138 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
my home is here in San Juan Tlatilco) in a document of
1587 or “Agustin Tecpanecatl chane Tolpetlac” (Agustin
Tecpanecatl whose home is Tolpetlac). Some documents
transcribe first-person identifications and thus suggest the
contours of actual speech, as in “nehuatl ni Martin de Laz-
aro Moyotla[n] nochan” (I, Martín de Lázaro, my home
is Moyotlan). 22 Thus, at least in their encounters with the
administrative system, the residents of the city thought
about themselves in the context of chane.
While the Spanish translation of chane is consistently
“vecino,” some of its social meaning is lost in the Eng-
lish translation to “resident.” The root word is chantli, or
“home.” Foreigners were called hueca chane, meaning “with
faraway homes.” But chantli had an important associated
meaning: to “speak home” (channonotza) meant to “come
to agreement in legal proceedings.” 23 That is, chantli (like
its English translation into “home”) was also embedded in
social accord and conveys that one is part of a larger social
network. As expressed through the (admittedly formulaic)
language of documents, the concept of tlaxilacalli appears
to be as much about a social as a geographic entity. The
boundaries that separated one tlaxilacalli from the next on
both Alzate’s and Caso’s maps may have been more porous
than their graphic expression suggests. 24
wRiTing sysTems and meanings
Nahuatl place-names were important for self-identification
of the indigenous populace throughout the sixteenth cen-
tury and beyond. So how did place-names allow indig-
enous residents of the city to lay claim to this landscape,
or to “make sense” of this city by naming it? A natural place
to turn for answers would be indigenous maps of the city,
where the place-names that we know from the Alzate map
might be registered. However, other than the Map of Santa
Cruz at Uppsala University, we know of no midcentury
indigenous map of the entire city (see figure 2.8). And
while the Santa Cruz map offers a wealth of pictographic
place-names in the landscape around the city, none appear
within the urban space at the center of the map; instead,
within the city only alphabetic glosses appear. Indigenous
maps of plots of land within the city do exist, particularly
for the later part of the sixteenth century, and while they
sometimes include indigenous place-names, many of
these seem to be those of micro-areas, that is, urban plots.
A case in point is figure 7.4, a small map from 1567 on
a sheet of European paper, now attached to a lawsuit in
the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico. On the right,
a two-room house is seen in plan, its walls marked in red
pigment. The dimensions are carefully measured accord-
ing to standard units, based on the maitl, “hand,” and the
yollotl, “heart.” On the far right side, a three-cemmatl length
(a measurement of about six feet, or the distance from foot
to hand outstretched) is marked with symbols of hands,
and along the top side, a length of three cemmatl and one
cenyollotli (a measurement of half a cemmatl, that is, from
outstretched fingertips to heart), is marked by three hands
and a heart. 25 Inside the space of the house, the owners
have glyphic names—the male, above, is identified by a
banner (panitl), the female below with a stream of water
(atl) grasped by a hand (maitl). A twisted cord shows the
bond of marriage between them; the attached cross indi-
cates the sanction of the union by the Catholic Church.
The male head has been shaded gray to indicate that he is
dead. In front of the house to the left are four fields, each
marked with a panitl, the measure for twenty, and together,
these fields probably measure 860 square yards, enough for
a family plot. The place-name attached to the fields on their
right border shows us reeds, or tollin.
The map, although quite simple, addresses one salient
coda raised by Certeau: were place-names like “worn coins,”
worn smooth by use until rendered unremarkable? For
instance, one might be born in San Francisco, but does
one connect the name with the bird- and animal-loving
saint who lies behind it, or instead is the name overlaid
with a wealth of historical and personal associations? Such
would be the conclusion that Certeau points to. However,
the appearance on the map of a pictographic script to name
both the householders and the field suggests that literate
people in the Valley of Mexico may have been more atten-
tive to etymologies because of the way that Nahuatl iconic
script was written. This script first developed in the pre-
Hispanic period but continued to be used in documents
produced in the colonial period, being very gradually dis-
placed by alphabetic writing of Nahuatl introduced in the
1540s, but still used within the indigenous ambit through
the century, as in this map. Maps made particular use of a
subset within the larger world of iconic script of phonetic
graphemes, or hieroglyphs, used to denote the names of
persons and places, dates and quantities. 26 In the pre-
Hispanic period, such appellatives were not just confined
to manuscripts but were also carved on public monuments,
as we have seen with the names of Ahuitzotl and Moteuc-
zoma in chapters 2 and 3, named on works where they were