The Death Of Aztec Tenochtitlan The Life Of Mexico City

"In 1325, the Aztecs founded their capital city Tenochtitlan, which grew to be one of the world's largest cities before it was violently destroyed in 1521 by conquistadors from Spain and their indigenous allies. Re-christened and reoccupied by the Spanish conquerors as Mexico City, it became the pivot of global trade linking Europe and Asia in the 17th century, and one of the modern world's most populous metropolitan areas. However, the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan and its people did not entirely disappear when the Spanish conquistadors destroyed it. By reorienting Mexico City-Tenochtitlan as a colonial capital and indigenous city, Mundy demonstrates its continuity across time. Using maps, manuscripts, and artworks, she draws out two themes: the struggle for power by indigenous city rulers and the management and manipulation of local ecology, especially water, that was necessary to maintain the city's sacred character. What emerges is the story of a city-within-a city that continues to this day"--

Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec empire before the Spanish conquest, rivaled any other great city of its time. In Europe, only Paris, Venice, and Constantinople were larger. Cradled in the Valley of Mexico, the city is unique among New World capitals in that it was well-described and chronicled by the conquistadors who subsequently demolished it. This means that, though centuries of redevelopment have frustrated efforts to access the ancient city’s remains, much can be told about its urban landscape, politics, economy, and religion. While Tenochtitlan commands a great deal of attention from archaeologists and Mesoamerican scholars, very little has been written about the city for a non-technical audience in English. In this fascinating book, eminent expert José Luis de Rojas presents an accessible yet authoritative exploration of this famous city--interweaving glimpses into its inhabitants’ daily lives with the broader stories of urbanization, culture, and the rise and fall of the Aztec empire.

Winner, Book Prize in Latin American Studies, Colonial Section of Latin American Studies Association (LASA), 2016 ALAA Book Award, Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation, 2016 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.

Illuminates the complexities of Aztec life. Readers meet a people highly skilled in sculpture, astronomy, city planning, poetry, and philosophy, who were also profoundly committed to cosmic regeneration through the thrust of the ceremonial knife and through warfare.

This book offers views of Aztec lives and their interactions in rituals, markets, courts, and on the battlefield.

"Resurrecting Tenochtitlan considers the ways in which artists, city planners, architects, and intellectuals in Mexico shaped the evolution of Mexico City's civic identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Long forgotten and assumed to have been completely destroyed during the Spanish conquest, layers of the remnants of Tenochtitlan were discovered in the middle of a drainage project augmented under the longtime president Porfirio Díaz. As the cityscape changed in the wake of the ends of the Porfiriato and the Mexican Revolution, the city's layers of history were uncovered to find the remnants of the Aztec capitol of Tenochtitlan, which stirred imaginings of a new and modern Mexican capital and nation that still drew from its ancient history. Tying the modern city to the ancient one was also a way in which intellectuals articulated a mestizo cultural identity. This discovery led to the renewed interest in 16th-century maps by artists, architects, and city planners to understand the ways in which the Aztec capital intersected with the beginnings of Spanish settlement over it. The manuscript examines how artists such as Juan O'Gorman and Diego Rivera drew from the recent work of archaeologists to render panoramic depictions of both the modern Mexican and the Aztec capital to visualize it for public audiences. And while not strictly chronological in its organization, it looks at how attitudes toward modern Mexico City's ties to Tenochtitlan shaped national identity and shifted over time. The authors' timeframe ends with the inauguration of Diego Rivera's long-planned Anahuacalli Museum, which was created with the support of the National Museum of Anthropology to display pre-Columbian artifacts. Its completion, after Rivera's death, was met with the first waves of the youth cultures in Mexico whose disinterest in and suspicion toward state-sponsored national projects signaled the beginning of the collapse of these ideas"--

The great temple known as the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan symbolizes the axis mundi, the Aztec center of the world, where the sky, the earth, and the underworld met. In this volume, Matos Moctezuma uses his unmatched familiarity with the archaeological details to present a concise and well-supported development of this theme.

Around 1542, descendants of the Aztec rulers of Mexico created accounts of the pre-Hispanic history of the city of Tetzcoco, Mexico, one of the imperial capitals of the Aztec Empire. Painted in iconic script ("picture writing"), the Codex Xolotl, the Quinatzin Map, and the Tlohtzin Map appear to retain and emphasize both pre-Hispanic content and also pre-Hispanic form, despite being produced almost a generation after the Aztecs surrendered to Hernán Cortés in 1521. Yet, as this pioneering study makes plain, the reality is far more complex. Eduardo de J. Douglas offers a detailed critical analysis and historical contextualization of the manuscripts to argue that colonial economic, political, and social concerns affected both the content of the three Tetzcocan pictorial histories and their archaizing pictorial form. As documents composed by indigenous people to assert their standing as legitimate heirs of the Aztec rulers as well as loyal subjects of the Spanish Crown and good Catholics, the Tetzcocan manuscripts qualify as subtle yet shrewd negotiations between indigenous and Spanish systems of signification and between indigenous and Spanish concepts of real property and political rights. By reading the Tetzcocan manuscripts as calculated responses to the changes and challenges posed by Spanish colonization and Christian evangelization, Douglas's study significantly contributes to and expands upon the scholarship on central Mexican manuscript painting and recent critical investigations of art and political ideology in colonial Latin America.