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"Mundy, Barbara E"
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The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City
The capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, was, in its era, one of the largest cities in the world. Built on an island in the middle of a shallow lake, its population numbered perhaps 150,000, with another 350,000 people in the urban network clustered around the lake shores. In 1521, at the height of Tenochtitlan's power, which extended over much of Central Mexico, Hernando Cortés and his followers conquered the city. Cortés boasted to King Charles V of Spain that Tenochtitlan was \"destroyed and razed to the ground.\" But was it?Drawing on period representations of the city in sculptures, texts, and maps, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City builds a convincing case that this global capital remained, through the sixteenth century, very much an Amerindian city. Barbara E. Mundy foregrounds the role the city's indigenous peoples, the Nahua, played in shaping Mexico City through the construction of permanent architecture and engagement in ceremonial actions. She demonstrates that the Aztec ruling elites, who retained power even after the conquest, were instrumental in building and then rebuilding the city. Mundy shows how the Nahua entered into mutually advantageous alliances with the Franciscans to maintain the city's sacred nodes. She also focuses on the practical and symbolic role of the city's extraordinary waterworks—the product of a massive ecological manipulation begun in the fifteenth century—to reveal how the Nahua struggled to maintain control of water resources in early Mexico City.
eBook
The 2022 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: Mexica Space and Habsburg Time
The Aztec (Mexica) city of Tenochtitlan was transformed after the Spanish invasion of 1519–21 into a staging ground for Habsburg colonial experiments. Indigenous response is glimpsed in this essay through the lens of annals, written in Nahuatl, that document urban festivals celebrating Spanish Habsburg monarchs. I argue that the redeployment of particular spaces—long charged with meaning by Indigenous residents—was crucial to the public legitimacy of the Habsburg festival. These festivals promoted new means of temporal orientation, thus disrupting Indigenous orientations in time, at the same moment that Indigenous calendars were coming under scrutiny for their heretical potentials.
Journal Article
The Emergence of Alphabetic Writing: Tlahcuiloh and Escribano in Sixteenth-Century Mexico
Over the course of the sixteenth century in Mexico (New Spain), alphabetic writing replaced pictography as the chosen form of written expression in indigenous communities. A new social role, that of the native language escribano (notary), emerged, eventually to become a principal cultural broker in the colonial period. Despite the indigenous escribano's importance, his origins and the source of his authority within the native sphere are poorly understood. This article offers a close reading of a corpus of hybrid pictographic-alphabetic documents, written in Nahuatl and created between 1553 and 1572 in the indigenous cabildo (town council) of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Within this important body, escribanos appear early in the documentary record; it was within the established indigenous ecosystem of governance that escribanos first found a niche. Here, pictography flourished, as did performances unique to the indigenous sphere. The corpus reveals how escribanos worked side by side with indigenous tlahcuilohqueh, or painters, who drew on a long-established tradition of manuscript painting and cartography to create property maps. These maps adhered to established codes, both social and visual. Initially preeminent in itself, the work of the tlahcuilohqueh came to supply meaning and public authority to the work of the escribano in this crucial formative period.
Journal Article
Dating the Mapa Uppsala of Mexico-Tenochtitlan
The Mapa Uppsala is the earliest known map of sixteenth-century Mexico City that was painted by indigenous artists after the city's takeover by Spanish forces. It is one of the few indigenous-produced documents about the city and its environs from this time period. While the traditional scholarly consensus has been that the map dates to c.1554, we derive evidence from an examination of the original map to argue for a creation date of c.1537-1541. This revised date, combined with the map's high degree of topographical and chorographical precision, means that the map offers a snapshot of the city's urban development and ecological changes at an earlier point in its history than has been acknowledged.
Journal Article
