axes in The ciTy • 169of these, perhaps the most interesting and least understood
were the celebrations of accession that happened within
Mexico-Tenochtitlan itself when the newly elected gover-
nor would take his seat within the tecpan.
Thus there were a multitude of occasions in which the
native governor and cabildo members could don their col-
orful cloaks and make their way through the city, often
preceded by a large procession composed of indigenous
church leaders (fiscales and cantores) and other city dwell-
ers, to the sound of musicians (playing trumpets and
drums) and the explosions of fireworks. In his essay “Walk-
ing in the City,” Michel de Certeau suggests that one way
of imagining the urban conglomerate is to compare the city
to language itself, wherein the paths of individuals walking
or moving through the city are akin to speech acts. 2 Just as
spoken language is performance and has no concrete exis-
tence beyond the instant that people speak, the city is like-
wise constituted by the movements of people as they move
through and use its spaces, what Henri Lefebvre would
designate “practice.” While these essential and quotidian
itineraries, like spoken language, are often lost to us, set
beyond the horizon of the historical gaze into past space,
we do have accounts of urban festivals that help us better
understand the lived spaces of the city.
PRocessions in mexico ciTy
Festivals and processions have also long been of interest
to social historians since they are, as the historian Rob-
ert Darnton has described them, when “the city mak[es]
itself visible to itself.” 3 In the organized arrangement of
participants, community leaders implicitly made public
the unspoken and often otherwise unrecorded structure
of the urban social order. Participants, in turn, internalized
this order; once enacted, it became a feature of communal
identity. In Spanish-sponsored processions in Mexico City,
such as Corpus Christi, representatives of the city’s indig-
enous populace went first, the distance between them and
the Eucharistic host, which appeared near the procession’s
end, a sign of their low status; the order of this procession
was firmly dictated by the Spanish cabildo in 1533. 4 That
these matters were taken seriously by the residents of Mex-
ico City is clearly seen in a sprawling lawsuit that refused
resolution for over a decade in the 1570s and 1580s. Gremios
(guilds of craftsmen) had their corresponding religious
cofradías (religious sodalities), and they marched behind
the banner of their cofradía’s patron saint in procession.
In the 1570s, Mexico City’s ironworkers protested that the
cofradía of the shoemakers’ guild had moved in front of
them in the Corpus Christi procession; they argued that
they deserved the place behind the tailors’ guild because
of the date of their establishment—that is, the procession
was organized by one guild cofradía following another guild
cofradía, but these in turn were arranged chronologically by
the date of their establishment. 5
Guilds were important to both the social and economic
life of the city. Because of the rules of the painters’ guild, for
instance, aspiring artisans would work in apprenticeship
for a number of years, before taking an exam that would
allow them to reach the next level of oficial; becoming a
master painter (maestro) came at the end of years of train-
ing and the successful completion of exams administered
by the guild overseer. 6 And only as a master painter could
a man set up his own independent workshop. The internal
structure of guilds came to mirror the idealized order of
hierarchical society segregated by caste; blacks and mulat-
tos could advance only so far, and after 1568, indigenous
painters were barred from creating images of saints and
selling them to Spaniards, in effect demoting them to a
lesser rank than their Spanish counterparts.
Thus guilds, with their regulated internal order, were
microcosms of an idealized social order set at a small scale.
The arrangement of them in a procession like Corpus
Christi offers yet another representation of the city’s social
order at a somewhat larger scale. The order is worth pars-
ing. If guilds’ cofradías appeared in order of the dates of
their foundation, then their procession offered, as shoe-
makers followed ironworkers, who followed tailors, a visual
narrative of the city’s history, told as the sequential coalesc-
ing of one artisanal industry after the next, like a derivative
graph that tracked the increase in the city’s population and
range of manufactured products, decade after decade. Since
guilds were represented as cofradías, the growing number
of guilds, year after year, joining the parade also bore wit-
ness to the expansion of Catholic religious devotion.
But in indigenous Mexico-Tenochtitlan, religious pro-
cessions followed a different logic, and they underscored,
in turn, the presence of the indigenous government and
the self-determined religious organization of the residents;
in doing so, they represented the social geography of the
city. A key source for processions in the sixteenth cen-
tury is the Historia eclesiástica indiana, completed in 1596
by the Franciscan Gerónimo de Mendieta (1528–1604),
who was resident at San Francisco after arriving in New