Space, Place, and Mapping ILA387 Spring 2016

Barbara Mundy, “The City in the Conquests Wake,” from The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City

In this chapter, Barbara Mundy examines the urban practices that aided the city of Tenochtitlan transition into Mexico City in the aftermath of the conquest during the 16th-century. According to Mundy, the participation of indigenous people in city life – translated in their political and socioeconomic organization – through government succession of indigenous rulers and markets, for example, created lived spaces that kept the indigenous city going albeit within the context of the Spanish system. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to counter the history of the Spanish residents as central figures in the development and functioning of the city by providing "a reinterpretation of the space... through the practices that created habitable spaces" (73). In order to do so she centers her argument on two questions: what were the necessary means to make the city function after the chaos of the Spanish invasion and conquest? Moreover, who were the key players in the process? Her answer: the lived practices of indigenous peoples in Mexico City accounted for the survival and continuation of the city. Mundy effectively addresses these questions by analyzing environmental and demographic shifts in Tenochtitlan, labor practices such as agriculture and economic exchange in the tianguis, the succession of indigenous rulers after the conquest, religious processions, and naming of places. Her analysis is  based on 16th-century maps that depict the organization of the water cause ways that run through the city, as well as planos parciales depicting agricultural plots, local rulers and market organization, in addition to chronicles written by friars that record religious feasts and processions. Mundy takes waterworks throughout the city as her point of departure, since the drainage process was a physical symbol of the “death” of Tenochtitlan, and the “birth” of Mexico City. She then proceeds to reveal the rebirth of the indigenous city amidst the new Spanish city by presenting evidence of indigenous lived practice through the maps. This chapter presents an overview of the ways in which indigenous city life unfolded and survived after the conquest, through practice. As it happens with archival evidence, however, there are filters that limit the ways in which researchers can convey their conclusions, and thus have to be considered – who elaborated the maps and for what purpose, the chronicles written by friars, for example. Mundy, however, masters the narrative aspect of her findings (“la narración”) and presents them in a way that allows for further and closer examination, by providing an overall view of the sources available. Thus, the significance of her work rests on proposing a counter-history to the myth of the death of Tenochtitlan in terms of the lived practices (De Certeau) of indigenous people, and perhaps even in questioning the extent to which the conquest was fully consummated.
 
“… we must appreciate not only that managing the ecology and economy of the refounded city was a complex endeavor, as it had been in Tenochtitlan, but also that the lives of tens of thousands of Mexica depended upon its continued functioning. The new conquistadores, for all of their brash confidence, had no understanding of the complex economic and ecological balance of the urban prize that the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan was during the war of conquest” (81). 
 

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