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.
The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture tracks the three spectacular forces of New World literary culture—cities, festivals, and wonder—from the sixteenth to the ...seventeenth century, from the Old World to the New, and from Mexico to Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. It treats a multitude of imperialist and anti-imperialist texts in depth, including poetry, drama, protofiction, historiography, and journalism. While several of the landmark authors studied, including Hernán Cortés and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, are familiar, others have received remarkably little critical attention. Similarly, in spotlighting creole writers, Merrim reveals an intertextual tradition in Mexico that spans two centuries. Because the spectacular city reaches its peak in the seventeenth century, Merrim’s book also theorizes and details the spirited work of the New World Baroque. The result is the rich examination of a trajectory that leads from the Renaissance ordered city to the energetic revolts of the spectacular city and the New World Baroque.
Instituting nature Mathews, Andrew S
2011, 20111104, 2011-11-04, 2013-06-26, 20110101
eBook, Book
A study of how encounters between forestry bureaucrats and indigenous forest managers in Mexico produced official knowledge about forests and the state.
Teotihuacan was one of the earliest and more populous preColumbian cities, and the Feathered Serpent was its vital monument, erected circa 200 AD. This work explores the religious meanings and ...political implications of the pyramid with meticulous and thorough analyses of substantially new excavation data. Challenging the traditional view of the city as a legendary, sacred, or anonymously-governed centre, the book provides significant new insights on the Teotihuacan polity and society. It provides interpretations on the pyramid's location, architecture, sculptures, iconography, mass sacrificial graves and rich symbolic offerings, and concludes that the pyramid commemorated the accession of rulers who were inscribed to govern with military force on behalf of the gods. This archaeological examination of the monument shows it to be the physical manifestation of state ideologies such as the symbolism of human sacrifice, militarism, and individual-centred divine authority, ideologies which were later diffused among other Mesoamerican urban centres.
Bioprospecting--the exchange of plants for corporate promises of royalties or community development assistance--has been lauded as a way to develop new medicines while offering southern nations and ...indigenous communities an incentive to preserve their rich biodiversity. But can pharmaceutical profits really advance conservation and indigenous rights? How much should companies pay and to whom? Who stands to gain and lose? The first anthropological study of the practices mobilized in the name and in the shadow of bioprospecting, this book takes us into the unexpected sites where Mexican scientists and American companies venture looking for medicinal plants and local knowledge. Cori Hayden tracks bioprospecting's contentious new promise--and the contradictory activities generated in its name. Focusing on a contract involving Mexico's National Autonomous University, Hayden examines the practices through which researchers, plant vendors, rural collectors, indigenous cooperatives, and other actors put prospecting to work. By paying unique attention to scientific research, she provides a key to understanding which people and plants are included in the promise of "selling biodiversity to save it"--and which are not. And she considers the consequences of linking scientific research and rural "enfranchisement" to the logics of intellectual property. Roving across UN protocols, botanical collecting histories, Mexican nationalist agendas, neoliberal property regimes, and North-South relations, When Nature Goes Public charts the myriad, emergent publics that drive and contest the global market in biodiversity and its futures.
When the PRI fell from power in the elections of 2000, scholars looked for an explanation. Some focused on international pressures, while others pointed to recent electoral reforms. In contrast, ...Dolores Trevizo argues that a more complete explanation takes much earlier democratizing changes in civil society into account. Her book explores how largely rural protest movements laid the groundwork for liberalization of the electoral arena and the consolidation of support for two opposition parties, the PAN on the right and the PRD on the left, that eventually mounted a serious challenge to the PRI. She shows how youth radicalized by the 1968 showdown between the state and students in Mexico City joined forces with peasant militants in nonviolent rural protest to help bring about needed reform in the political system. In response to this political effervescence in the countryside, agribusinessmen organized in peak associations that functioned like a radical social movement. Their countermovement formulated the ideology of neoliberalism, and they were ultimately successful in mobilizing support for the PAN. Together, social movements and the opposition parties nurtured by them contributed to Mexico’s transformation from a one-party state into a real electoral democracy nearly a hundred years after the Revolution.
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 Hernn Corts 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, Douglass 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.
In 1800 Mexico City was the largest, richest, most powerful city in the Americas, its vibrant silver economy an engine of world trade. Then Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, desperate to gain New ...Spain's silver. He broke Spain's monarchy, setting off a summer of ferment in Mexico City. People took to the streets, dreaming of an absent king, seeking popular sovereignty, and imagining that the wealth of silver should serve New Spain and its people—until a military coup closed public debate. Political ferment continued while drought and famine stalked the land. Together they fueled the political and popular risings that exploded north of the capital in 1810. Tutino offers a new vision of the political violence and social conflicts that led to the fall of silver capitalism and Mexican independence in 1821. People demanding rights faced military defenders of power and privilege—the legacy of 1808 that shaped Mexican history.
How Mexican artists and intellectuals created a new
identity for modern Mexico City through its ties to Aztec
Tenochtitlan. After archaeologists rediscovered a corner
of the Templo Mayor in 1914, ...artists, intellectuals, and government
officials attempted to revive Tenochtitlan as an instrument for
reassessing Mexican national identity in the wake of the Revolution
of 1910. What followed was a conceptual excavation of the original
Mexica capital in relation to the transforming urban landscape of
modern Mexico City.
Revolutionary-era scholars took a renewed interest in sixteenth
century maps as they recognized an intersection between
Tenochtitlan and the foundation of a Spanish colonial settlement
directly over it. Meanwhile, Mexico City developed with modern
roads and expanded civic areas as agents of nationalism promoted
concepts like indigenismo, the embrace of Indigenous
cultural expressions. The promotion of artworks and new
architectural projects such as Diego Rivera's Anahuacalli Museum
helped to make real the notion of a modern Tenochtitlan. Employing
archival materials, newspaper reports, and art criticism from 1914
to 1964, Resurrecting Tenochtitlan connects art history
with urban studies to reveal the construction of a complex physical
and cultural layout for Mexico's modern capital.