20 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
orderly paths still follow its late eighteenth-century plan,
a park that once marked the western edge of what was an
island city. A bundle of lines press toward the south, trac-
ing the surge of urban development as once-independent
cities—Coyoacan, Culhuacan, Tlahuac—were absorbed
into the modern megalopolis.
The names of the stations that mark the map open like
windows onto the city’s history. Each of them is desig-
nated by a related icon (designed by a team under Lance
Wyman), useful in a city with still-high illiteracy rates, and
most of the names were chosen because they relate to an
aboveground feature or toponym, or a historical figure or
event, often one that happened close to the location of the
metro station. Appropriately, the map sets them along the
lines following their spatial order, but we could easily rear-
range them, like playing cards on a table, to follow a differ-
ent order, this one chronological. Near the contemporary
end of our timeline would be “Universidad,” the stop at
the National Autonomous University (unam), relocated
from the center of the city to a rocky outcropping in the
south in 1954, or “Instituto de Petroleo,” built in 1965 as a
research arm for the national petroleum industry (Pemex),
whose profits have underwritten many of Mexico’s public
services, including the unam. Somewhere in the middle of
our metro-station timeline would be those stations with
names relating to the city’s tumultuous nineteenth-century
history, when this former capital of the viceroyalty of New
Spain wrested itself from Spain’s control and shaped itself
into a nation: the “Hidalgo” stop recalling Miguel Hidalgo,
the priest whose rallying cry in 1810 triggered the Mexican
War of Independence from Spain; “Juárez” after Benito
Juárez, who was born to a peasant Zapotec family and
later became president, helping transform Mexico under
the liberal constitution of 1857. Clustered in the city’s cen-
ter, where millions pass through them daily, these stations
are as central to the transport hub as they are to Mexico’s
own historical narrative, where independence and nation
building have pride of place.
At the beginning of our timeline, we would set a small
number of stations that bring us even further back in
time, to the city’s sixteenth-century history. The city’s vio-
lent conquest by Spanish and allied indigenous troops in
1519–1521 has produced a number of traces in the metro
map: the station named “Villa de Cortés” is after Her-
nando Cortés, the great conquistador, whose deadly siege
from May to August of 1521 brought the Mexica city to
capitulation; “Cuauhtemoc” is named after the last Mexica
emperor, who took the throne of the imperiled city in 1520,
surrendered to Cortés the following year, and was executed
by him in 1525; “Cuitlahuac” is after Cuauhtemoc’s prede-
cessor, Cuitlahua, who ruled for only eighty days as Aztec
emperor in 1520 before dying, likely a victim of smallpox, a
European-introduced pathogen whose rapid and terrifying
death-sweeps through the indigenous population were the
Spanish conquistadores’ most effective avant-garde. And
then, of course, there is the station named “Moctezuma.”
The icon of this station is evocative and provocative (fig-
ure 1.13). It shows us, in simplified form, the great fan made
of resplendent green quetzal feathers that, in the popular
imagination, Moteuczoma II was believed to have worn
as a headdress (figure 1.14). The fan, probably made right
before the arrival of the Spaniards in 1519, is one of the
great works of Mexica art to survive. The feathers making
up the headdress were brought to the city by long-distance
traders whose journeys knitted the imperial center to far-
flung peripheries in places like Guatemala, six hundred
miles to the south. As such, it was a material reminder
of the large empire cobbled by Moteuczoma’s forebears,
mostly in the wake of the Triple Alliance of 1428, begun
when the altepetl of Tenochtitlan joined with two other
altepeme in the Valley of Mexico, Tetzcoco and Tlacopan.
The triumvirate began to wage brief wars against otherfiguRe 1.13. Icon of the Mexico City metro station “Moctezuma.”
© Sistema de Transporte Colectivo. Ciudad de México.