axes in The ciTy • 187in the mid-1570s, the salary to be paid to an indigenous
alcalde in nearby Tacuba (Tlacopan) was twelve pesos a
year; regidores received only eight. 84 This clearly meant that
indigenous cabildo members needed to find other ways to
support themselves, as did Crown officials of the era. The
resentment of the commoners bringing the charges was not
over the use of the feathered costumes, or their expense,
but rather that objects that they had paid for as commu-
nity goods were being used to enrich public officials. This
repositioning of symbolic items, once seen as communal
property, into the private sphere of individual rulers was
paralleled by the movement of once-communal goods, like
land, into the domain of individual indigenous elites. 85
If mitotes became flashpoints for the mounting tensions
between commoners and elites, and the hijacking of once-
communal costumes was the source of resentment, it is
because they were an important expression of communal
identity and its internal hierarchy. They were, as much as
the procession, another way the community showed itself
to itself. In leading the mitote, a pre-Hispanic ruler like
Moteuczoma made public his role as leader of the altepetl;
and we might imagine after the Conquest that the gober-
nador danced in a similarly key position, perhaps flanked
by the two alcaldes and followed by regidores and then by
the alguaciles (constables) of the four parcialidades to make
visible the political hierarchies of the government. When
Chimalpahin describes a mitote at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, he tells us that it is don Hernando de
Alvarado Tezozomoc, that is, Huanitzin’s son and Moteuc-
zoma’s grandson, who would don the dance costume and
lead the crowd. 86
Descriptions of the colonial mitotes make clear why they
should serve as such potent metaphors for that communal
body. Mendieta describes the three or four thousand peo-
ple who would come together to dance; each of the “songs”
would be started by two masters, recalling the double lead-
ership that the huei tlatoani and cihuacoatl provided for the
altepetl, to be followed by a large chorus. “This great mul-
titude,” marvels Mendieta, “moved their feet together, the
same as very skilled Spanish dancers. And more is that all
the body, the head along with the arms and hands, moved in
concert, measured and ordered, that not a single one varied,
nor moved off the beat.” The harmonious community that
was forged kinesthetically in the mitote was also a means of
social reproduction: “Many youngsters, and the sons of the
lords, join the dance, some of them seven or eight, others
as young as four or five, who dance with their parents.” 87
That the 1564 lawsuit would underscore that young men
were eager to join the dance tells us that the commoners
bringing the suit also understood its socially integrating
function (although attributing the zeal of participants to
sensual pursuits), and if we think beyond the spectacle
of its performance, we can envision the apprenticeship of
dance master and young disciple assuring the continuity of
one generation to the next.
In the same context, the tecpan building, sometimes
referred to simply as “la communidad” and presented as
such in the Codex Osuna, would become equally conten-
tious. The process of building tecpans was a communal
enterprise, with labor being part of one’s obligation to the
community. But at the same moment that the mitotes were
being contested, so was the tecpan. As part of the same
lawsuit of 1564, the commoners protested that they had not
been paid for their labor, either to maintain or to expand
the tecpan. “They brought many large stones for the work
being done at the cabildo-and-community house [the term
for the tecpan], and each stone cost three pesos, and to pay
for them, they [the native cabildo] collected a silver real
from each Indian, and they were brought by dragging, an
enormous amount of work, to put them in the cabildo-
and-community house, and in bringing them, more than
500 Indians worked for more than eight days.” 88 And as
we shall see, the tecpan would bear the brunt of growing
popular outrage.dance and RioT
Just when the commoners of Mexico-Tenochtitlan were
gathering testimony in support of their charges against the
native cabildo, the seated gobernador, don Luis de Santa
María Cipactzin, grandson of Ahuitzotl and resident of
Moyotlan, celebrated his wedding, on June 4, 1564, to doña
Magdalena Chichimecacihuatl. 89 They were married not in
San Francisco but in Santo Domingo, and after the wed-
ding, a merry procession complete with wind instruments
made its way back toward the tecpan. A native account
tells us of the events: “At the foot of the stairs, the people
of the church gathered, the singers, and there they sang.
When the bride entered, they began to dance. First they
performed to the chichimecayotl song, and then they began
the atequilizcuicatl [water-spreading song], and then the
tlatoani [Cipactzin] himself danced. And in this he then
painted his huehuetl drum, he gilded it. The lords and prin-
cipales of the [surrounding] towns had come. And in the