The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City by Barbara Mundy

Author:Barbara Mundy [Mundy, Barbara E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2015-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 7.3. Alfonso Caso, map of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, showing the indigenous neighborhoods, from “Los barrios antiguos de Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco,” Memorias de la Academia Mexicana de la Historia 15 (1956). Reproduced courtesy of the Academia Mexicana de la Historia. Photograph General Research Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

For readers of the day, Caso’s article revealed a theretofore-unknown social order and complexity of the pre-Hispanic city that existed within the framework of the known four-part division. Caso took the names that Alzate had plotted on the map and correlated the boundaries of the subdivisions to the modern streets of the city, marking their boundaries with colored lines on a modern map, the different colors corresponding to the four parcialidades, with a blue trapezoid at the map’s center to mark the limits of the Spanish traza. He thus affirmed the spatial expanse of the hundred or so subdivisions, which he called “barrios.” As the title of his article suggests, his interest was in the pre-Hispanic period, but since he used colonial documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he ended up offering strong evidence for the colonial endurance of the pre-Hispanic spatial and social categories in the city.

This study sparked other research, and scholars such as Luis Reyes García have since established not only that the units Caso called “barrios” endured, but also that they were better known in the sixteenth-century city as tlaxilacalli, a term discussed in chapter 3. More recently, Edward Calnek and Jonathan Truitt have taken up the names again, working even more extensively with the Nahuatl corpus of documents from the city to expand and refine the number of tlaxilacalli names.19 But even more important is Truitt’s finding that the tlaxilacalli were not extinguished by the Conquest or any time after, but rather, like the larger parcialidades that comprised them, took on the names of Catholic saints and endured into the nineteenth century.

The tlaxilacalli was the basic unit for collective identification within the city, one step up from the household and one step down from the parcialidad. The evidence that tlaxilacalli names were a crucial part of residents’ sense of themselves in the city is attested to by the scores of Nahuatl legal documents that survive from the sixteenth-century city. While in Spanish documentation of the same place and period it is a commonplace to identify one’s place of residence, such locational identifiers are often quite general, with “citizen of Mexico City” (vecino de México) being a frequently found identifier. But indigenous residents of the city were situated within a three-layer hierarchy, the indigenous city, its component parcialidad (a continuation of the four-altepetl pre-Hispanic city), and finally the tlaxilacalli, or neighborhood. These layers combined into a neat spatial package we can call “Mexico-Tenochtitlan,” which can be roughly diagramed as shown in table 7.2.

TABLE 7.2. The three-layered political hierarchy in Mexico-Tenochtitlan

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