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Schürch, Isabelle. "Liminal Lives in the New World ." Animal History in the Modern City: Exploring Liminality. By Clemens Wischermann, Aline Steinbrecher and Philip Howell. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 25–40. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350054066.0007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 06:55 UTC. Copyright © Clemens Wischermann, Aline Steinbrecher, Philip Howell and Contributors, 2019 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Animal History in the Modern City Liminal Lives in the New World 2 Liminal Lives in the New World Isabelle Schürch Introduction The beach represented in the opening illustration of the twelfth book of the Florentine Codex of the Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España marks not only the starting point of the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica, but it is also one of the earliest representations of a liminal space par excellence: the beach (Figure 2.1). In this context the Mexican beach can be best described in Marie Louise Pratt’s conception of ‘contact zone’, which denotes a social space where encounters become highly significant and yet remain liminal.1 The Historia General was compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún during the second half of the sixteenth century and proves to be one of the most intriguing encyclopaedic and historiographical works about the people and culture of central Mexico.2 Written in Spanish and Nahuatl it seems to have been a collective hybrid work influenced by both European and Mesoamerican visual and narrative practices.3 This beach scene sets the tone for the following analysis of the New Spain context and its multiple forms of liminality and coexistence. The beach illustrated here is not only a human contact zone, but also a space for non-human contact. For the first time, various European domestic non-human animals set their feet – or rather hooves – on American ground. What is striking in this ark- inspired illustration is the space assigned to non-human animals. On the left-hand side, traditional domestic ‘livestock’ such as cows, pigs and sheep are depicted, whereas the horses are put clearly separated from them on the right-hand side of the picture. Abel A. Alves argues that the only animal lying in the group of livestock animals is in fact a dog. As his argument is based largely on the collar the animal is supposedly wearing, I would argue that this interpretation can be contested. The reclining position and the overall ovine appearance of the animal, on the one hand, but also the very different iconographic rendering of dogs in other visual sources on the other, point to another example of a domesticated species.4 Yet, even this contested interpretation does not change the distinctive order of the picture. Alves’s presumed dog is pictured as a herding dog, and not as the conquistadorial companion animal in its most iconic form as a war dog.5 It still falls within and safely guards the boundaries of livestock. The positioning on the beach indeed marks the clear distinction between two groups of non-human animals. Whereas livestock or species associated with them are set in Animal History in the Modern City.indb 25 17-05-2018 17:20:15 26 Animal History in the Modern City Figure 2.1 From Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España, Codex Florentinus (1540-1585), Book XII, The Conquest of Mexico, fol. 1v. Courtesy Medicea Laurenziana Library, Florence. a pastoral context, horses are marked by contrast as companion animals, as indicated by their close proximity to the human actors, but also by their riding tack and trained comportment. The horses are not depicted simply as horses, note, but as riding horses – a variation that makes in this picture a significant difference between the various non-human animals introduced into the New World. Whereas ‘livestock’ animals are associated with basic settlement, riding horses belong to the conquistadorial elite.6 Therefore, the beach space as it is presented in the Florentine Codex marks the Mexican landscape as a liminal space shared not only by different human beings with different social status (crewmen, office-holders and indigenous people), but where different non-humans are also present in this socially marked space. In what follows I will not just focus on the transitional and ambiguous space the beach represents, but rather on its hinterland: the pre- and post-conquest Mesoamerican townscape which was more or less constantly adapted, built over, sometimes even Animal History in the Modern City.indb 26 17-05-2018 17:20:15 Liminal Lives in the New World 27 destroyed and reconstructed. The main focal point is the city of Tenochtitlán.7 The Mexica capital city was famously built as an island city-state in Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico and was considered the centre of the expanding empire of the Mexica Triple Alliance. As was clearly noted and remarked upon by historical contemporaries, Tenochtitlán was an extraordinary example of urban development and planning, one of the largest and best organized cities at this time.8 I would like here to discuss visual and narrative representations of Tenochtitlán to identify the strategies by which both the Spanish and the Mexica dealt with the challenges to social order and known boundaries with which they were confronted after 1492, particularly with regard to the place of the non-human inhabitants.9 As a concept in social theory, liminality helps in highlighting the characteristics of the conquest of the ‘New World’, in the sense that ‘liminality refers to moments or periods of transition during which the normal limits to thought, self- understanding and behaviour are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and imagination, construction and destruction’.10 The experience of the actors involved and their ways of reacting to this challenge of social boundaries are key to understanding this specific moment of ‘in-between-ness’,11 where neither order nor outcome is certain.12 This approach encourages us to focus on the specific historical setting, and I argue that especially during the early Mesoamerican conquest, these processes of disambiguation questioned and renegotiated social boundaries – such as the differentiation between human and non-human.13 The thesis put forward in this chapter is that the New World context offers a setting where liminality has to be explored, not just as a useful concept, but rather as the general concept. What we have to bear in mind, though, is that ‘liminality does not and cannot “explain” anything’.14 Rather, it should be considered a fait social that needs to be explained in its various historical settings. Whereas the beach might be considered the most obvious space of liminality as it marks a very specific borderland and contact zone, the townscape of Mesoamerica proves to be a no less significant site.15 The Mesoamerican townscape became the socially most dynamic and conflict-laden space of interaction between Spanish and indigenous groups. On the one hand, existing towns were re-formed according to Spanish concepts of urban space.16 On the other hand, the Spanish conquest of the Mesoamerican lands differed from the Portuguese stronghold strategy along the African coast and the comparable early Caribbean fortification outposts as initiated by Christopher Columbus. Cortés’s very first – and unauthorized – action after his landing at the Gulf of Mexico was to found a town and to legitimate his actions by establishing a Castilian urban rule.17 What is today known as a specific Castilian urbanism derived its logic from geographical conditions: the dry and treeless Iberian landscape seems to have favoured a territorial rule founded in a network of towns. So what our beach scene from the Florentine Codex renders in biblical imagery are actually the first steps towards a New Spanish townscape. Liminal lives in Tenochtitlán Interestingly enough, the city which sustained Spanish interest more than any other was also part of a complex urban network: Tenochtitlán.18 Approximately 150,000 Animal History in the Modern City.indb 27 17-05-2018 17:20:15 28 Animal History in the Modern City people inhabited the imperial capital city in Lake Texcoco, some three times the size of Seville at that time.19 As the city of Tenochtitlán was depicted in the so-called Nuremberg map, it represented an ideal city. The Nuremberg map itself is a curious case. By all appearance, it is the oldest surviving visual representation of the city. The model for the woodcut from 1524 was made shortly after the city’s destruction through Cortés and his men in 1521. The map was first published in 1524 to accompany the Latin version of Hernán Cortés’s famous Second Letter, written to His Sacred Majesty, the emperor Charles V, on 30 October 1520, just before the siege and conquest of Tenochtitlán.20 As such it happened to be the first depiction of the Mexica capital that circulated throughout Europe. Barbara E. Mundy has convincingly argued against the claim that this first published map of Tenochtitlán was a purely European product and pleads instead for its status as cultural hybrid.21 Although several planimetrical patterns can clearly be seen as European style conventions, it is safe to assume that the overall idea of the map to depict Tenochtitlán as the centre of cosmic order is based on Mexica visual traditions. Whereas traditional research had long argued for a European conceptualization of the Nuremburg city map, studies conducted in the last twenty years have shown that Renaissance grid- plan city ideals were actually influenced by pre-Columbian town concepts.22 What we detect in this map is the depiction of the ideal city of Tenochtitlán as it was conceived as the centre of the empire.23 Therefore, the map claims nothing less than the supremacy among the Mexica Triple Alliance of the three city-states of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and Tlacopan.
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