huaniTzin RecenTeRs The ciTy • 109figuRe 5.5. Unknown creator, the tecpan
of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, with don Esteban de
Guzmán and Viceroy Luis de Velasco below,
Codex Osuna, fol. 38r, ca. 1565. © Biblioteca
Nacional de España.small indication of the political realities the Franciscans
faced in the decades after the Conquest, as allegiances with
native elites like Huanitzin were crucial to the fortunes of
both, there and elsewhere.
The site of the tecpan from its construction until the
nineteenth century was at the intersection of what is
today Eje 1/Lázaro Cardenas and Izazaga, near the mod-
ern metro stop of Salto de Agua, and nineteenth-century
photographs show it as having an arcaded façade; a detail
from an 1867 plan of the city shows it as being a large
building, set back from the street line (see figure 4.10).
The earliest record of its appearance is to be found in the
Codex Osuna, a manuscript compiled in 1565 as part of a
complaint by the indigenous rulers against the excesses of
audiencia members; the circumstances of its creation are
discussed at greater length in chapter 7. This manuscript
includes a nearly full-page image of the tecpan, probably
after a renovation carried out in about 1555 (figure 5.5). In
the Codex Osuna, the street façade of the urban palace is
a long wall, which the tianguis maps discussed in the last
chapter reveal to have been about ninety yards long. It is
shown decorated with a row of twenty disks, a symbol of
chalchihuitl, or precious jade beads, a standard decoration
that marked important indigenous buildings through the
colonial period and known archeologically as far away as
Oaxaca. 41 The Osuna shows this wall punctuated by an