The Mexico Valley after Conquest as Depicted by the “Map of Tenochtitlan,” c.1530

Gergely Baics, Barnard College
Caterina Pizzigoni, Columbia University

The “Map of Tenochtitlan” (c.1530s) is one of the earliest maps of Mexico City after conquest, unique in several ways. First, its author(s) were of Nahua origin, educated at the Franciscan monastery near Tlatelolco. The map therefore integrates Indigenous and Western cartographic traditions. Second, it is a map of Mexico City-Tenochtitlan and its surrounding region. Before conquest, the Mexico Valley was among the world’s most densely populated. In 1550, the small Spanish population in the city was engulfed by a vast Nahua world in the city and across the valley. Third, the map details not only the region’s built environment and topography, but also its human and natural ecosystems. Its vision is Indigenous, corresponding to the Mesoamerican urban tradition that treated city and countryside as integrated human and natural ecosystems. Fourth, the map narrates everyday life, depicting interactions between the human and natural environments and between Spanish and Indigenous people. Overall, it provides a veritable spatial catalogue of the built, natural, and human environments of Spanish America’s most important region from an Indigenous perspective. The “Map of Tenochtitlan” has attracted considerable scholarship, but mainly focusing on its artistic production and representation. We approach it from a spatial history perspective, and explore it as a rich cartographic resource with significant locational specificity and accuracy. Our GIS workflow involves geo-referencing the entire map, a challenging process given its multiple scales. This process, however, provides insights about the mapmakers’ underlying vision, orientation, and priorities in depicting the Mexico Valley. Second, we digitize and thereby create a spatial history archive of the map’s rich locational information about the region’s built environment, ecologies, and daily life. This opens up the possibility to reflect on the complex human and natural ecosystems of the Mexico Valley that had survived and continued to thrive after the conquest.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 197. Mapping Perceptions of Space