64 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
have predated the foundation of the city. Years later, near
this site, Moteuczoma II would install his own portrait. 47
While we tend to privilege the artistic representation alone,
the meaning of the portraits was clearly dependent upon
the adjacency to both waterworks and tree grove, as Mexica
rulers linked their sculptural representations to control
over the surrounding environment.
The acuecuexco aqueducT
In the decades that followed the building of the elaborate
Chapultepec aqueduct in 1466, the desalinization and
control of the Laguna of Mexico added to urban growth.
Under Ahuitzotl, the residents of the city “had planted
gardens and orchards, that provided a pleasant freshness.
Here they had sown maize, chia, squash, chilies, amaranth,
tomatoes and many kinds of flowers.” Nonetheless, as
D u rá n’s Historia underscores, it was a precarious paradise,
dependent upon rainfall to feed the rivers that in turn ran
into the lake. “With all these plants the city was greatly
beautified, but their freshness would be lost should they
lack water. They would dry up and wither away.” Drought
affected not only the laguna, but the entire lake system,
important because the city increasingly depended upon
canoes to bring foodstuffs such as maize from outlying
regions as well as move it through the city, and “in the dry
season the water in the canals of Tenochtitlan was so low
that the canoes could barely pass.” 48
Because of the growing population in the city and the
evident insufficiency of the freshwater coming into the city
over the Chapultepec aqueduct, Ahuitzotl hatched a plan
to build another aqueduct into the city, one that would tap
five springs that lay close to the city of Huitzilopochco and
were under the jurisdiction of the southern city of Coyoa-
can; the aqueduct would be named Acuecuexco, after one
of them (see figure 2.7). 49 Its ruler, Tzutzumatzin, objected
to the plan and issued a Cassandra-like warning to Ahui-
tzotl of the dangers the unleashed waters might cause,
because had he not, “then the Aztecs would complain that
he had not warned them.” Instead of taking Tzutzumatzin’s
counsel to heart, Ahuitzotl raged at the objection, swearing
“that he would destroy Tzutzumatzin and erase his entire
family from the face of the earth,” and dispatched assassins
to murder the Coyoacan ruler. 50 Realizing the peril, Tzut-
zumatzin tried a number of sorcerer’s tricks, turning him-
self into an eagle and then a jaguar, a serpent and a flaming
chamber, but then realized that resisting the Mexica would
bring calamity on all of Coyoacan. He gave himself up to
the Mexica assassins, who strangled him on the spot.
With his opponent’s death, Ahuitzotl went forward
with construction. The springs were dammed up with
“a strong mortar dam which made the water surge up
with great force,” very much like the dam we know to have
existed at Chapultepec, from both before and after the
Conquest, which allowed the springwater to fill a tank and
achieve the necessary elevation to enter and flow through
the aqueduct with force. From the dammed springs, the
waters flowed along a raised aqueduct, probably made
of stone and packed earth, and then joined the existing
Ixtapalapa causeway, the main southern route into the city.
It was very similar to the Chapultepec aqueduct, which,
likewise, carried the water from the springs before join-
ing with the Tlacopan causeway (see figure 2.7). 51 This
southern causeway had originally been built under Itzcoatl
in the wake of the Triple Alliance. It passed across a small
island called Acachinanco before reaching the island at a
site known in Durán’s time, as today, as San Antonio Abad.
Here, at the edge of the lake, residents could approach via
canoe, and aqueduct water was sluiced off to fill a fresh-
water reservoir. At Huitzilan, a little farther north into
the city (at the present-day Hospital de Jesús, along the
Ixtapalapa causeway), there was another collection point,
followed by one at Pahuacan; Durán does not tell us where
the aqueduct ended, but given its utility to agriculture, any
excess freshwater may have been channeled toward urban
chinampas. The opening of the aqueduct was celebrated
with great fanfare in 7 Reed (1499). 52
The celebrations around the opening of the Acuecuexco
aqueduct were memorable ones—Durán’s account, written
almost a century after the fact, includes pages devoted to
celebrations remarkable for their novelty and for the range
of participants as well as spatial expanse. Far from mark-
ing a feat of successful engineering, they were religious in
character, led by priests and punctuated by human sacri-
fices. But unlike the highly orchestrated veintena festivals
that were centered in Tenochtitlan’s main temple precinct,
these celebrations of 1499 spread through the city, as “the
entire city turned out, dancing and singing” to welcome the
life-giving water as it entered the city. 53 Some of the atten-
tion of the throng that turned out into the streets of the
city was certainly focused on the priests, immediately rec-
ognizable by their black-painted bodies and matted hair,
who performed sacrifices of four young boys at the main
culvert. But other city residents crowded along the route to