PLace-names in mexico-TenochTiTLan • 149And reading the names for etymology, as above, can show
us what salient topographical features Nahua residents
identified in the city around them, where important archi-
tecture was likely to stand, and in a few instances, the
imprint of the city’s history on its toponymy. But if we set
aside the “etymological attitude” argued for above and con-
sider that names may be little more than the smooth coins
of Certeau, what interpretive possibilities are open to us?
The challenge comes from a manuscript housed at the
University of Texas at Austin, known as the Genaro Gar-
cía 30, which on its dozen or so pages offers the richest
known record of place-names written in iconic script from
Mexico-Tenochtitlan. It is a fragmentary manuscript and
was once part of a larger juicio de residencia, or internal
investigation of an official’s time in office, carried out in
late 1553 or the early months of 1554. The subject of its
investigation was the then-seated indigenous gobernador
of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, don Diego de San Francisco
Tehuetzquititzin (r. 1541–1554), who succeeded Huanitzin
after the latter’s death (see figure 4.7 for his genealogy).
Such residencias were standard operations within Spanish
government in that they offered a way for the Crown to
maintain oversight of the officials in its government. They
involved appointing a judge with broad authority to exam-
ine accounts and take testimony. In this case, the residencia
was carried out by don Esteban de Guzmán, an indigenous
judge from Xochimilco, a man trusted by the viceroy who
later headed the government of Mexico-Tenochtitlan as
juez-gobernador (1554–1557), a special title that conferred
upon him both judicial and executive authority. Upon
completing the residencia and writing down his find-
ings, Guzmán would typically present his findings to the
audiencia. 30
The manuscript registers complaints lodged by the city
commoners, who claimed that they had delivered goods
to the gobernador but had not been paid for them. This is
a surprising charge, given that commoners traditionally
supported the indigenous nobility as part of the social
contract of the altepetl. But by midcentury, no longer. The
existing manuscript has three strata: it began as a purely
pictographic register of the goods that the four parcialidades
of the city claimed to have delivered to the government
under Tehuetzquititzin, along with their respective values.
These included piles of highly finished embroidery works,
furniture made of woven reeds, and supplies of waterfowl
and fish. In figure 7.6, we see the page devoted to the food
delivered to the native cabildo by different subsections,
likely tlaxilacalli, within the parcialidad of San Juan Moyo-
tlan. For the food, the Moyotlan macehualtin, “common-
ers,” received compensation, so those amounts are shown
as well. For instance, for the fish delivered by Moyotlan,
seen as the fish glyph at upper left, they were compensated
six pesos (each peso is shown as a semispherical bowl with
a hank of three knotted cords above to create a bundle)
and seven tomines (an amount that is one-eighth of a peso,
shown as a coin or counter), colored red. For the birds they
delivered, shown by the glyph below the fish, they received
one peso, four tomines, also colored red. Uncolored amounts
on other pages are the unpaid debts claimed by the native
community. This is the first stratum. The second stratum
was added after the pictographic record was created. A
scribe, writing in Spanish, wrote down the oral testimony
that the pictographic account elicited from both the gober-
nador and the macehualtin; in figure 7.6, this is the script
that appears above the payment of six pesos, seven tomines
in the upper register. The third stratum was added when
the whole was reviewed by a judge, who determined the
veracity of the accounts and what was due to the common-
ers, setting his comments in the margin; on this page, this
appears as the large, loose hand below the fish, which, in
one word, notes that the debts have been absolved.
To identify the groups of commoners, the artists of
the pictographic manuscript employed hieroglyphs. In
figure 7.6, the one for Moyotlan, a mosquito topped by
a net, is seen in the inset. Below it, however, other hiero-
glyphs appear—a cedar tree attached to a mask at lower
left, a hill symbol (tepetl) attached to the glyph for teeth
(tlan). These glyphs may be the names of their respective
tlaxilacalli, or a smaller unit that Truitt has identified as a
sub-tlaxilacalli, because very few of the hieroglyphs easilysouRces: Tlaxilacalli names are from Alfonso Caso, “Los barrios antiguos de Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco”; Agustín de Vetancourt, Teatro mexicano; and
Jonathan Truitt, “Nahuas and Catholicism in Mexico Tenochtitlan: Religious Faith and Practice and la Capilla de San Josef de los Naturales, 1523-1700.”
Translations other than my own are from Caso, “Los barrios antiguos de Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco”; and Antonio Peñafiel, Nombres geográficos de México.
All illustrations by author; comparable glyphs are from the Codex Mendoza, with the exception of Atlixyocan, from the Codex Osuna and Chapultepec,
from Tira de la Peregrinación.
noTe: Italicized names are identified in the cited sources not as tlaxilacalli but as estancias (small farms) or huertas (orchards).