212 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
of a city is perhaps better likened to swimming, where a
straight trajectory forward or backward through space is
one option, but so is a vertical plunge downward to move
back in time. We have seen that place-names can serve like
buoys in an aquatic environment, floating on the surface
but always anchored to the bottom, to a point in deep
time, as if by the ropes of memory. At the same time, the
underwater landscape that determines their surface loca-
tion is always changing, just as the contours of history are
being remade like the bottom of the sea, as tectonic plates
shift and underwater storms drive through. For the urban
historian, the water is constantly rising, and while we float
on its surface, past moments of a place are lost to us below,
while new ones are being created.
With a new history of the city discovered in these
depths, let us return to the representation of present-
day Mexico City that is perhaps the best known to its
residents—the metro map—with a new appreciation of
the meanings carried by the urban body (see figure 1.12).
Along the oldest line of the system (line 1, colored pink),
where we encountered traces of Mexica Tenochtitlan in
the stations of Pantitlan and Chapultepec, we now find
yet another monument to the indigenous manipulation
of water: “Salto de Agua” is set at the site of the life-giving
tianguis fountain engineered under the city’s extraordinary
sixteenth-century leader Antonio de Valeriano. Crossing
through it is the newish line 8 (dark green), inaugurated
in 1994, which runs along the great indigenous-Franciscan
axis of the city that ran from the tecpan in San Juan Moy-
otlan to San Francisco and ends right near Santa María
Cuepopan. In 1604, Balbuena likened the city, rising from
the ashes of the Conquest, to a phoenix, and it bears recall-
ing that in Ovid’s telling, the phoenix is one of the few
creatures that “reproduces itself,” the offspring a clone of
the parent. The parent of Mexico City was Tenochtitlan,
and the birthright can no longer be denied.