The ciTy in The conquesT’s wake • 77all men of Spanish descent) and plans for a new cathe-
dral building were being drawn up, a building that would
finally be dedicated in 1656. 12 Not seen on this map is the
ayuntamiento, “city hall,” where the Spanish town council,
or cabildo, of the city met. It rose behind the canal at the
bottom edge; but visible are the arcaded spaces, the portales
along the plaza’s west side that this cabildo rented out for
income. Stretching out from the large plaza at the center
are straight streets, the grid plan that the city follows today.
As this map shows it, the erasure of the indigenous city and
the triumph of the Spanish city are complete.
The suRvivaL of The
indigenous ciTy
But spaces have a way of refusing to give up their pasts.
The brash new palaces set at the upper left and lower right
of this map depended upon the solid foundations of the
Mexica palaces beneath them to bear up the weight of their
heavy stone towers and cornices. Buried in the foundation
of the royal palace at lower right, close to the canal that
runs across the bottom of the map, the Teocalli of Sacred
Warfare rested, facedown, waiting for its rediscovery seven
indigenous centuries, or 364 years, later. The canal is empty
of canoes in this rendering, but it would have been filled
by indigenous boats trafficking goods around the city. If we
were to step into one of them and ask the oarsmen to take
us to the outskirts of the city, perhaps heading to the north-
west, we would find ourselves in a very different space.
It would look something like the map reproduced in
figure 4.4, which is the Plano Parcial de la Ciudad de
México, one of the most remarkable sixteenth-century
maps from the valley, one perhaps made in the city or its
immediate environs around 1565, that is, two years after
the Plaza Mayor map (figure 4.3). 13 It shows a great
expanse of productive chinampas, the rectangular plots
separated by a grid of canals. We see almost no trace of
Spanish authority here; instead, the right edge of the
map is marked by a line of successive indigenous rulers,
beginning with Itzcoatl (r. 1427–1440), that run from bot-
tom to top. As reproduced in figure 4.5, the list appears
in two details, one from the map’s lower part on the left,
on which are seen (A) Itzcoatl, (B) Moteuczoma I, (C)
Axayacatl (effaced), (D) Moteuczoma I (second appear-
ance), (E) Ahuitzotl, and (F) Moteuczoma II; at right are
(G) Cuitlahua and (H) Cuauhtemoc. Notably, the list does
not end with Moteuczoma II, or even Cuauhtemoc, the
rulers who died under Cortés, but continues upward to
include the Mexica elite who were named as gobernadores
of the indigenous city after the Conquest: (I) don Pablo
Xochiquentzin (r. 1530–1536), ( J) don Diego de Alvarado
Huanitzin (r. 1537/1538–1541), (K) don Diego de San Fran-
cisco Tehuetzquititzin (r. 1541–1554), (L) don Esteban de
Guzmán (r. 1554–1557), (M) don Cristóbal de Guzmán
Cecetzin (r. 1557–1562), and (N) don Luis de Santa María
Cipactzin (r. 1563–1565). Omitted on this map are don
Juan Velázquez Tlacotzin, who was named gobernador in
1524 but died shortly thereafter, and don Andrés de Tapia
Motelchiuhtzin, who ruled 1526–1530. The presence of
this lineage suggests that the map may have been used as
documentary support in the fierce battles waged by the
indigenous rulers of the city to hold on to tributary land
in and around the city. The role of this elite will concern us
in the next chapters.
What is remarkable about the work is how few marks of
Spanish presence are to be found on the larger landscape
depicted on the map some forty years after the Conquest.
The map’s location has yet to be securely determined, but
it shows some expanse of the island, or an area that pre-
Hispanic Tenochtitlan possessed near the opposite littoral
of the lake. Other than a church glossed as “S. María,” we
see acre upon acre of chinampas, those highly productive
plots, each one labeled with the pictographic name of its
owner and a symbol for a house, with great diagonal canals
cutting through the space, feeding the smaller arteries
between the fertile plots. A total of over four hundred plots
spread out over the map’s large surface.
If the 1564 map of the Plaza Mayor shows us one view
of the city, the Plano Parcial de la Ciudad de México shows
us the region’s other face: Nahuatl-speaking agriculturists
living in organized communities under the control of their
traditional lords in a landscape carefully created by the
harnessing of water. It reveals an ordered and (it seems)
fully functioning indigenous community and impels us to
construct a bridge between this image and that of the chaos
and destruction of forty years earlier. What really needed
to happen to get the city to function again? Who were
the key agents in the process? The act of laying the streets
out was merely marking lines on the ground, but getting
a city—a vast collective of people as well as a particular
geographic space—to function in the immediate wake of
the war was another matter altogether.
Because after the war was over, the city’s evacuated
residents did come back. The city’s population has been