24 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
the city. The Codex Mendoza, as we have seen, posited a
close identification between the figure of the ruler and the
city itself, and chapter 3, “The Tlatoani in Tenochtitlan,”
focuses first on Ahuitzotl (r. 1486–1502), the huei tlatoani
preceding Moteuczoma II, and then on Moteuczoma
himself to demonstrate connections between the flow of
water and the figure of the ruler. It also shows how he
both functioned as a representation of the city as well as
embedded himself in urban spaces, and connected himself
to all-important temporal cycles; we will look fleetingly
at practices, as the figure of the ruler threaded together
the urban fabric. Chapter 4, “The City in the Conquest’s
Wake,” takes up the city in the wake of the Conquest, or
the trope of Tenochtitlan’s “death” as Mexico City was for-
mally founded within its space in 1522. While Spanish nar-
ratives about the city emphasize the destruction of visible
monuments of pre-Hispanic religion—the manuscripts,
the “idols,” and the temples—we will instead look at the
crucial role that indigenous peoples, and the Mexica elite,
played in the rebuilding of the city. Chapter 5, “Huanitzin
Recenters the City,” continues to look at the role of the
indigenous elite as they imagined the new city, focusing on
one of the early governors, don Diego de Alvarado Hua-
nitzin (r. 1537/1538–1541), and on a seminal representa-
tion of the city crafted out of feathers under Huanitzin’s
patronage. Chapter 6, “Forgetting Tenochtitlan,” turns to
Huanitzin’s urban partners, the Franciscans, the mendi-
cant order chosen to evangelize the city’s indigenous popu-
lation, to encounter their complex and ambivalent project
as they sought in the 1530s and beyond to both preserve
and erase indigenous Tenochtitlan. Their implied analogy
of the city to the human mind—with urban erasure akin
to forgetting—allowed them to destroy, but mostly pre-
serve, the lived spaces of the city. At the same time, they
attempted to fill those spaces with new meanings, creating
from old Tenochtitlan a new Rome. Chapter 7, “Place-
Names in Mexico-Tenochtitlan,” takes up one of the
primary, but often overlooked, representations of the city,
its place-names, and through them looks at the city under
the successors of Huanitzin, particularly don Diego de San
Francisco Tehuetzquititzin (r. 1541–1554). Above, we noted
how important urban practices are in defining the city, and
also how difficult these ephemeral traces are to track in
the historical record; in an attempt to better understand
the city’s lived spaces in the mid-sixteenth century, chapter
8, “Axes in the City,” looks to urban processions and their
role in creating lived spaces, with particular focus on the
late 1560s and the 1570s. Chapter 9, “Water and Altepetl in
the Late Sixteenth-Century City,” returns to the themes
of water and the indigenous ruler in its discussion of the
construction of a new urban aqueduct under the auspices
of the indigenous city’s great late-century ruler, don Anto-
nio Valeriano (r. 1573–1599), underscoring his role in the
maintenance of the ancient altepetl of Tenochtitlan, both
as an ideal and as a reality.
If we return again to our biombo painting (figure 1.2),
we will encounter an image that dovetails nicely with
seventeenth-century Mexico City as represented in Span-
ish sources, centering on orderly urban life around the
plaza and the palace, that emblem of Habsburg rule. But
such an image can assign the viewer to the role of Icarus,
whose daring plumage allowed him to be “lifted out of the
city’s grasp” at the same time that his ability to see every-
thing from above deprived him of the experience of being
on the ground. By the end of this book, I hope readers will
have a greater understanding of the role of the indigenous
residents in the creation of this extraordinary place across
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and will come, as I
have, to appreciate what the view from the ground has to
offer, as we trace canals and walk through markets, rais-
ing our heads at times to glimpse the spectacular figure,
quetzal-plumed or wrapped in embroidered mantle, of the
indigenous ruler as he made his way through the island
capital that the world now knows as Mexico City.