inTRoducTion • 13chapters that follow. As an art historian, I will be dealing
most frequently with the first sphere, what Lefebvre would
call “representations of space”—and the reader will see
this in the strong focus on maps, plans, and other images
that run through the book. The emphasis on the image is
also necessary in dealing with Tenochtitlan and Mexico
City, because through the sixteenth century the peoples
of central Mexico expressed themselves through images
and a largely pictographic script, as they had before the
Conquest; one can see in the pages of the Codex Men-
doza the central role that the images play. The alphabetic
text, a post-Conquest introduction, is at times meant only
to explain the images to its assumed European reader. In
order to reencounter the heretofore occluded history of
the indigenous city, I turn frequently in the pages that fol-
low to a group of rare pictographic-alphabetic manuscripts
produced in the city in the sixteenth century: the Codex
Mendoza (ca. 1542), the Codex Aubin (ca. 1576–1608),
the Map of Santa Cruz (ca. 1537–1555), Genaro Garcia 30
(1553–1554), the Codex Osuna (ca. 1565), the Tlatelolco
Codex (ca. 1565), and the Florentine Codex (ca. 1575–1577).
While these alphabetic-pictorial manuscripts are crucial to
understanding sixteenth-century representations of urban
space, alphabetic texts also offer us descriptive representa-
tions, and I will be drawing on period texts written in both
Spanish and Nahuatl selectively, often as complement to
the image, to discuss the nature and history of this city in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
But representations of space, of course, represent some-
thing, and my real quarry is that elusive referent. On the
simplest level, it is the built environment, actual spaces in
the urban fabric. But Lefebvre reminds us that the built
environment is just one component of the category of lived
spaces of the city, as the built environment is defined by
quotidian practice and inflected by ideologies supplied by
representations of space; we will see that our three spheres,
when in use, are not like hard-edged solids, but more like
radiant bodies emitting colored light—blue and yellow and
pink—their appearance changing as they mingle, touch,
and intersect. Thus, in dealing with the built environment,
I will also be attentive to these mutually constituting inflec-
tions. In using representations of the city to better under-
stand the city’s lived spaces, we will find that historical
continuities, rather than ruptures, reveal themselves. That
is to say, if the powerful master narrative of “death” and
“birth” as coincident with its political leadership is lodged
in the representations of the city’s space, lived spaces offer
countering—and abundant—evidence of the city’s conti-
nuities before and after the Conquest, irrespective of who
claimed political authority. I suspect that a close-grained
analysis of urban practices would reveal even more such
continuities. But since practice—so quotidian, so ephem-
eral—is often best encountered through archeology and in
the historical archive, an archive that is highly fragmentary
in the case of indigenous Tenochtitlan and Mexico City,
the present study is just a first step toward understand-
ing the lived spaces of the city. If Lefebvre’s spheres can
be imagined in order of visibility as we look back in time
to the historical city, the representations of the city (“the
conceived”) loom large in the foreground, with lived spaces
in the blurred midground, and practice (“the perceived”)
hovering at the horizon line.
How are these lived spaces to be encountered, given the
looming endurance and historiographical primacy that
representations of the city’s space have had? I would con-
tend that, often, their traces are hidden in plain sight. Let
us return to the marvelous biombo, with its scene of palace
and plaza, and bring our gaze closer to the bottom of the
work (figure 1.2). Here, we see the city’s original residents:
Nahuatl-speaking women wearing traditional clothing,
selling food, which might include the leaves and fruit of the
nopal cactus, avocados, and pomegranates. Their husbands
and sons work nearby, selling freshwater from wooden bar-
rels or transporting goods on their backs. While this paint-
ing does include these residents, it shows them as the city’s
underclass, the visual hierarchy echoing a social one, with
popular classes at the base and the ruling class, in the form
of the royal palace and viceroyal retinue, above. Nonethe-
less, their inclusion in this representation of space points to
their practices that shaped the urban fabric, practices that
took them beyond the frame of this particular image as they
followed their daily routines, inflecting other lived spaces
in the city. The daily paths of the female sellers set into the
biombo’s foreground may have led to the city’s indigenous
markets, where Nahua women sold beans, corn, and chile
to provision the teeming city. In the biombo, the Habsburg
palace that dominates the background is the only urban
palace that made its way into this representation of space,
but it was one of two such palaces in the city. The other,
never pictured, as far as I know, by a biombo painter, sat
in the city’s southwest, and within its walls gathered the
indigenous men who also served as the city’s rulers—an
indigenous government would exercise power in the city,
along with the city’s Spanish cabildo, “town council,” until