuauhtemoc surrendered and Cortés took
charge of the city, August 13. By 1528, preparations for
sponsoring this feast were being recorded in the cabildo
records, along with preparation for the feasts of San Juan
( June 24), Santiago ( July 25), and the Assumption of the
Virgin (“Santa María de Agosto,” on August 15), but it
was always San Hipólito that most absorbed the cabildo’s
energy and funds. 67
In commemorating the feast of San Hipólito, the cabildo
designed a ritual of reenactment, following the age-old
patterns set by Holy Week celebrations, this one stretch-
ing over two days, thereby allowing it to bleed into the
important Marian festival of the Assumption. Although
the battle itself was not replayed, we can still see in the way
the event was choreographed the cabildo’s attempt to con-
solidate the messy and brutal history of the Conquest into
a singular compressed narrative, enacted by city residents
and foregrounding the presence of the city’s civic govern-
ment. The festival began the evening before the feast, as
Spanish residents in their ceremonial best mustered in the
Plaza Mayor in front of the cabildo’s building on the plaza’s
south edge. The cabildo had paid for special elements, like
the dozen trumpets to announce the parade, and the high-
pitched brass melodies were distinctly different from the
low beat of the drums that marked indigenous celebrations
in the city. The great velvet pendón, or scarlet battle stan-
dard, was an object of special expense, and every year it was
carefully entrusted to a regidor, or councilmember of the
cabildo, who would host a midday banquet for celebrants. 68
This regidor went on horseback and was preceded by many
other residents with a mount; the participation of the con-
quistadores, at least in the early years, and the battle garb
of the regidor’s horse would have lent a martial character
to the event. So too would the eye-catching presence of
the scarlet pendón, embroidered with the coats-of-arms of
the city, which unfurled over the group just as if it were a
military procession. 69 The route was a direct one, its course
significant. It ran from the Plaza Mayor along the causeway
of Tacuba out to the hermita, or shrine, of San Hipólito,
close to the exit of the city. This axis had been the princi-
pal ceremonial route of the Mexica city because it was the
causeway toward Chapultepec, along which the Mexica
huei tlatoani would enter the city at the close of a victorious
campaign. After 1520, the route was vividly remembered by
the participating conquistadores as the path of their pan-
icked and humiliating retreat from the city on the Noche
Triste, as they were driven out of the city by the Mexica.
Retaking that same route, this time with measured and
confident steps, heading toward the shrine that marked
where Spaniards had fled, allowed the conquistador class
to layer a new meaning onto the axis, reinscribing their
panicked path of retreat with the eventual claim to vic-
tory, as if the weight of their feet could push down the
Mexica city and its history below the surface of the soft
and wet ground. 70 The procession was repeated the fol-
lowing morning, when a special mass was held, followed
by the bullfights and lasso contests that happened in many
festivals. In this particular one, the bullfight can be seen as
revisiting yet again the battle and triumph over the city’s
indigenous peoples, the conflict between the two parties
symbolized by the uneasy (and, barring tragic accident,
predetermined) contest between matador and bull and
played out within the more controlled space of the arena
set up in the Plaza Mayor.
That the festival had the desired commemorative effect
and can be presumed to have been absorbed into the
meaning of the lived space is registered by accounts of it
by the city’s chroniclers. The long account written by the
Franciscan Diego Valadés in the mid-1570s tells us of both
cause and effect. The meaning of the event was explained,
he tells us, in the sermons said on the masses of the two
days, as the archbishop took the opportunities to remind
those gathered of what had happened at the site. Having
been present at many celebrations of San Hipólito (Vala-
dés lived in Mexico City from 1543 to 1555 and likely visited
many times up to 1571), Valadés uses his narrative of the
present-day event of the festival of San Hipólito to offer a
representation of the city’s past space: the pendón, he tells
us, was the same as that carried when the city was captured,
the site of San Hipólito was to be found outside of the
earlier Mexica city walls, and the two masses of thanksgiv-
ing that were said on the feast day “happened on the same