86 • The deaTh of azTec TenochTiTLan, The Life of mexico ciTy
eventually find commodities from the far reaches of the
empire. The market on the Plaza Mayor was such a parián,
and seems to have been of minor importance to indigenous
marketers in the sixteenth century, but grew in importance
in the seventeenth after floods forced sellers in the other
markets to the high ground of the plaza, which is why the
biombo reproduced in figure 1.2 shows indigenous market-
ers on the Plaza Mayor. 45 While the markets of Tlatelolco
and Mexico seem to have operated every day, each of the
three markets had its major selling day; as reported by the
English traveler Henry Hawks, “The one of these Faires
is upon the Munday, which is called S. Hypolitos faire,
and S. James [Santiago Tlatelolco] his faire is upon the
Thursday, and upon Saturday is S. Johns [Tianguis of
Mexico] faire.” 46 Hawks would have witnessed the Satur-
day “faire” in the Tianguis of Mexico in the 1560s while liv-
ing in Mexico. He thus saw it in the wake of orders issued
by the audiencia midcentury, which commanded that all
indigenous towns within a twenty-league radius come to
this tianguis on Saturday to sell food, thereby ensuring that
the city was properly provisioned. Such directives vexed
indigenous peoples in the valley, who claimed that they
were forced to sell their turkeys, chickens, and eggs well
below cost, and no doubt reminded some communities
of their burdensome pre-Hispanic tribute obligations to
Mexica lords; the Franciscan Pedro de Gante, in his role
as indigenous advocate, jumped to the defense of the sell-
ers. 47 In any event, such an influx of marketers would have
swollen the already large market on that day.
When it was founded, this great indigenous market
likely occupied an urban void that had once contained
the earlier pre-Hispanic one, and in the first half of the
sixteenth century, it was marked as an indigenous space,
dominated by indigenous marketers and organized by the
indigenous governors. The native government had jurisdic-
tion over these markets, a fact confirmed by Ramírez de
Fuenleal, president of the second audiencia, who wrote to
the queen in 1533, the year of the tianguis’s move, to recom-
mend that the native judges, the mixcatlaylutla, retain their
powers of “light coercion” in the tianguis so as to maintain
its well-established order. 48 Through the mid-sixteenth
century, when the Spanish population of the city was still
small, control of the market was relatively uncontested,
but by the 1560s, as we shall see, the Spanish cabildo, which
ruled over the Spanish-occupied center of the island, came
to see it as part of the city under their control.
If the daily movement of goods, like the path of
processions, establishes relations of center to periphery, the
Tianguis of Mexico was at the hub of both the daily market
economy and the indigenous city. As such, it was connected
to both the city and the larger valley by important arter-
ies, some of which can be seen in figures 4.2 and 4.8. The
southern limit of the tianguis, seen in figure 4.8 as its left
border, was defined by the causeway of San Juan, which
ran from Chapultepec across the city to San Pablo and
was the city’s major east–west axis south of the causeway
of Tacuba. This road had been extended westward across
the lake to reach Chapultepec in 1532, around the time the
tianguis was refounded at the site. 49 The construction of
this causeway was not difficult: lake levels had fallen pre-
cipitously after the Conquest, and the area it spanned was
mostly shallow swamp. The minutes of the meetings held
by the Spanish cabildo, the Actas de cabildo, an essential
source for the early city, called this roadway the “calzada
nueva de Chapultepec” (new Chapultepec causeway).
Names given to streets in the sixteenth-century city were
highly situational, often changing block to block, and the
part of this road that penetrated the city was often called
in the sixteenth-century Actas de cabildo “calzada que va
del Hospital Real al Tianguis” (causeway that goes from
the Royal Hospital to the Tianguis); today it is the Calle
José María Izazaga, but for consistency, this book refers to
it as the causeway of San Juan. Another urban axis defined
the western side of the Tianguis of Mexico. By the 1540s,
it would link the market and the tecpan, the palace of the
indigenous governors, with the newly built monasteries of
San Francisco and, to the north, Santiago Tlatelolco; it also
had a southern extension (known as the Calzada [Cause-
way] de la Piedad in the colonial period), which ran parallel
to the causeway of Ixtapalapa (eventually renamed Calzada
de San Antonio Abad) and reached Coyoacan in the south.
This is seen as the horizontal roadway running across the
top of the market in figure 4.8. But more importantly, it
led from the market to water routes coming in from the
southern lakes, where canoes from the rich agricultural
zones in the south could dock.
Other than the Map of Santa Cruz, we have no early
maps of the Tianguis of Mexico, and faced with this lack, I
turn to two maps created later in the century to add more
details of its physical features. A map of 1588 by the cabildo’s
alarife mayor (director of public works), Cristóbal de Car-
vallo, offers pertinent details about the appearance of the
tianguis later in the century (figure 4.9). This map, created
to resolve a long-simmering jurisdictional dispute, shows