Constructing New Spain

chapter 7 Constructing New Spain

‘Hunc librum legi, Mexico, year 1539’ announces a final scribble in an annotated volume of a 1512 edition of Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria. A note in the lower margin of the front cover reveals the reader and proclaims his title: ‘It belongs to Antonio de Mendoza, Viceroy.’1 Mendoza grew up subscribing to conventional humanist precepts in a bastion of Castile’s fleeting ‘caballero renaissance’ at his father’s court in the Alhambra – within view on a clear day of the ideal castrum-turned-municipality of Santa Fe.2 As a young man he fought against the pretensions of comuneros to municipal autonomy, before returning to the Alhambra for Charles v’s wedding in 1526 in time to see Pedro Machu- ca’s plans for the erection of a rusticated Renaissance palace to dominate its Nasrid structures. Later, as a courtier and ambassador, Mendoza visited cities and princely courts in Flanders, England, Germany, Italy and as far as Hungary. Before ever seeing New Spain he was imbued with the importance of urban architecture, and as part of his new responsibilities he considered it indispens- able to ‘[take from Castile] with him many master craftsmen to ennoble his provinces, especially Mexico,’ as well as his copy of Alberti.3 Amongst a wide range of advice that he might have noticed in the De re aedificatoria was Al- berti’s assurance that architecture was a function of town planning and towns expressed the politics and constitution of society.4 Mendoza revealed his interest in urbanism almost immediately after his arrival in Mexico City. First, he commanded that the simple plan drawn up by Alonso García Bravo – Cortés’s ‘good geometrician’ – to retrace the axial avenues of Tenochtitlan, should be reoriented according to the rationale of cosmographers like Alonso de Santa Cruz – the viceroy’s friend and correspon- dent in Castile. Nor did the viceroy’s ideal urban plan brook any incidental nos- talgia: he requested, and received permission from the crown in a royal cédula

1 Guillermo Tovar y de Teresa, La ciudad de México y la Utopía en el siglo xvi (Mexico: Seguros de México, 1987), p. 71ff and his ‘Antonio de Mendoza y el urbanismo en México’ in Cuader- nos de arquitectura virreinal 2:2–19, (Mexico: unam, 1984). 2 Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance 1350–1550 (New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, 1979) Ch. 6, passim. 3 Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés the life of the conqueror by his secretary, ed. and trans. Lesley B. Simpson (Berkley: University of California Press, 1965), 405. 4 Franco Borsi, Leon Battista Alberti (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 14.

Constructing New Spain 233 dated 23rd August 1538, to dismantle the great pyramid of Tenochtitlan that Cortés had left standing, though desecrated, ‘for memory’ – perhaps as a future bell-tower adapted from its original purpose, like the Giralda of Seville, which had been a minaret.5 Instead the viceroy’s master craftsmen and teams of indigenous builders would produce ‘the most perfect city of its day, according to the prevailing aesthetic.’6 Recent arrivals from Europe admired Mexico for its straight and wide avenues, squares, water supply and buildings of uniform height. The City’s setting in the lake of a highland basin, ‘mountain crowned,’ most spectacularly by the snow-capped volcanoes to its south-east, added to its majesty.7 Urban reconstruction was costly: Motolinía described the restoration of Mexico City as the seventh plague to afflict its indigenous population.8 Despite the evident sacrifice, however, the conversion of Tenochtitlan into the Mendo- zan Mexico City acted like a template that the leaders of indigenous polities and new mixed settlements across New Spain could use to demonstrate their conformity with the viceregal administration. The exceptional scale of urban reconstruction in New Spain during the mid-sixteenth century, and the simi- larity of its physical results throughout the kingdom, speak to a sustained com- mon purpose that went beyond the Renaissance ideals of an educated viceroy.9 If Alberti was right in thinking that towns reflected the politics and constitution of a society (as at least some of his contemporaries believed), then the scale and nature of New Spain’s urban transformation reveals, quantifiably, the extent to which the kingdom’s population intended to adhere to the norms of its viceregal government. Indigenous leaders relied on the help of friars and a host of experts, like the ‘Roman knight’ and viceregal agent, Luis de León Ro- mano, who directed part of the urbanistic effort in Michoacán and Oaxaca.10

5 Tovar y de Teresa, ‘Antonio de Mendoza y el urbanismo en México,’ 19. 6 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ‘Latin America’ in Peter Clark ed., The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 370. 7 Francisco Cervantes de Sálazar, México en 1554 y túmulo imperial, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman (Mexico: Porrúa, 1972), ‘2nd dialogue,’ for example, suggests as much. See Barbara E. Mun- dy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), for elements of Mexico City as a manifestation of utopian Franciscan ideals, 116; and it as a ‘New Rome,’ 121–27. 8 Toribio de Benavente or Motolinía, Historia de los Indios de Nueva España, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman (Mexico: Porrúa, 1973), 17. 9 Mundy, Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, 122–25. 10 Rodrigo Martínez Baracs, La vida michoacana en el siglo xvi. Catálogo de los documentos del siglo xvi del Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de Pátzcuaro (México: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, 1999), esp. 221f.