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If we move upward from the city’s southwest quarter,
where we ended the last chapter, and take a view from
the air, that captured in a map of 1628, we confront few
traces of the indigenous sacred architecture that existed
the century before (figure 7.1). We see the city from an
oblique angle, as if viewed from a bird aloft to the city’s
west, and the city stretches out across the foreground, the
dike of Ahuitzotl or San Lázaro limning its far edge, with
Lake Tetzcoco extending beyond. While the landscape of
lake and mountains would have been familiar to a viewer
of 1500, the temple complexes that once dominated the
ceremonial life of the city’s four parts, Moyotlan, Teopan,
Atzacoalco, and Cuepopan, had been recycled to build
churches, the memory of them appearing in vacancy: the
large atrios around San Pablo Teopan and San Sebastián
Atzacoalco that replaced earlier ceremonial plazas are seen
at the upper part of the eastern-oriented map. The new
churches that replaced the temples and other religious
monuments were carefully rendered by the map’s author,
Juan Gómez de Trasmonte (d. ca. 1647). Named in 1635 as
maestro mayor, or official architect/city planner, Gómez de
Trasmonte was one of the designers of the city’s preemi-
nent building, the Cathedral, which appears in the map’s
center. In this map (a lithographic copy is reproduced here
of a now-lost original that he created), no explanatory
glosses appear within the space of the city. Instead, tiny
inscribed numbers appear adjacent to the larger buildings,
indexes to the legends set in the map’s two cartouches, one
at lower left and the other dominating the upper part of
the map. In this upper banner, the leftmost column lists
the larger monastic complexes by religious order (Fran-
ciscan, Augustinian, Dominican, Jesuit, Mercedarian,
Carmelite), whereas on the right, buildings are grouped by
type (convents, hospitals, parish churches, schools). This
seventeenth-century representation of the city empha-
sizes the hierarchy of institutions that provided spiritual
guidance, intellectual training, and corporeal succor to its
residents, their presence woven into the grid of streets that
comprised the ordered streets of the traza. The existence of
the indigenous city that also occupied this space has been
neglected by Gómez de Trasmonte, and upon the body of
European architectural forms that we see within the city, he
has drawn a veil of the Spanish names of Catholic saints. 1
There is one exception to this linguistic effacement, and
that is to be found in the name that stretches like a banner
across the top: “La Ciudad de Mexico,” which preserves the
name the city’s indigenous founders gave to the island that
they created, the founders who also took that place-name
to identify themselves (the Mexica, or “people of Mexico”).
The origin and etymology of this Nahuatl name, “Mexico,”
is poorly understood; the Codex Aubin of 1576–1608 says
that the Mexica had taken the name of their deity Me xitli,
while more recently the linguist Gordon Whittaker has
argued that it is a place-name contracted from words
meaning “the center of the moon,” with the “moon” refer-
ring to the surrounding lake. 2 Its pre-Hispanic adoption
may date to after 1473, when Tenochtitlan’s conquest of
its northern neighbor on the island, Tlatelolco, called for
a name to describe the entire island; or it may have been
the name that the immigrants, once united in their era of