Dynastic History | Tlatelolco — The Market City That Kept Its Square and Lost Its Line

Tlatelolco was the island's other Mexica city, settled around 1337 by part of the same group that founded Tenochtitlan, and it had its own ruling line, from Cuacuauhpitzahuac down to Moquihuix. In 1473 Axayácatl of Tenochtitlan defeated it. After that the two cities shared their god and their market, but Tlatelolco's governors were installed from the other end of the island, and its dynasty did not resume.

The market is what the invaders wrote about. Hernán Cortés told Charles V that sixty thousand people bought and sold there on the main day — his number, in a despatch written to justify what he was doing — and Bernal Díaz, decades later, remembered the noise of it. Both are the conquering side's accounts, as is most of what survives; the Nahua testimony in the Florentine Codex was collected a generation afterwards under Spanish supervision.

The siege of Tenochtitlan ended in this quarter on 13 August 1521 with the capture of Cuauhtémoc.

Systematic excavation began on 8 April 1944, and between 1960 and 1968 sixty-seven structures were exposed — the largest area of standing pre-Hispanic building in the city. They now lie below the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, between the colonial church of Santiago and 1960s housing blocks. A plaque there reads: "El 13 de agosto de 1521, heroicamente defendido por Cuauhtémoc, cayó Tlatelolco en poder de Hernán Cortés. No fue triunfo ni derrota, fue el doloroso nacimiento del pueblo mestizo que es el México de hoy." That is a twentieth-century state's reading of the day, not a record of it.

📸 Cover: aerial view of the Tlatelolco archaeological zone, with the church of Santiago at right, ProtoplasmaKid / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0