34 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
figuRe 2.6. Unknown creator, map of household properties showing
chinampas, mid-sixteenth century. Archivo General de la Nación,
Mexico, Bienes Nacionales, legajo 1147. Mapoteca 4743.1.cast down and out to the periphery as the solar orb rises
along the central east–west world axis, but also sets this
in relation to the representation of the ideal altepetl, a ris-
ing landmass marked by abundant freshwater provided
by gentle, crossing streams, spatial ideologies that would
prove tenacious both in the pre-Hispanic city and after the
Conquest as well.
This representation of the ideal altepetl, with its cross-
ing streams of pacific freshwater, is expressed on folio 2r
of the Codex Mendoza, which begins with a map-picture
of Tenochtitlan at the moment of its official foundation in
1325 (see figure 1.3), discussed in the introduction. At the
center of the page, the eagle of Huitzilopochtli lands on
the cactus tree and four streams of water flow out from, or
cross, near this tree, like those four streams described in
the Codex Chimalpahin. Registering yet another important
spatial template, the artist rendered the newly founded city
as a quincunx, a visual motif that also opens the Codex
Fejérváry-Mayer, a pre-Hispanic religious manuscript. The
frontispiece of this sacred book offers us a map of cosmic
geography, a pattern to which the Codex Mendoza artist
would adhere (figure 2.5). The surface of the sacred earth
is rendered in the form of a Maltese cross. At the center of
each trapezoidal quadrant is a T-shaped tree that holds up
the skies, represented by the celestial bird that perches in
its branches, and each trunk rises from a base that serves
as a directional marker. East is at the base of the blue tree
in the top quadrant, shown by a rayed solar disk rising over
a low temple, just as the sun rises in the east. At the cen-
ter of these quadrants is a square space within which we
see the solar deity Xiuhtecuhtli, identifiable by his striped
face paint, a blue bird set above his forehead, and his red
body paint. So when the artist of the later Codex Mendoza
evoked this pattern of four quadrants with a deity at the
center (in the Mexica’s case, the eagle of Huitzilopochtli,
another deity associated with the sun), he or she meant to
show the city’s space in alignment with that of the divinely
created world.
In the Codex Mendoza, the space that the city would
come to occupy is pictured on the page as bordered by a
simple blue rectangle of water (see figure 1.3). While this
codex likens the layout of Tenochtitlan to that of the sacred
cosmos, of note on this page is the quality of the water. I
have frequently read the framing rectangle as an abstracted
version of the surrounding lake (see figure 1.1), but the
water of the surrounding Lake Tetzcoco was almost always
represented as frothy, surging, uncontrolled—qualities also
noticed by Spanish residents in the sixteenth century, who
spoke fearfully about the huge waves of the lake. Instead,
what frames the newly born city are the gentle, tamed
waters of a canal, rendered similarly to canals surrounding
the raised-bed plots called chinampas that we find pictured
in quotidian land documents produced in Tenochtitlan in
the sixteenth century. In the map of a house plot shown in
figure 2.6, the more turbulent water of a supply canal that
runs across the bottom of the page is filled with spiraling
eddies. In contrast, the ditch that flows around the rectan-
gular chinampa (identified here in Nahuatl as a chinamitl)
is marked with parallel lines to show its calm nature. It
was these raised irrigated beds and their development that
would prove crucial to the development of the Mexica and
their city in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Thus it
is to the great feats of water management that we now turn.waTeR conTRoL in TenochTiTLan
The Valley of Mexico was once dominated by five shallow
lakes; while separate in the dry season, during the rainy
season, when water flooded into the system, they could