The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City

How to Approach Indigenous Law?

“…According to Rovira Morgado, Andrés de Tapia's house in Tenochtitlan still served as a tecpan calli when he was appointed governor by viceroy Antonio de Mendoza in the 1530s. 108 The Spanish showed some tolerance toward indigenous forms of political organization because they understood that maintaining these could facilitate the implementation of imperial order. However, they also engaged in an ongoing process of marginalizing a wide range of precolonial indigenous "officials" and reducing their positions.…”

Beyond rules and norms: Heterogeneity, ubiquity, and visibility of groundwaters

“…This climatological view of nature continues to inform the idea that waters have powerful medical uses (Jennings, 2006). Equally rich and diverse traditions can be traced for the Americas (Mundy, 2015; Trawick, 2001) and Australia (McLean et al, 2018; Strang, 2009), for example. For most of recorded human history we know that heterogeneous waters were valued for their specific qualities and uses, and as Jamie Linton (2010) has argued, unifying them physically and conceptually was unthinkable.…”

Land, Water, Explorer: Place-Making “America” in the Early Modern Period

“…40 In The Death of Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City (2015), the art historian Barbara Mundy asserts that the use of place-names was fundamental to the colonial process, as they functioned as "imaginative projections of what they hoped to find, or to create, in territories whose expanse they poorly understood and whose peoples were ciphers." 41 In Columbus's writings, his place-naming gives the effect of control over the islands, a necessary step in seizing power away from the Indigenous people who inhabited them and expanding the Spanish empire's overseas territories.…”