The ciTy in The conquesT’s wake • 73of the Sixteenth Century. The map features the streets
around the Plaza Mayor, where the Spanish population
clustered. An imaginary line is set on the map, thereby
delimiting an interior of the city, with streets laid out under
Spanish auspices, and an exterior, where unplanned (and
largely indigenous) zones were to be found. In contrast,
figure 4.2 offers a more complete view of the city, show-
ing all the lands that stretched to the littoral of the island,
and includes the city’s indigenous neighborhoods, the four
altepeme of Moyotlan, Teopan, Atzacoalco, and Cuepo-
pan. These were oriented to the intercardinal directions,
and were bordered by the once-independent altepetl of
Tlatelolco. After the Conquest, names of Catholic patron
saints were added to the Nahuatl names, and the altepeme
became known as San Juan Moyotlan, San Pablo Teopan,
San Sebastián Atzacoalco, and Santa María Cuepopan,
with Santiago Tlatelolco to the north. However, as social
and spatial entities, these altepeme endured across time.
In this chapter, I examine the rebuilding of the city in the
1520s and 1530s, picking up the thread of the city’s history
in the wake of the wars of conquest. As a counter to urban
histories emphasizing the role of a small group of Spanish
residents, I focus on the role of its indigenous residents to
reveal that, in its built environment, the post-Conquest
island shared essential features with pre-Conquest
Tenochtitlan. Certainly, new monumental architecture, like
the new palaces that would be built for Cortés and other
conquistadores on and around the Plaza Mayor, marked
Spanish presences and employed European architectural
vocabularies. It was the construction of these works—and
the wanton deaths that resulted—that the Franciscan
friar Motolinia would call the “seventh great plague” to
visit the city’s indigenous people, demanding more labor-
ers than the great Temple of Jerusalem. 7 However labor
intensive and physically impressive they may have been,
these constructions occupied only a small area of the city.
In contrast, the Mexica still occupied large expanses of the
city. The architectural masses of the Spanish mansions and
Catholic churches that were built in the 1520s and 1530s
were certainly important to the nature of the city, but so
were its great spatial axes and voids—plazas, causeways,
and the great markets, or tianguises (the Hispanicization
of the Nahuatl tianquiztli). Established in the pre-Hispanic
period, they were extensive, and these lived spaces were
primarily used by the city’s Mexica residents and shaped
by their daily, and ephemeral, routines.
Central to my reinterpretation of the space of the city
are the practices that created habitable spaces and endowed
them with meaning, as well as the continuities of the role of
indigenous elites in shaping the city’s spaces. By the mid-
1520s, this indigenous city, forming a ring around its new
Spanish center, had its own indigenous government, called
a cabildo, like its Spanish counterpart. It was headed not
by a tlatoani, but by a gobernador, who was supported by
tribute goods and the labor of altepetl residents, as before
the Conquest. And this gobernador and his cabildo oversaw
a city built by indigenous laborers, who employed time-
tested indigenous technologies in aquatic engineering and
basic principles of architecture in the soft-soiled city; it was
indigenous agriculture that, in these early years, fed the city;
and most of all, it was indigenous people whose daily, unre-
corded actions made it a city. If one were to walk through
the streets of the city’s southwest quadrant of Moyotlan
in 1530, not even a decade after the Conquest, one could
enter a great market, named for an indigenous lord, where
hundreds of women sellers, all speaking Nahuatl, would befiguRe 4.1. The new Spanish traza, or grid plan, in Mexico City,
from George Kubler, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), figure 17, facing p. 72.
Reproduced courtesy of the Kubler family.