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Daniel Astorga Poblete
Five hundred years after the conquest of Tenochtitlan by the Tlaxcalan and Spanish alliance, there are still various details of the events surrounding the defeat of the Tenochca that intrigue scholars of Colonial Mexico. One such detail is a map of the fallen city that appeared alongside early publications of the Segunda carta by Hernando Cortés. The map’s authorship and the interpretation of its images are still in debate. This article studies the Map of Tenochtitlan, which was published in Nuremberg in 1524. I argue that the map displays the Nahua understating of space and time as it was inspired by an Indigenous document that presented both spatial and historical information regarding the founding of the Mexica altepetl and the arrival of Cortés. Through the analysis of the image of the sun appearing in the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan, the stone idol in the center of the altepetl, the resemblance of the map to other pictographic documents, and the interaction between Spaniards and these documents, I propose that, in the map, the Indigenous/Nahua history of Mexico-Tenochtitlan is preserved.
