116 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
was never a world apart; it was just one node in the densely
populated Mexico City. Nonetheless, from within its walls,
Franciscans attempted to shape the city around them in
its image. Their partners in the enterprise, as suggested in
the last chapter, were often the indigenous elite, who were
hardly the passive receiving audience pictured by Valadés,
but rather had their own agendas. But this chapter centers
on the Franciscans and their project for the city. It argues
that they were gripped by the powerful representation of
space that they found in another formerly-pagan-now-
Christian city, Rome, and that they attempted to remake
Mexico-Tenochtitlan in Rome’s image. In the opening
chapter of this book, I discussed Lefebvre’s three intersect-
ing spheres of space, and we saw the diachronic nature of
lived space, as the past is continually reawakened in urban
spaces through practices that range from the expressly
commemorative to the quotidian. This range reflects the
operation of individual human memory itself, whose
powers of recall fall on a wide spectrum, on one end the
intentional, on the other, the habitual. 3 The Franciscans
were well aware of the powerful mnemonic pull that once-
pagan Mexico-Tenochtitlan held for its residents, like the
lodestone to the needle, and their efforts to remake the city
entailed not only reshaping its lived spaces, but also reach-
ing into the minds of its residents and making them forget
pagan Tenochtitlan. Thus, we will be concerned not only
with how the city was rebuilt in the image of Rome, but
also with the model of mind and memory that allowed the
Franciscans, particularly Pedro de Gante, to believe that
Tenochtitlan could be forgotten and Rome remembered.
fRanciscan uToPias
While the evangelizing project of the Franciscans was
to spread through New Spain, the heart of their enter-
prise was in Mexico City, whose indigenous residents
were assigned to a single Franciscan parish, San José de
los Naturales, in 1525, just a year after the arrival of the
famous twelve. Although initially given a privileged site by
Hernando Cortés on the Plaza Mayor upon their arrival
to the city in the spring of 1524, they made the decision in
1525 to move to the southwest and build their monastery in
Moyotlan. 4 There, they would found what would become
an enormous monastery, with an indigenous chapel and
school, San José de los Naturales (see figure 4.2). The
Franciscans’ move to the southwest was perfectly in keep-
ing with their sense of their mission in the New World:
the conversion of its native peoples in preparation for the
millennium, which called them to turn away (and move
away) from the corrupt world of the venal conquistadores
and cabildo members who held sway around the refounded
Plaza Mayor. 5
However, the Franciscans’ move would have appeared
foolhardy to the conquistadores, who had settled in the
center of the city; although it was only a few blocks, it took
the friars out of the protective nucleus of Spanish power
around the Plaza Mayor, out to its unstable margins, at a
time when Spanish residents of the city were nervously
awaiting an indigenous uprising. On this exposed urban
frontier, where at night the friars could hear the noisy
drumbeats and songs that they feared accompanied sacri-
ficial rituals, the Franciscans seemed headed toward a swift
martyrdom. 6
But perhaps they were in less danger than some imag-
ined. The Franciscans moved to the new site at the moment
that most of the city’s high-ranking Mexica elite were with
Cortés on the long march to Honduras, which from Octo-
ber 1524 onward left a power vacuum in the indigenous
city. And the compromised infrastructure, as well as uncer-
tain provisioning, meant the Mexica were hardly ready to
spearhead another war, or able to organize an insurrection
among the surrounding altepeme without first repairing
political relationships damaged by the war.
The Franciscan choice of this particular spot to found
the large compound of San Francisco was decisive in the
development of post-Conquest Mexico-Tenochtitlan. One
practical reason for choosing the southwestern site was the
presence of Moteuczoma’s aviary and gardens in this part
of the city. These areas would likely have featured large
open spaces, which could be used as plazas for worship,
and vacant spaces in the city’s dense urban fabric here and
elsewhere exerted a magnetic attraction to the Franciscans.
By choosing an open site, Franciscans could avoid labo-
rious removal and destruction of houses and buildings,
which might rile the native populations. In addition, this
site was close to one of the main freshwater supplies, the
aqueduct from Chapultepec, and at the beginning of 1526,
the Franciscans were granted their own generous allot-
ment of water from the Chapultepec pipe. 7 One of the
main canals of the city ran along the eastern perimeter of
the monastery and then turned toward the west to run
through the center of the convent, providing a flow of irri-
gation waters early in the city’s history, as later maps of the
city make clear. Water allowed the friars to plant orchards,