The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City

Published in Mexico City in 1604, Bernardo de Balbuena's Grandeza mexicana brings to life in Castilian verse the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. As Barbara Mundy reminds us in The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City, Balbuena describes Mexico City as rising phoenixlike from the flames of a presumably destroyed Tenochtitlan. Dense with research and insight, Mundy's study expertly counters the trope of the destruction of Tenochtitlan. Mundy's title borrows from Jane Jacobs's influential The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), in which the author-activist highlighted the disconnect between those who design cities and the needs of those who live in them. Though Mundy's thesis runs in a different direction, she shares with Jacobs an overriding emphasis on the city as a social space, and her riff on Jacobs's title should be read not as a statement of fact but rather as a position, assumed by many, that Mundy queries and challenges. “The death of Tenochtitlan as an indigenous city is a myth,” Mundy clearly states in the opening pages of the introduction. “This book,” she goes on, “will argue that while the Conquest changed an indigenous New World capital, and it was remade into the hub of the global empire of the Habsburg kings in the sixteenth century, it did not destroy indigenous Tenochtitlan, either as an ideal, as a built environment, or as an indigenous population center” (p. 3).Developed over the course of ten chapters, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City explores how the transition of the city is registered in artifacts of cultural production—literary texts, manuscript and printed histories, illustrations, pictorial documents, paintings, maps, stonework, and featherwork. The introduction is followed by chapter 2, “Water and the Sacred City,” which looks at the worldview that was embodied in the representation of the lacustrine space that defined Tenochtitlan / Mexico City. In chapter 3, “The Tlatoani in Tenochtitlan,” Mundy turns her attention to the native leaders of the pre-Hispanic city whose power and authority, which reached far beyond the island city, was evidenced as much in their urban work projects as in their dress. In chapter 4, “The City in the Conquest's Wake,” Mundy demonstrates how the city was reimagined by both Spaniards and natives post-1521. Native leaders responded to the new sociopolitical structures and made efforts to maintain some degree of power and autonomy. These efforts in turn affected the ways in which the Spaniards organized the new viceregal capital. Chapter 5, “Huanitzin Recenters the City,” focuses on a specific leader who navigated and negotiated the changing landscape. The extraordinary featherwork The Mass of Saint Gregory, commissioned by gobernador don Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin (r. 1537/38–41) to be gifted to the pope, highlights the possibilities that native leaders imagined for themselves by recognizing and celebrating the authority of the Catholic Church with the most elevated of artistic expressions from the pre-Hispanic period. Chapter 6, “Forgetting Tenochtitlan,” draws our attention to the religious institutions that played a major role in organizing and reorganizing community, and chapter 7, “Place-Names in Mexico-Tenochtitlan,” looks at the ways that history is embedded in names of places. Chapter 8, “Axes in the City,” looks at the rituals of reenactment and commemoration in the indigenous city and how these gave meaning to the shared space. Chapter 9, “Water and Altepetl in the Late Sixteenth-Century City,” draws our attention to another native leader who left a lasting impact. Antonio Valeriano served as Indian governor of Mexico City during the final decades of the sixteenth century, and he oversaw the petition for and then construction of the Chapultepec aqueduct. Chapter 10, “Remembering Tenochtitlan,” offers a conclusion that reminds us that in spite of the efforts from the sixteenth century onward to erase Tenochtitlan from the memories of Mexico City's inhabitants, elements of the pre-Hispanic city survived. And Mundy shows just that, providing “a new narrative about Mexico City that shows its historic connections to pre-Hispanic Tenochtitlan” (p. 211).In the penultimate stanza of Balbuena's poem, the native inhabitant of Mexico City makes his first and only appearance as the “indio feo” whose tribute filled the king's fleets with riches. Mundy's book does more than any other single study to put to rest not only the trope of the destruction of Tenochtitlan but also any disparagement of native inhabitants' contributions to the emergence of Mexico City. In this way, Mundy's book is part of a trend in scholarship of the early colonial period called the New Conquest History, in which the role of native peoples in shaping historical processes comes to center stage. The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City makes an indisputable case for the presence and impact of native actors in the creation and management of the Viceroyalty of New Spain's capital

Ancient history · Art · CONQUEST · Empire · Humanities · Indigenous · Literature · Mythology · Population · Sociology · Trope (literature) · Classics · Demography · History · Latin American history and culture