158 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
grant the lands under its aegis. A careful businessman, well
aware of legal niceties, Tejada sought additional confirma-
tion for his new land grant from the Spanish cabildo, which
he received on July 19, 1549. 45 Thus, what had begun as a
work that would profit the indigenous cabildo ended up as
a net loss of tianguis land.
While the extractive economy, with peasants supporting
elites, had its roots in the pre-Hispanic era, in that period,
disgruntled or overworked laborers had no exterior court
of appeal over executive authority. But after the Conquest,
the Crown established a legal system that provided one.
Its presence is seen in the Genaro García 30, where the
overseeing (but unnamed) judge (likely from the audien-
cia) writes down the summary judgment. In legal disputes,
indigenous commoners could appeal to royal judges, who
had jurisdiction over elites and commoners alike; by the
end of the sixteenth century a separate court system was
set up for them. 46 But by midcentury, popular discontent
by Mexico-Tenochtitlan’s tributary population could and
would be channeled through the Spanish legal system. We
find abundant evidence of it in the commoners’ reaction to
largely untenable conditions erupting during Tehuetzqui-
titzin’s reign. In the Genaro García 30, city residents, aware
that they now needed to be compensated for goods beyond
the set level of tribute, made a plea to be paid for goods
given to Tehuetzquititzin. Another document, the Codex
Cozcatzin, reveals another face of the strained system. This
work is a composite, drawn up probably in the late seven-
teenth century by an elite indigenous family from Tlatelolco
who used it as part of an ongoing effort to claim political
power in the polity. To this end, they ordered the copying
of a number of earlier alphabetic-pictographic manuscripts
by a native scribe, who brought together largely unrelated
pictorial histories in a single document. One of them is a
complaint of ca. 1572 presented to the audiencia by indige-
nous residents of Mexico City. They claimed that under the
reign of Tehuetzquititzin, that is, over twenty years earlier,figuRe 7.11. Unknown creator, textile tribute from the four
parcialidades of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Genaro García 30, fols. 8v–9r,
ca. 1553–1554. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University
of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin.