Status Updates From The Death of Aztec Tenochti...

To be aware of indigenous presence is thus to confront the powerful metaphor of indigenous erasure, an erasure that was established in the first historical accounts of the city…and carried forth by the city’s Franciscan evangelizers and in its official Spanish histories.

Tenochtitlan, the city that they would transform into one of the greatest metropolises of the world, began, as archaeology has revealed, as little more than a series of low-lying atolls in the shallow and swampy saltwater of Lake Tetzcoco, bearing only the slightest resemblance to the ideal of Aztlan. By the fifteenth century, a new Aztlan had been created: the work of human hands.