130 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
But one way of closing the temporal gap can be found
in the proper names that city residents used to name (and
therefore to represent) the urban spaces they inhabited, a
process that Michel de Certeau calls “carv[ing] out pock-
ets of hidden and familiar meanings.” On this map, the
presence and the voices of urban residents are transferred
to a narrow register within the vast field of language—
the names at the top that reflect, in part, the names that
people used to designate certain places. Place-names, Cer-
teau argues, “make sense” of the otherwise undifferenti-
ated spaces of the urban body by providing a shared set of
referents (if I were to say “ Tianguis of Mexico” or “Plaza
Mayor,” you and I would both understand these as distinct
places that offered distinct experiences). 6 And thus the
proper nouns that residents used to name the city may be
the best register of this process of “making sense.” But at
the same time that the Trasmonte map reveals some of the
place-names, it forgets to include others: none of the city’s
Nahuatl names show up in its glosses, other than “Mexico.”
And it was Nahuatl, rather than Spanish, that the majority
of the city’s residents spoke through the sixteenth century,
and it was in Nahuatl that most places were named.
The indigenous place-names of Mexico City have been
a subject of interest to the city’s historians since the eigh-
teenth century, when they were considered as one of the
few remaining traces of the earlier, pre-Hispanic city. But
other than the bare fact of their survival, what can they tell
us about the city? How can they be interpreted beyond
what they say about the evident physical features of the
place they name—be they Acalhuacan, the “place of the
canoes,” for a docking station, or Tullan, the “place of reeds,”
for a swampy locale? Is the simple description of topog-
raphy the only way residents of the city “made sense” of
the urbanscape? Certeau anticipates one pitfall of read-
ing too much into place-names: “Those words . . . slowly
lose, like worn coins, the value engraved on them,” which
is to say that even mosquito-bitten residents of Moyotlan
(from the Nahuatl moyotl, “mosquito”) might never have
connected their afflictions with the name of the place. My
goal in this chapter is to gain some insight into how city
residents in the mid-sixteenth century understood their
city, and in tracking that quarry, place-names are one of the
best guides. But we must go beyond the simple question
of etymology, that original “value engraved,” and to do so,
I offer a reading that shows how place-names are used in
particular historical contexts, both as names and as graphic
symbols. Doing so will give us a unique vantage onto the
historical shifts that were taking place in the city’s political
life in the 1550s and early 1560s. During these decades, the
native gobernadores who succeeded don Diego de Alvarado
Huanitzin (r. 1537/1538–1541) found their prerogatives
increasingly curtailed by the Spanish cabildo and the royal
government, at the same time that their support from
below—those masses of commoners who once sustained
them economically through tribute and politically through
participation in the city’s ceremonial life—was eroding.
This chapter has two sections. First, as a way of establish-
ing how closely names were linked to political concerns, I
begin with a brief discussion of the changes in names of
the island city to show how proper nouns were a way that
ruling bodies articulated the space of their domain. In the
second part, I turn away from etymology, the traditional
means of interpreting names, to look instead at the way
that written place-names were used in manuscripts of the
period, arguing that their graphic presences came to stand
for the social and ethnic groups in the capital city, and
through them, we can meter their widening ruptures.names and shifTing RefeRenTs
It has long been understood that as the Spanish entered the
New World, they used place-names as imaginative projec-
tions of what they hoped to find, or to create, in territories
whose expanse they poorly understood and whose peoples
were ciphers. Christopher Columbus, upon landing on a
sandy beach, endowed this and everything beyond with the
name “the Indies,” thinking he had reached Asia. Even after
it was apparent that the Americas were not part of Asia,
“the Indies” was used to designate Spain’s overseas posses-
sions, into the nineteenth century. And within New Spain,
the instability of name to referent was not just a feature
of language in general, but rather a condition produced
by colonization, where the aspirations of the colonizers
mixed with an uncertainty about the nature and extent of
the entities being named. This uncertainty, as well as the
political stakes in the use of certain names, is revealed when
we track the name of one place over time. Let us return to
the place-name for the complex city that is our subject, the
entity named “Ciudad de Mexico” in the Trasmonte map.
The use of the designation “ciudad” to describe Mexico
City is first encountered in the letters that Hernando Cor-
tés wrote back to the Crown; after he decided to re-found
the city and set the government of New Spain upon the site
of the Mexica capital, he called that place a “ciudad” and the