axes in The ciTy • 177indigenous victory still remembered in the late sixteenth
c e n t u r y. 34 The two republics made their way through
the city, stopping at convents and a monastery along the
way. The first stop was the first convent founded in New
Spain, La Concepción (1540), and the second was Santo
Domingo, the large monastery of the Dominicans, who
were the second mendicant order to arrive in New Spain,
after the Franciscans. From there, the procession passed by
the convent of La Encarnación (since these were cloistered
nuns, the procession did not enter), then to Santa Catalina
de Sena (a cloistered order of Dominican nuns), before
heading south to the Cathedral and the Plaza Mayor. 35
This route thus underscored very early religious founda-
tions (La Concepción and Santo Domingo), the presence
of the powerful religious orders in the city’s urban fabric,
and the centrality of the Cathedral.
The third set of routes seen in figure 8.2 were indig-
enous ones, cultivated by the Franciscans. Mendieta’s
Historia underscores that in addition to the Eastertime
celebrations, the most important indigenous feasts were
those of the Virgen de la Asunción (August 15) and San
Juan Bautista ( June 24), which were, not coincidentally,
the feasts of the two parcialidades (Cuepopan and Moyo-
tlan) that remained under Franciscan control at the time
Mendieta was writing (San Pablo and San Pedro and San
Sebastián, the patron saints of Teopan and Atzacoalco, do
not figure in this account). The nineteenth-century map
of San Francisco, within which San José was to be found,
shows two principal entrances to this enormous complex
(see figure 6.2, which is oriented to east at top). The one
to the north is still in use today. The other entrance was
along the west wall and led directly onto the north–south
causeway, so upon leaving San José, the celebrants would
head to the chapel of Santa María Cuepopan to the north
or, in the south, to the plaza in San Juan Moyotlan where
a small chapel to San Juan had been built. After 1594, this
was also the site of the Clarist convent of San Juan de la
Penetencia, and Mendieta describes Moyotlan as “where
there is a nuns’ convent of Santa Clara, in addition, it is
the leading neighborhood [barrio principal] of Mexico
City’s Indians.” 36 When the convent was moved to this site
in 1594, leaders of the parcialidad stipulated that they be
allowed to continue to celebrate their fiestas y mitotes (festi-
vals and dances) in its plaza, affirming that the plaza of San
Juan was an important site for indigenous celebrations. 37
Causeways were raised roadways, so once upon these
streets, the procession—noisy with musicians and fire-
works—would be easily visible from lower-lying surround-
ing streets. Much of this north–south street was also what
was called una calle de agua, that is, a street of water, and
the wide canal running alongside it flowed south to the end
of San Francisco and then turned to the east to cross the
Plaza Mayor. This great north–south axis was marked, in
the colonial period, by the sightline that ran from the tall
cross made of a single trunk of a massive ahuehuetl tree
that was set in the courtyard of San Francisco—visible for
miles away—to the tower housing the bells of the mon-
astery of Santiago Tlatelolco to the north and then on to
the mountain of Cuauhtepec, where a sacred mountaintop
shrine had been built in the pre-Hispanic period. 38 It was
this same mountain where Mexica priests once journeyed
on the ritual perambulation of the month of Atlcahualo,
supplicating the rain deity Tlaloc for his life-giving waters
through the tears of sacrificial children. 39 On the Assump-
tion and the feast of John the Baptist, these axes may have
been formally marked with great triumphal arches shading
the route, arches made of “roses and adorned with trim-
mings and garlands of the same flowers.” 40 The creation of
these arches demanded enormous expenditures of labor, as
did porting the flowers and greens from peripheral growing
areas to this part of the urban center. 41 This north–south
axis was crucial to the Franciscans as well, both physically
and conceptually, because it linked the two Franciscan
monasteries in the city—San Francisco and Santiago
Tlatelolco, which lay barely a mile apart. From the 1550s
into the 1570s, two of the great Franciscan intellectuals of
the era were living and working along this axis, Pedro de
Gante in San Francisco and Bernardino de Sahagún a mere
thirty-minute walk to the north at Tlatelolco. 42
In short, the lived spaces of the city were being layered
with meaning through ritual practices; in particular, its
axes were marked repeatedly by the ritual processions that
took place following the annual religious calendar. As we
saw in the rites of Holy Thursday, the indigenous rulers
of Mexico-Tenochtitlan continued the age-old pattern
of embedding themselves and their presence within the
spaces of the city itself. As likely hosts of an impressive
feast, they entwined themselves into orthodox celebrations
of Holy Thursday. Having briefly established why ritual
was so important in shaping the lived spaces of the city and
helping coalesce collective identity, I will, in what follows,
turn to some of the rituals of the indigenous government
taking place in the 1560s into the 1580s that were played
out in both formal and informal contexts (the procession,