axes in The ciTy • 175reinforced the center and its relative periphery in the lived
space of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. So at the same time that
these gatherings represented the spaces beyond the walls
of the compound, they also marked San Francisco and par-
ticularly the chapel of San José as of central importance to
the city’s emergent spatial orders.
As such, these rituals left a deep impression on the
city’s residents and in its lived spaces. It would be easy to
discount a friar like Mendieta’s description of the worship-
ping crowd, mustered on the page simply to bear witness
to his rhetorical claim of the success of the evangelizing
project. But two diaries written by indigenous chroniclers
of life in the city, the anonymously authored Anales de Juan
Bautista and the Annals of Chimalpahin, also underscore
the impression religious festivals and processions made on
city residents. Their transcription, translation, and publica-
tion at the hands of Luis Reyes García, Rafael Tena, James
Lockhart, Susan Schroeder, and others have opened the
doors of a once-remote and little-known Nahuatl archive
and brought the texture of daily life of sixteenth-century
and early seventeenth-century Mexico-Tenochtitlan to life.
They are both filled with accounts of regular and episodic
public celebrations, as well as irregularities in the known
patterns. For instance, one of the many festivals that Chi-
malpahin describes for the year 1593 is Corpus Christi, and
his entry of the first day of the feast, not untypical in length
or detail, reads thus:
Thursday the 17th of the month of June was when the
Sacrament went in procession, but it could not be done, it
could not make progress on the road; it went in procession
only inside the cathedral, since it couldn’t be taken out
because it rained very much; the rain really pelted down,
and it became very muddy. And the dancers prepared
themselves well, in Mexico as well as Tlatelolco, and all
the different tradespeople performed their acts of enter-
tainment as separate groups; the reason it was done that
way is that the Royal Audiencia along with the alcaldes
ordinarios of the [Spanish] city and the corregidor mayor
at the municipal building ordered it and set a big fine for
whoever should not take part in the celebration; they
would be punished by the officers of the law. 29In an entry of 1566, one of the anonymous chroniclers of
the Anales de Juan Bautista describes the antics of peo-
ple on Mardi Gras and the other days leading up to Ash
Wednesday but centers it in the indigenous city: “Here was
the great performance, and all the players [mahuiltiani],
gathered in the Tecpan and then went to circle around the
Tianguis [of Mexico]. For three days they were in the mar-
ket and the nobles rode on horseback: don Pedro Dionisio
[the son of Tehuetzquititzin] and don Pedro de la Cruz
also went to circle around the market, and on an old shelter
that was erected in the market, they put on top of it a globe
with the four winds.” 30 Descriptions such as these reveal
the lasting visual impact of such ephemeral practices on
lived space, as well as the way that new representations of
cosmic spaces—the globe and the four winds—were being
integrated into them.chRisTian axes in mexico ciTy
During Holy Week, San Francisco was the locus for cel-
ebrations; the presence of San José de los Naturales, the
first and foremost parish church for the city’s indigenous
residents, made it a frequent hot spot within the urban
fabric—often in complement to the great Tianguis of
Mexico that lay only a few blocks to the south, for when
the tianguis was emptied out on Sundays and feast days,
San Francisco filled up. 31 Also of great importance were
the chapels pertaining to each of the four parcialidades. In
the pre-Hispanic city, great care had been taken, mostly
across the fifteenth century, to construct the visual axes
that tied the sacred architecture of the valley together and
gave expression to political relationships. 32 These axes were
visually unchanged in the sixteenth century. Standing on
the hill of Tetzcotzinco, which had been shaped in as a
miniature altepetl by the rulers of Tetzcoco, the colonial
ruler of Tetzcoco, don Hernando de Pimentel, could see
in 1557 across the valley as his forebears had done. From
this hill, he could look to the other small hill that gave
expression to the idea of the altepetl: Chapultepec. Visual
axes also roped the larger environment into the built envi-
ronment of the city, with the equinox sun still aligning itself
with the Tacuba causeway, the city’s main east–west axis.
However, within the city itself, residents joining in ritual
processions, often ones that traced a route from one hot
spot to another, were actively renewing or creating anew
axes of importance within the city.
Figure 8.2 highlights three important processional
routes, each associated with a different set of com-
memorative events—the kind of commemorations that