156 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
Coyotlinahual. 33 Thus for some craftspeople, group iden-
tifications stemming from occupation and residence his-
torically overlapped. In the post-Conquest city, Catholic
religious sodalities dedicated to a saint or an object of devo-
tion, called cofradías, began to consolidate as early as the
1530s, replacing pre-Hispanic cults. Since members often
shared the same occupation, religious affiliations coincided
with professional ones, as they had in the pre-Hispanic
period. We will see the trajectories of the cofradías through
the city streets in the next chapter. Another forum where
the bonds of collective identification were forged was the
marketplace, particularly the great Tianguis of Mexico,
where craftsmen and merchants were grouped by type in
stalls to sell their goods, which afforded them repeated and
habitual face-to-face interactions with each other and with
their buyers.
If we consider that Genaro García 30 offers us on its
pages a representation of the city, its first strata and gen-
eral organization created by a native scribe working for
commoners complaining about abuses by the nobility, we
can see how frequently indigenous hieroglyphs represent
collectives of people whose communal identity was con-
solidated through their shared tribute obligations. The
symbols of the saints that stood for the parcialidades, on
the other hand, are aligned to the collection of that trib-
ute, which was intended for the native gobernador. We can
compare folios 4r–7r to a page from the Codex Mendoza,
where tributary provinces are named along the edge of the
page and the lists of the tribute that they were required to
pay is pooled in the center of the page (figure 7.7 and see
figure 3.1). But two crucial differences emerge: first, the
Codex Mendoza opens with a visual statement about the
divine origins of Tenochtitlan (see figure 1.3), an ideological
statement that justified the extractive economic relation-
ships that are expressed in the tribute section. Genaro
García 30 is a fragmentary manuscript, but in its present
state it lacks compelling ideological justification of the tra-
ditional transfer of goods detailed on its pages, perhaps an
indication that conventional social bonds within the alte-
petl were fraying. Second is the presence of the other strata
on the pages—the responses produced by the questioning
of the indigenous judge don Esteban de Guzmán and the
gobernador Tehuetzquititzin and the final responses by the
Spanish judge. These show us quite visibly the shake-up
in power relations within the city itself, where the native
gobernadores were now expected to pay for the many
goods they had once received for free. And now native
gobernadores were no longer the last court of appeal in any
political process, their traditional rights countermanded
and curtailed by a new Spanish legal system.TehueTzquiTiTzin
But who exactly was the figure named as “don Diego” on
the pages of Genaro García 30? And if the manuscript tells
us something about indigenous commoners living in the
city during his reign, and their dissatisfactions at deliver-
ing tribute to the tecpan, what can it tell us about him?
Other historical sources reveal that, like his second cousin
Huanitzin, Tehuetzquititzin was a political survivor as well
as a member of the highest strata of the Mexica elite, being
the grandson of the huei tlatoani Tizocic (see figures 4.7
and 5.2). He tenaciously made it through three years in
captivity in Coyoacan and then the grueling expedition to
Honduras, during which many other native leaders, like
Cuauhtemoc, died or were killed. And like Huanitzin, such
proximity to the conquistadores gave him an opportunity
to observe them at close range as well as create alliances
with the other elite Mexica also held captive. Upon Hua-
nitzin’s death, he was chosen, likely by Viceroy Mendoza
himself, as the new gobernador. From the brief descrip-
tion offered by the historian Chimalpahin, we can see that
Tehuetzquititzin followed in the traditional path of his
huei tlatoani forebears and as part of his accession rituals
he was bathed: “It was also at this time, in [this] year, that
one went to Xochipillan where the people of Xochipillan
were defeated. There don Diego Tehuetzquititzin went
to be bathed as ruler.” 34 Bathing was an important phase
of the pre-Hispanic consecration rituals of the anointed
ruler, and Tehuetzquititzin carried on that tradition; he
also proved his prowess as a warrior, another crucial phase
of Mexica consecration. However, Tehuetzquititzin did
not initiate his own conquests, as his forebears had done.
Instead, he joined Viceroy Mendoza’s campaign against the
northern Chichimecs in the 1540–1542 Mixtón war. Such
a pattern—the anointment by ritual bathing, the waging
of war—evokes the earlier rituals of the Mexica kings, at
the same time that participation in a Spanish-led military
campaign allowed Tehuetzquititzin to prove his loyalty to
the Spanish Crown as well as to hit the road with Men-
doza, then the most powerful man in New Spain.
Representations of Tehuetzquititzin in indigenous
manuscripts adhere to the conventions used to show his
predecessor Huanitzin. In the Codex Aubin, he is shown