The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture) - Softcover

Mundy, Barbara E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1477317139 ISBN 13: 9781477317136

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2018

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"Codex studies and translations of indigenous-language manuscripts have been burgeoning in the past few decades, and yet the fields of history and art history have been crying out for someone to bring them together for a new, overarching view of the crucial center of one of the two most important Spanish colonies in the Americas, especially in the crucible that was the sixteenth century. . . . This book makes a wonderful contribution to our understanding of the colonial evolution of the capital city of what we now call Mexico, giving special attention to the fact that the indigenous population, its leadership, and its culture had greater longevity and made more significant contributions to the city than have previously been recognized. Barbara Mundy synthesizes a tremendous amount of new research, integrating it with what has enduring value in earlier studies, and adds to that sum original research of her own. She provides careful substantiation for her arguments, convincing us of her conclusions." Author: Stephanie Wood, Director, Wired Humanities Projects, CORE, College of Education, and Adjunct Professor of Latin American Studies and History, University of Oregon; author of Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico; and coeditor of Mesoamerican Memory: Comparative Studies in Sys

About the Author:

Barbara E. Mundy is Professor of Art History at Fordham University. She coedited Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land, Writing and Native Rule with Mary Miller, and, with Dana Leibsohn, is the author of a pioneering digital work, Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520–1820. Her first book, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, won the Nebenzahl Prize in the History of Cartography.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1477317139
• ISBN 13: 9781477317136
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256