178 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
the marketplace), in structured formats and unstructured
eruptions (the swearing of the oath and the riot), to better
understand the evolving spatial orders of the city and the
connection of indigenous rule to it.
The PRocession and The RioT
Writing in the mid-1590s, Mendieta witnessed a city where
Franciscan control of the indigenous peoples had eroded
since its peak during the decades of the 1550s and 1560s, as
other orders (Dominicans and Augustinians) had chipped
away at this Franciscan stronghold. In their contest with
the Franciscans, these other orders found an uneasy ally
in Alonso de Montúfar, the reforming archbishop, whose
arrival to the city in 1554 coincided with the death of the
gobernador Tehuetzquititzin (r. 1541–1554). Montúfar, an
irascible and widely disliked man, was a Dominican as well
as the highest-ranking religious authority in the colony.
Despite his own mendicant affiliation, he attempted to curb
the power of the mendicant orders in general by prying the
huge indigenous congregations from their control and put-
ting them in the hands of parish priests (also called secular
priests), who answered to the archbishop rather than to the
head of an order. Within the city, his attempts at so-called
secularization put him at odds with the powerful Fran-
ciscans, who controlled the city’s indigenous parishes and
with whom the Dominicans had a long history of strife.
Montúfar’s first successful assault on Franciscan power
in Mexico City involved removing the residents of the
indigenous barrio of San Pablo Teopan, which lay in the
city’s southeast quadrant, from Franciscan control and
turning them over to secular priests in 1562. 43 This was a
slap in the face to the educated, erudite, and self-denying
brown-robed friars; these new parish priests at San Pablo
had no ties to the Franciscans. They also had the reputation
of being badly educated, lacking indigenous languages, and
being interested in worldly gain (they took no vow of pov-
erty, as did the Franciscans). If we return to the idealized
image of the city found in the Codex Osuna of 1565 seen
in an earlier chapter (see figure 6.5), we now understand
it to be a nostalgic one, as one branch of the perfect quin-
cunx radiating from San José had recently been lopped off.
Montúfar’s plan to empower secular priests in indigenous
Mexico-Tenochtitlan was, in the short term, an unsuccess-
ful one, but his project to curb Franciscan holdings was
not: San Pablo went from the hands of secular priests to
those of Augustinians in 1575; San Sebastián was turned
over to the Carmelites 1585 and remained under their con-
trol for over two decades before being ceded to the Augus-
tinians in 1607. 44 And the arrival of the Jesuits in 1572 also
threatened the Franciscans, as did their establishment of
the school of San Gregorio in 1575, which would supersede
the Franciscan school at Tlatelolco in the education of the
native elite by the seventeenth century. Writing about these
events at the end of the century, Mendieta would speak of
the indigenous city, once unified under Franciscan control,
in anthropomorphic terms: “Others have attempted, and
perhaps some still attempt, to dismember even more this
body.” 45 So when the brown-robed Franciscans headed
processions out of their monastery through the city streets
to the indigenous churches under their charge in wake of
the public “dismemberment” of 1562, they were making
their control of these indigenous neighborhoods a public
spectacle, asserting their presence in this urban body.
The struggle taking place in the 1550s and 1560s between
the Franciscans and the archbishop was also about money,
and both the indigenous uprisings we will see in this chap-
ter played out against a glinting backdrop. From the time
of the Conquest, the indigenous peoples of New Spain
were exempt from the expected 10 percent tithe to sup-
port the Catholic Church, often levied on agricultural
products, but they paid tribute to the Crown or to their
encomendero and they manned the labor drafts (repar-
timientos) assigned to build churches and monasteries; 46
following custom, they provided food to the clergy and
supported them through the portion of their tribute that
went to their caja de comunidad (community coffers).
Donations of alms were often quite substantial. In addi-
tion, many voluntarily served churches, but if they did so,
they were exempt from paying tribute, as Charles Gibson
notes. Montúfar, however, pushed for direct payments to
the church via tithes, and understandably, native leaders
resisted. Montúfar scored a partial victory in the wake of a
judicial hearing in 1558; as Gibson explains, “Indians were
not to pay tithes on native goods and native properties,
but . . . they were liable in transactions involving either
Spanish goods, such as cattle, wheat, and silk, or lands
that had formerly belonged to Spaniards.” 47 So by the time
Montúfar began to take away mendicant parishes, he had
already raised the ire of both Franciscans, who felt that an
additional tax would turn native converts away from the
church, and native leaders, who objected to another tax on
their already-stressed native charges.
So Mexico City in the 1550s and 1560s was very much a