18 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
square, and from the center of each of its four sides, one can
see the starting points of four broad causeways, three of
them (to the west, south, and north) connecting the city to
the encircling lakeshore. Along the western causeway, run-
ning vertically upward from the city, one can even see the
bridges spanning the breaks in the causeways that allowed
the lake water to circulate. The four causeways that cut
through the city also divided it politically, and the resultant
four parts—Moyotlan, Teopan, Atzacoalco, and Cuepo-
pan—were each a distinct sociopolitical entity, or altepetl.
In the pre-Hispanic period, each seems to have had its own
ruling lineage and its own religious complex dedicated to
the altepetl’s particular deity; Lockhart describes the larger
city of Tenochtitlan as a “complex altepetl” comprising
these four component altepeme, which in turn had one
huei tlatoani (supreme leader) and a central sacred complex
in the Templo Mayor, seen as the square at the center of
the map. 41
Despite the destructions of the Conquest, the causeways
remained, as did the quadripartite sociopolitical arrange-
ment of the indigenous city. Tenochtitlan’s post-Conquest
inhabitants divided themselves into four parcialidades,
“parts” (also called barrios, “neighborhoods”), of Mexico
City, which largely respected the preexisting arrangements
of the quadripartite city, including the nomenclature of
places and the placement of sacred architecture. An indig-
enous government ruled over these areas, headed, through
the sixteenth century, by members of the Mexica ruling
family. And a number of pre-Hispanic Mexica monu-
ments—including ones that proclaimed the cosmic cen-
trality of the Mexica state—were publicly visible in Mexico
City into the seventeenth century, adding another provoca-
tive counter to the widely held notion of the erasure of the
indigenous city. 42
While there is a mounting tide of evidence support-
ing continuities in representations of space and lived space
of indigenous Tenochtitlan and Mexico City across the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, spatial practices, those
quotidian actions that both create and give meaning to
cities’ lived spaces, are both the most important sphere in
which to look for more such evidence of continuity and the
one of most difficult access to the urban historian. Fortu-
nately, new work being done by historians on Mexico City’s
Nahuatl-speaking community promises to further enrich
our understanding of the city’s lived spaces: Alejandro
Alcántara Gallegos has focused on the spatial configura-
tion of indigenous lands; Jonathan Truitt’s dissertation on
San José de los Naturales has looked particularly at the role
of Nahua confraternities in creating the post-Conquest
city’s religious spaces; and while Richard Conway’s work
focuses on Xochimilco, it does shed light on the indigenous
market practices within the urban hub, all part, as is this
work, of the spatial turn of the humanities. 43meThod
Let us begin with an exercise in the method of the book,
that is, begin with a representation of the space of the city
and examine it for the evidence it offers of lived space, as
an introduction both to the history of the city as well as to
the themes of the chapters that follow. Today, Mexico City
has some 8.85 million inhabitants (this is the official count
for just the Distrito Federal, as the central urban zone is
known; inclusion of the entire urbanized area of the valley
pushes the population as high as 23 million), and perhaps
the representation of the city that most encounter today
is the map of its metro system, whose passengers made
1,606,865,117 trips in 2012, some 4,402,370 trips a day,
along a system of 140,733 miles of tracks. 44 Metro maps
are framed in every station, greeting those who enter, and
are set along the platforms (figure 1.12). The metro was
designed by urban planners in the 1960s to bring a con-
temporary system of transport to the city under President
Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. It was then, and is now, a marker of
Mexico City’s urban modernity, still one of the most effi-
cient systems of urban transport ever created. The metro
map is a representation of space par excellence; its spidery
lines index what happens aboveground, in the fresh air of
lived space. In the first phase of the system, opening in 1969,
the longest of these lines was route 2, which now stretches
over 12 miles, cutting into the city’s broad middle from
the west, taking a turn at the center of the city, and then
heading south. New lines added in 1999 and in 2012 track
the recent expansion of the urban populace to the city’s
northeast and southeast. Looking at the map of the system,
one can also see traces of the city’s historical development.
Five of the fourteen lines (1, 2, 3, 8, and B) thread around
the Zócalo, once known as the Plaza Mayor and seen in
the biombo painting, the core of the city and one of the
world’s largest urban plazas, a plaza that was first shaped
by the city’s Mexica founders and is seen at the center of
the 1524 map of Tenochtitlan. A few stops away to the left,
or west, four of these lines converge around the Alameda,
another great open space, this one an urban park whose