Moteuczoma Reborn: Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico City

Author(s): Barbara E. Mundy

Source: Winterthur Portfolio , Vol. 45, No. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2011), pp. 161-176
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont
Winterthur Museum, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661559

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 Moteuczoma Reborn
Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory
in Colonial Mexico City

Barbara E. Mundy

Two-sided folding screens, called biombos, produced in Mexico City in the seventeenth century, bring together bird’s-eye views of
the city with historical scenes of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest. This article links the biombo scenes to the festival culture
of the Hispanic capital, particularly that of Corpus Christi; both their iconography and the modes of viewing they inculcated
helped to shape collective memory among elite city residents. But when set against the practice of mitotes, or ritual dances, by the
city’s indigenous residents, the biombos point to a different set of collective memories operating in the city.

A
FOLDING SCREEN created in late
seventeenth-century Mexico City was in-
spired by a Japanese luxury good, a “byōbu”
that the brisk transpacific trade brought from
Spain’s Asian colonies to its New World ones (fig. 1).
Artisans in the viceroyal capital of Mexico City, one
of the larger cities in the world in the seventeenth
century, saw “byōbu” as early as 1614 and quickly
translated them into the local idiom; their painted
“biombos” were popular furnishings for the man-
sions and palaces that lined the streets around
Mexico City’s main square, now known as the Zócalo;
these in turn were often taken back to Europe by elite
Spaniards as a souvenir of a New World sojourn.1
Despite the foreign origin of the form, this
biombo reveals a distinctly local preoccupation:
one side features scenes of the Spanish conquest of
Barbara E. Mundy is associate professor in the department of
art history and music at Fordham University.
The author thanks Wendy Bellion, Mónica Domínguez Torres,
Dana Leibsohn, Eduardo Douglas, and Lloyd Rogler for constructive
criticism.
1
Japanese screens seem to have first arrived in New Spain in
1614 as diplomatic gifts; see Edward Kamens, “The Tale of Genji
and Yashima Screens in Local and Global Contexts,” Yale University
Art Gallery Bulletin (2007): 100–121. A key to the large literature
on biombos is found in Viento detenido: Mitologías e historias en el arte
del biombo; Colección de biombos de los siglos XVII al XIX de Museo
Soumaya (Mexico City: Museo Soumaya, 1999).
2
The Franz Mayer biombo shares its size, format, and imagery
with one at the Museo Nacional de Historia in Mexico and a similar
B 2011 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum,
Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/2011/4523-0005$10.00
Mexico City, or Tenochtitlan, as the city was known
by its founders.2 These battles raged between 1519
and 1521, pitting the city’s autochthonous residents,
who called themselves the Mexica (but who his-
tory knows better as the Aztecs), against a group
of Spanish forces under Hernán Cortés and indig-
enous allies. With the fall of Tenochtitlan and the
humbling of the once-proud Mexica lords, the
Spanish were able to found their colony, and at its
center was their capital of Mexico City. This particu-
lar moment of the city’s history was clearly a pre-
occupation of its elite residents (similar conquest
imagery circulated on folding screens and other
objects produced in the seventeenth century).
While this biombo promises to offer an understand-
ing of how seventeenth-century elite residents saw
the city’s past, considering its imagery in the con-
text of social practices shows us the intricate inter-
play between artworks and collective memory.
Seventeenth-century biombos feature a range
of imagery, and artists in the capital seemed par-
ticularly keen on using them to show Mexico City.
This biombo’s artists paired the conquest narra-
tive on one side with a map of the city on the other
(fig. 2). The Conquest of Mexico narrative adheres
to literary sources closely; the image of the contem-
porary city on the reverse was probably inspired by
early seventeenth-century maps of the city (fig. 3).
one in a private collection; the three were undoubtedly products
of one of the many painting workshops in the city.

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 162

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00 00
Fig. 1. Front of Biombo de la Conquista de México y vista de la Ciudad de México showing the Conquest of Mexico, ca. 1690. Oil on canvas; H. 83⅞ , W. 216½ .
(Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City; photo, Michel Zabé.)
Winterthur Portfolio 45:2/3
Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico City 163

Fig. 2. Reverse side of biombo in fig. 1 showing the view of Mexico City.

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164 Winterthur Portfolio 45:2/3

Fig. 3. After Juan Gómez de Trasmonte, “Forma y Levantado de la Ciudad de Mexico” (view of Mexico City), 1907
[based on 1628 map, now lost]. Lithograph; published by Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, Florence.

In developing a new kind of secular imagery for biom-
bos, painters, in league with patrons, were certainly
influenced by the European craze for decorative
maps. In its size, its elevated viewpoint, and fidelity
to the physical features of the city, the biombo paint-
ing situates itself comfortably among the multitude of
city views being produced in both Europe and the
New World that show burgeoning local pride through
these pictures of “home.” Bathed in light, here is the
city of “immortal spring” so praised by its poets.3
This city was intimately known by the biombo’s
creators and, almost certainly, by the artwork’s pa-
trons as well. On one side, the picture of the con-
temporary city offered a visual experience of a
well-known place—its streets strangely empty of
all life, as if to invite viewers to contemplate the city
afresh, to implant their personal memories of this
3
Bernardo de Balbuena, La grandeza mexicana (Mexico City:
Editorial Porrúa, 1985), 59.
place onto the ordered grid that stretched before
the eyes. And on the other, dozens of distinct scenes
from the narrative of the Conquest of Mexico crowd
together, organized by letters that correspond to a
legend at the bottom left.
In the high society of New Spain, a society that
delighted in games of all sorts, matching picture to
remembered narrative must have proved great fun.
And to watch (largely Mexican) audiences who
come, free, on Sunday to the Museo Nacional de
Historia, where one of the biombos is housed, is
to witness some of the biombo’s irresistible power
as a mnemonic: parents point out known places
or remembered scenes on one side or the other, of-
fering a narrative of fragments to their children,
whose desire to touch the scenes themselves, which
they see at eye level, often proves uncontainable by
hovering guards. In representing two well-known
aspects of the city—its conquest history and its
spatial expanse—this biombo activates viewers’

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Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico City
memories today and must have done so in the past
as well. Its physical properties also work to activate
memory: a double-sided, mutable object, the biombo
functions in ways quite distinct from a static canvas;
although the two sides are related, the entire work
is never held in view at any one time, and in moving
from one side to the other, one must call upon
memory to make the invisible side present.
Can the individual mnemonic activation of the
biombo, and the small-scale rituals of viewing it in-
spires, be connected to the production of collective
memory? Maurice Halbwachs’s foundational study
of the topic emphasized the role of great public
rituals, and others, as well, have seen the crucial
role that public rituals—not things—have played
in giving coherence to the social order.4 In taking
Halbwachs’s argument further, Paul Connerton
argued that, along with the content of a specific
commemoration (such as the Passion of Christ),
its form, specifically the employment of a formal-
ized ritual language and specific bodily gestures,
brought meaning home to participants. 5 Both
make it clear, however, that through involvement
with collective rituals that invoke a shared history,
individuals are transformed into members of a
larger social group. With this in mind, we confront
two problems in the biombo’s relationship to col-
lective memory: first, can an artwork, in presenting
static imagery, even of explicitly historical content,
have any of the instrumental force of the collective
rituals that Halbwachs identifies? And second,
since the biombo was a work of limited circula-
tion in a literate elite ambit, can it offer, at best, any-
thing more than the memories of a very limited
collective?
Artworks, like the elites that commission them,
never exist in total isolation from larger social con-
cerns. What a close examination of the biombo will
reveal is how connected this artwork was to collec-
tive memory in two ways. First, its presentation of a
conquest history offered a narrative of genesis to
the city’s elites, a narrative repeated time and again
on other artworks, as well as in the public rituals
that took place in the colonial city—the stuff of
Halbwachs’s concerns. Second, the biombo en-
couraged certain practices of viewing of explicitly
4
Halbwachs particularly centered on religious rituals, writing
about those of the church, where the religious past was made actual
through a dramatic representation and, in participating, partici-
pants forged a collective identity—that powerful bond necessary
for any functioning society. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Mem-
ory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), 88.
5
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1989).
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165
mnemonic character and, in doing so, echoed
the forms of public rituals in the colonial city. But
in triangulating the biombo’s relationship with
collective memory and public rituals, we will also
discover that the collective memories of other city
residents beyond those elites, who lived not in the
mansions that lined the streets around the city’s
main plaza, but in the humble houses made of
adobe and reed at its margins, are also implicated.
It is through its relationships, often oblique, with
the city’s indigenous residents that the biombo of-
fers a unique key to understanding the collective
memories circulating in the colonial city.
City as Mnemonic
In joining city map on one side with historical nar-
rative on the other and in activating their memories
as they shuttled from one side to the other, the
biombo called viewers to understand the city itself
as a great mnemonic space upon which its own his-
tory was inscribed. The map, drawn from an un-
known source but loosely based on the 1628 map
from the same vantage by Juan Gómez de Trasmonte,
features the city’s traza, the area reserved for Span-
iards around the Zócalo, the main plaza, at cen-
ter but also includes the indigenous center of
Tlatelolco on its left panels; to the right, causeways
stretch toward the cities of the southern lakes (see
fig. 3). The grid plan, laid out in 1523–24, is clearly
visible and is carefully aligned to coincide with the
perspectival scheme of the painting itself—the
Tacuba causeway and parallel streets running from
the west (foreground) to the east (distance) also
define the main orthogonals of the image. Thus,
one-point perspective, the arrangement of objects
within a picture space along lines converging on a
vanishing point, whose rational scheme for de-
termining picture space had been accepted as “nat-
ural” since the sixteenth century and was closely
linked to the mimetic project of painting, coincides
with another rationalizing scheme for urban order,
that of the grid. The map also emphasizes and iden-
tifies the numerous Church-sponsored buildings,
monasteries, convents, hospitals, and schools that
represented the collective piety of the city manifest
in the extent of its social services.
On the other side, the artists have limned ex-
actly the same space, but gone is any immediately
apparent sense of order: here we are plunged into
the chaos of battle that gripped the city in an earlier
moment of its history as Hernán Cortés, joined by
Spanish soldiers and masses of indigenous allies, fill
166 Winterthur Portfolio 45:2/3

Fig. 4. Diagram of fig. 1. (Barbara Mundy.) Details of diagram: (1) Encounter of Moteuczoma and Cortés, August
1519; (2) Siege of the Templo Mayor, Fall 1519; (3) Assassination of Moteuczoma, June 1520; (4) Amassing of
treasure, June 30, 1520; (5) Escape of Spanish troops from city, June 30, 1520; (6) Assault on city by Spanish forces
using bergantines [brigs], June 1521; (7) Entry into city by Spanish troops, August 1521; (8) Fall of the Temple of
Tlatelolco, mid-August, 1521.

its streets, which run colored with their blood, to
wrest control from its Mexica occupants. At the
time the biombo was painted, the circulation of
histories of the conquest, with Antonio de Solís’s
providing the most popular narrative in the late
seventeenth century, ensured that this was a well-
known history among the city’s literate elites. 6
Solís’s history effectively displaced the early in-
digenous history of the city, which centered on its
miraculous foundation at the behest of the deity
Huitzilopochtli in 1325, replacing it with a more
conventionally dramatic (by European standards)
face-off between the intrepid and indefatigable
Cortés and the fatalistically doomed emperor of
the Mexica, Moteuczoma. But the biombo painter
eschewed the linear arrangements of Solís’s narra-
tive and, instead, arranged the scenes of conquest
by spatial rather than temporal order, so that battle
scenes correspond to the locales within the city
where they took place. Thus, the (temporally) first
scene of the narrative, the initial encounter of
Cortés and Moteuczoma, which occurred along
the causeway of Iztapalapa on November 8, 1519,
is shown at the upper right corner of the biombo,
corresponding to the southern edge of the city.
Moteuczoma’s assassination in June of 1520 (here
at the hands of his own soldiers, a historically du-
6
Antonio de Solís, Historia de la conquista de México: Población y
progresos de la América septentrional conocida por el nombre de Nueva
España (Madrid: Bernardo de Villa-Diego, 1684). The volume
had twenty-six Spanish editions and eighteen in other languages
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
bious event, but one faithfully recorded by Solís)
appears at bottom center (fig. 4), while the fall of
the temple of Tlatelolco, one of the last battles of
the conquest in August 1521, appears at upper left.
To make sense of this narrative, viewers were called
upon to move between the known and measured
spaces of their contemporary city on one side and the
corresponding episodes of its creation on the other.
The contrast between the lucid grid of the con-
temporary city and the conquest scenes is height-
ened by the unusual composition of the latter; on
the front of the biombo, implied vectors point to
a center that is oddly vacant: the palace patio that
dominates the bottom of panels five and six. Above
this empty patio to the left, stands Moteuczoma,
caught in a moment of oration from a balcony as
his assassin takes aim from below (fig. 5). Directly
above the empty patio, identified in a legend as the
Palace of Moteuczoma, is a hexagonal building that
is teeming with battling Indians and Spaniards—
this is the main temple of Tenochtitlan. Such a
composition, where the center does not hold, un-
derscores the view of Solís: Moteuczoma’s ineffec-
tual leadership was akin to absence, and due to it,
the city would fall. On the opposite side, in contrast,
the center of the city is filled with the physical pres-
ence of both religious and secular authority: the
grid leads the eye to the cathedral and the viceregal
palace, built on the site of Moteuczoma’s own (fig. 6).7
7
Schreffler has pointed out that the viceroy’s palace, the locus
of Habsburg power at the heart of the city, whose prominent façade
marks the center of the composition, is meant to be seen as the

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Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico City
Fig. 5. Detail of the Palace of Moteuczoma in fig. 1.
The biombo encouraged its viewers, then and
now, to read in the known spaces of their city a pa-
limpsest of its past, compelling viewers to shuttle
from one side of the screen to the other, to make
connections between the conquest-era history
and the city’s present-day reality. We can also con-
sider this charged mental activity the biombo in-
cites as a preparation for moving through actual
streets, a dress rehearsal for entering into the urban
form itself. Engaging with the city’s history as one
moved through the streets would also offer an
organizing force of both the city and the pictorial field. Michael J.
Schreffler, The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in
Baroque New Spain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2007), 24–25, 107–27.
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167
imaginative release, the same kind of escape that
Bernardo de Balbuena’s 1604 Grandeza mexicana
offered. In his word-picture, the city was imagined
as a “jardín de Venus, dulce golocina” (garden of
Venus, sweet ambrosia).8
Taken together with other representations of
the city, the biombo pushed viewers to see history
as a living spectacle in the city streets, perhaps even
to replace the seething humanity and chaotic ex-
perience that the “now” continually offers with
the dramatic and ordered narratives that had been
created out of the experience of the wars of con-
quest, itself once equally chaotic until tamed by
the written word. And in this, the biombo echoed
the experience of public rituals. For residents
of the city of Mexico—and not just viewers of the
biombo—were long accustomed to historical re-
membrances of the city’s past through performance.
In fact, the city’s history was more frequently experi-
enced not through a written narrative, but in the
celebrations that punctuated the collective life of
the city, through which certain filaments of the
city’s past were remembered as reenactments, just
as was the life of Christ in the liturgical year.9 Such
reenactments, in which city dwellers often partic-
ipated either as actors or as spectators, helped forge
agreement about the city’s history.10
Almost all rituals of this emergent civic religion
were entwined with Catholic ones, and one partic-
ular to Mexico City was directly connected to the
city’s conquest: the feast of San Hipólito, which fell
on August 13, the day in 1521 when the Mexica sur-
rendered their city. During the feast, the city’s com-
ponent groups—the viceroy and court, the clergy,
the guilds—paraded with the banner (pendón) of
the city from the Zócalo, the seat of the govern-
ment, along a route 2 kilometers long to reach the
Salto de Alvarado, where a shrine to San Hipólito had
been built. By 1528, this site, of the many that
could have been chosen to celebrate the fall of the
city, was understood to be the place “where this king-
dom [of New Spain] was discovered.”11 The powerful
sponsors of the Feast of San Hipólito were members
of the Spanish cabildo, or city government—it was
from their coffers that funds to pay for the event
came—and the celebration marked their annual
attempt to emphasize, if not consolidate, the his-
tory of the colony around the Spanish military
Balbuena, La grandeza mexicana, 73.
8
Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 88.
9
10
Connerton, How Societies Remember, 44.
11
Archivo General de la Nación, México (hereafter AGNM),
Ramo Indios 12, exp. 236, fol. 148.
168
Fig. 6. Detail of the Cathedral and Viceroyal Palace in fig. 2.
triumph over the city. The procession held on the
Feast of San Hipólito comprised many of the city’s
social groups in rank order, effecting what Darnton
has called “a statement unfurled in the streets,
through which the city represented itself to itself.”12
Solemn and decorous, this procession moved
westward along the Tacuba causeway, also the main
artery of the Aztec city, offering a marked contrast
to two historic skirmishes that took place along this
same artery—the first, tracing the same westward
movement, on June 30, 1520, the so-called “Noche
Triste,” as the Spanish troops occupying the city
took panicked flight out of the city while its Mexica
residents rose up against them, an event described
by Bernal Díaz: “To one who saw the hosts of war-
riors who fell on us that night and the canoes full
of them coming along to carry off our soldiers, it
was terrifying.”13 The second fell slightly over a year
later, after August 13, 1521, as Spanish troops and
their indigenous allies surged down the causeway—
12
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes
in French Cultural History (New York: Basic, 2000), 120.
13
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico,
trans. and ed. A. P. Maudslay (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Cudahy,
1956), 315.
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Winterthur Portfolio 45:2/3
any trace of military discipline was consumed in the
spirit of violent retribution—into the defeated city,
raping women and terrorizing what remained of
the city’s starved population in their search for gold
and gems. “The Christians searched all over the
women,” says one native account, “they pulled
down their skirts and went all over their bodies,
[looking] in their mouths, in their vaginas, in their
hair.”14 In Mexico City, the ordered procession of
San Hipólito along this route replaced, and even
effaced, the violent maelstrom that city residents
once knew from memory. The biombo does the
same: on the conquest side, the chaos of the Noche
Triste gives way, on the map side, to a wide open
causeway, one of the main visual axes allowing en-
trance into the space of the city.
In the pictorial imagery on one of its sides, the
biombo valorized a certain narrative of the city’s
foundational history, its genesis: the daring exploits
14
From Anales de Tlatelolco; I favor James Lockhart’s suggestion
that “ixilla” is translated as “in their vaginas,” rather than “on their
abdomens,” given the context of the events. James Lockhart, ed.
and trans., We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico,
Repertorium Columbianum, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1993), 268–69.
Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico City 169

of Hernán Cortés, his Spanish troops, and indige-

nous allies against the doomed Moteuczoma, a nar-
rative that was also found in literature and other
artworks. And in pairing these scenes with a map
of the city, the biombo reinforced the practice of
viewing contemporary Mexico City through the
scrim of this particular history. The coincidence be-
tween the biombo and the annual festival of San
Hipólito in both the subject matter (the commem-
oration of the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan)
and the habits of viewing (city as palimpsest) allows
us now to better understand the relationship be-
tween the art object and collective memory: both
were activated by the collective rituals of historical
commemoration that bound together Spanish and
Creole residents of the colonial city into a distinct
society.

The Biombo and an Indigenous Public

But remembrance was a pluralistic affair. San

Hipólito marked the Spanish victory, but for other
city residents, it was defeat. These residents, whose
numbers were equal, if not greater than those of
Spaniards and Creoles, were members of the repúb-
lica de indios, living not in the traza but in the large
indigenous neighborhoods surrounding it (fig. 7).
Seen from inside or outside of the traza, the events
of 1519–21 could be victory or trauma, and dif-
ferent collectives among the residents of the city
would revisit them, again and again, in different
ways. Not only were different historical narratives
alive in the city—filaments glimmering brightly to
some and inert to others—but the ways they were
expressed so as to animate the collective memory
were diverse as well. Although the biombo—meant
to be seen only by an elite audience and clearly re-
inforcing their ideologies of the city—would seem
to have little to offer about Mexico City’s indige-
nous population, a closer look at the unusual ele-
ments of its iconographic program, rarely discussed
in the literature on biombos, shows us that the
biombo commemorated the Spanish victory over
the city, firmly lodging it in the collective memory
by implanting it in the present-day city at the same
time that it brought up the troublesome business of
indigenous defeat.
The physical conquest of the city—the military
battles taking place over the space of a year and a
half—could be understood and organized into
the narrative form that we see on the biombo. But
the attendant conquest of the city’s original Mexica
residents could not. It was not that there was any
Fig. 7. Indigenous neighborhoods of colonial-era Mex-
ico City showing the Spanish traza and surrounding
lake. (Barbara Mundy.)
physical resistance to the Spaniards after their
victory—the starving and humiliated population
seems to have offered very little. But physical con-
quest was never the stated aim of the Spanish vic-
tors: successful conquest could only be proven by
successful conversion, and the measure of a man’s
soul is an obscure business. After the conquered city
had been reorganized into parishes, and Franciscans
and other religious were dispatched to complete the
project of evangelization, the question remained:
Were the conquered Mexica really Christians? And
later on, in the seventeenth century, when they had
ceased to be anything other than “indios,” were they
civilized? These questions plagued the great Span-
ish intellectuals of both centuries. The Franciscan
Bernadino de Sahagún (ca. 1499–1590) felt pro-
found pessimism about the evangelizing project at
the end of his life. And Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora
(1645–1700), after the food riots of 1692, would
cast the blame on malicious Indians living within
the city, arguing for their expulsion from the city.15
15
Sahagún, in Arte adivinatoria of ca. 1585. See Charles Dibble,
“Sahagún’s Appendices: ‘There Is No Reason to Be Suspicious of
the Ancient Practices,’” in The Work of Bernadino de Sahagún: Pioneer
Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico, ed. J. J. Klor de Alva,
H. B. Nicholson, and E. Quiñones Keber (Albany, NY: Institute

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170
If the feast of San Hipólito commemorates the
physical conquest of the city, it should come as no
surprise that the other great annual festival of the
city was dedicated to the spiritual conquest of its in-
digenous residents. That was Corpus Christi, which
fell sixty days after Easter, that is, anywhere between
May 21 and June 24. It was, and is, one of the most
important celebrations in Spanish America, a cele-
bration of the Eucharistic host, the bread that
through the miracle of transubstantiation became
the body of Christ during the Mass. But, as Carolyn
Dean has discussed, Corpus Christi was also asso-
ciated with the triumphal entry of Christianity into
formerly pagan realms, and thus its celebration was
carried out with great fervor in the colonies.16
The Franz Mayer biombo also refers to Corpus,
but obliquely, in the garland of flowers that appears
on its grid side (see fig. 2). Flower frames were pop-
ular in Dutch painting imported into the colo-
nies, but unlike the Dutch examples, this is clearly a
flower garland, covering only the sides and the top
of the image, with the bottom edge having a painted
molding. Similar rectilinear garlands (but of mostly
greens) also appear within a nearly identical biombo
(now in the collection of the Museo Nacional de
Historia), where they are shown as being set up
along the causeway along which Moteuczoma wel-
comed Hernán Cortés and his men into the city in
November 1519; in this image, one can see the gar-
lands that are set over a procession of indigenous
lords who meet Spanish horsemen (fig. 8). The
painted garlands had their real-life complement:
garlands like these, both of flowers and greens,
decorated urban spaces during the celebration of
Corpus Christi, when they were set up along the
procession route. Framing the city map with a flower
garland suggests that we are meant to see the or-
dered seventeenth-century city not at simply any
moment, but during Corpus Christi, when the city’s
streets were framed with blossoms.
Garlands of flowers and greens—verdant sym-
bols of the eternal life offered through the salvation
of Christ—were also freighted with other mean-
ings.17 Garlands along the processional route of
Corpus were among the many goods that the indig-
for Mesoamerican Studies, 1988), 107–18. Carlos de Sigüenza y
Góngora, Alboroto y motín de México del 8 de junio de 1692, ed. A. de Pez
and I. A. Leonard (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arqueología,
Historia y Etnografía, 1932).
16
Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi
in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
17
Flower decorations were a continuation of pre-Hispanic
practice. See Louise Burkhart, “Flowery Heaven: The Aesthetic
of Paradise in Nahuatl Devotional Literature,” Res: Anthropology
and Aesthetics 21 (1992): 89–109.
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Winterthur Portfolio 45:2/3
Fig. 8. Detail of biombo showing the Conquest of Mex-
ico, ca. 1690. Oil on canvas. (Museo Nacional de His-
toria, Mexico City, CONACULTA-INAH-MNA-MEX,
reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de
Antropología e Historia; photo, Barbara Mundy.)
enous community was expected to provide for the
city government and over time became an emblem
of their grueling economic subjugation within the
Spanish city. Each garland was large—regulations
called for them to be nine varas, or about 27 feet,
wide to allow the procession to fit through them—
and hundreds would have been created for the
route.18 Indigenous labor was needed to gather
greens and flowers from outside the city, transport
them in, and erect the arbors in rapid time to pre-
vent them from wilting in the late spring sun. All
this took place during a time when the maize crop,
crucial to survival, was young and work in the fields
imperative. Traces of the burdensome nature of
the arches are to be found in Mexican national ar-
chives: a priest, no less, called for the end of forced
indigenous labor to be used to create the garlands
in 1649, and Viceroy Mancera’s insistent directives
that exist for 1670–72, compelling nearby indige-
nous communities to come to the city to erect the
arbors, suggest some passive resistance by the indig-
enous communities thus taxed. It was only in 1790
that the viceregal government, recognizing the
burdensome nature of the garlands, called to end
the practice.19
18
AGNM, General de Parte, vol. 13, exp. 68, fol. 93v–94v. See
also AGNM, Indios, vol. 19, exp. 624, fol. 349.
19
AGNM, General de Parte, vol. 13, exp. 11, fol. 10 (1670);
General de Parte, vol. 13, exp. 68, fol. 93v–94v (1671); General
de Parte, vol. 13, exp. 113, fol. 127v–128v (1672). Resistance by
priests to these indigenous labor drafts is recorded in 1649; AGNM,
Reales Cedulas Duplicados, vol. D14, exp. 783–82, fol. 493. A 1790
document makes reference to the burden put upon indigenous com-
munities in providing the arbors and tries in the celebrations
Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico City 171

Fig. 9. Detail of biombo showing the Conquest of Mexico, ca. 1690. Oil on canvas. (Museo
Nacional de Historia, Mexico City, CONACULTA-INAH-MNA-MEX, reproduction authorized
by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia; photo, Barbara Mundy.)

The festival of Corpus Christi is also evoked,
again obliquely, in an important scene on the con-
quest side of the Franz Mayer biombo and its coun-
terpart at the Museo Nacional de Historia, the
encounter of Moteuczoma and Cortes. Beneath
the scene of the encounter, sets of dancers and mu-
sicians appear, filling boats in the lake beneath the
causeway, beating on the teponaztli and huehuetl for
accompaniment (fig. 9). Although neither Solís’s
narrative of the event nor other histories make
mention of native dancers at the meeting, it was
clearly an essential ingredient of the scene among
Mexico City’s painters. Consider another one of the
great biombos from the period, now in the col-
lection of Banamex, which was probably from the
same workshop as the pair being discussed, where-
in the Conquest of Mexico is distilled to a single
scene of the encounter between the two leaders
(fig. 10). As Moteuczoma and Cortés approach
each other across a ten-panel scene, the viewer’s
attention at first oscillates between the elegant
of Corpus henceforth to “[evitar] el acostumbrado perjucio que
en la antigua se causaba a los infielices indios.” AGNM, Indiferente
Virreinal, caja 6140, exp. 007.
Mexica emperor, on the second panel, carried in
a golden throne borne by richly dressed attendants,
his crowned head set against the pale waters of the
background lake and framed by a palanquin above
and two feather fans, a red set behind him and
a green one of quetzal in his hand. Across from
him in panel nine, slightly lower in the pictorial
field, is Hernán Cortés on a dappled gray; his pale
face is set off from dark shrubbery behind and
punctuated by the bright red plume of feathers in
his gleaming helmet. The forward motion of both
parties signals their encounter. It also foreshadows
the eventual collision between them. The point on
the biombo where they will meet, on panels five
and six, is occupied by two pairs of indigenous
dancers who raise and lower fans of golden, red,
and green feathers and rattles (fig. 11).
Just like the flower garlands, dancing In-
dians were part of the unique festival culture of
Corpus Christi in Mexico City, during which time
Moteuczoma, despite his assassination in 1520,
continued to live in the streets of the city, a dancing
figure clothed in embroidered robes and carrying a
feather fan. Like the phoenix that was the emblem
of his lost city, he had been reborn as a performer,

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 172

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Fig. 10. Biombo attributed to Juan Correa, El encuentro de Hernán Cortes y Moctezuma, ca. 1690. Oil on canvas; H. 952/300 , W. 2171/300 . (Banco Nacional de
México, Mexico City.)
Winterthur Portfolio 45:2/3
Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico City
Fig. 11. Detail of central panels of fig. 10.
unmistakable in his gleaming feathers, dancing the
aptly named “Mitote of the Emperor Moteuczoma.”20
One of the few extensive descriptions of this mitote,
or dance, written by the Jesuit Andrés Pérez de
Ribas (1576–1655) corroborates a visual depiction
of the same dance captured on a biombo at the
Los Angeles County Museum (fig. 12). Pérez de
Ribas described how the mitote began with pairs
of richly dressed men holding long feather fans
who moved in solemn procession to the percussive
beat of the teponaztli. As they broke into two ranks,
there emerged a more elaborately dressed figure,
“Moteuczoma,” to stand at their head; in the Los
Angeles County Museum biombo, the circle of
dancers dominates the lower right quadrant of
the screen, and the upright figure of Mocteuzuma
is easy to identify. His elevated status is signaled by
the elaborate feather fan made of green quetzal
feathers that halos his head, held aloft by a small
page standing behind him. The bowing movements
of the paired dancers on the biombo echo Pérez de
Ribas’s description. He describes that this court
then “bowed to him in unison, positioning their
plumes, rattles, and bodies so that it seems as if they
wished to cast themselves beneath his feet.”21 For
Pérez de Ribas, the performance of the mitote had
20
Other mitotes or indigenous dances were performed for
many events in the city; when performed at the behest of Spaniards,
they were usually to mark some transition in monarchial power
(such as the death of a king or entrada of the viceroy). See Linda
Ann Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Perform-
ing Power and Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 2004).
21
Andrés Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of Our Holy
Faith amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World,
trans. D. T. Reff, M. Ahern, and R. K. Danford (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 1999), 714–15.
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173
a specific meaning that made it ideal for the cele-
bration of Corpus, the feast of the triumph of the
Eucharist: at one point in the dance, Moteuczoma
turns toward an altar, which Pérez de Ribas tells us
was representation of the emperor’s joyous conver-
sion to Christianity.
A joyous conversion—the pagan emperor ac-
cepting Christianity—was understood by Pérez de
Ribas, and likely most Spanish spectators as well,
as synecdoche, a stand-in figure for all indigenous
peoples, and so when Moteuczoma danced in
seventeenth-century Mexico City on Corpus Christi,
he was performing, for all to see, the true meaning
and goal of the violent conquest, the glorious evan-
gelization of New Spain. Seen through the eyes of
seventeenth-century viewers, versed in seeing the
present through the scrim of the past, the dancing
figures were representations of evangelization,
bursting in the center of the pictorial field.22 In
the biombo in the Banamex collection, the flower
garland appears around the encounter scene with
dancing indigenes and thus conjoins into one
scene two references to that most desired triumph
of indigenous evangelization (see fig. 10).
The Dance of Defeat
But can we accept the mitotes that appear on the
biombos and were danced during Corpus Christi
as only a representation of successful evangeliza-
tion? Because just like the flower garlands used
on Corpus, the mitotes were the special responsibil-
ity of Mexico City’s indigenous community, and just
like those garlands, they were freighted with other
meanings. This other “collective” (that is, the in-
digenous residents within Mexico City) saw the
dances not as representations of historic events,
but rather as rites: the ritual role of the mitote is well
documented among the Mexica, and their continu-
ance during the colonial period—for mitotes were
commonplace in the festival life of the city—
suggests their enduring importance as ritual.23
Spanish and Creole observers seem to have
recognized the possibility that the mitotes might be
22
Schreffler has further noted, in art of the seventeenth cen-
tury, “scenes in which Indians perform ritualized expressions of
loyalty to the crown … emphasiz[e] the idea that Spain’s victory
in Middle America was so complete that conquered peoples volun-
tarily and ritually swore their obedience to their new sovereign.”
Schreffler, The Art of Allegiance, 88–89.
23
On the pre-Hispanic mitote, see Diego Durán, Historia de
las indias de Nueve España e islas de la tierra firme, ed. Angel Ma.
Garibay K. (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1967), bk. 1, chap. 2.
 174

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Fig. 12. Biombo con desposorio indígena y palo volador (Folding screen with Indian wedding and flying pole), ca. 1690. Oil on canvas; H. 6600 , W. 12000 . (Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Bernard and Edith Lewin Collection of Mexican Art Deaccession Fund; photo,
© 2009 Museum Associates/LACMA/Art Resource, NY.)
Winterthur Portfolio 45:2/3
Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico City
more than representations, in another register, of
joyful evangelization; in more general references to
indigenous dances and costumes, Spanish writers
often identify indigenous dances explicitly with
the past, often the outlawed pagan past. By 1628,
in southern Mexico, the king had banned their
use in most celebrations, except for Corpus and
the day of the local patron saint, claiming that the
acquisition of the costumes used in the dance was a
waste of resources and that the dances themselves
“call to mind the sacrifices and ancient rites from
pagan times.”24
But within Mexico City, the mitotes may have also
been important vehicles for social reproduction
as well as recollection, and the imagery of the Los
Angeles County Museum biombo suggests as much.
The circle of joyous dancers seems to have come
together on this screen to celebrate a wedding of
an elite indigenous couple; the garlanded bride
in a red and white huipil can be seen emerging
from the church at the far right (see fig. 12). The
dancers themselves have trained for these parts;
their movements, similar to depictions of dancing
on other biombos, display a clear choreography.
Movements are limited, largely vertical, as the
paired dancers are shown bowing, or lifting arms
and feet in unison, in time to the music. The coor-
dination of their movement is emphasized by the
fans and feathers held in opposing hands and their
matching costumes. To keep the mitotes alive across
centuries, select indigenous dancers needed to
train both for the event and to pass this kinesthetic
knowledge down; each performance of the mitote
connected to a chain of earlier performances,
stretching back in time. That the process linked
the generations is signaled by the page standing be-
hind the figure of Moteuczoma. This young boy,
costumed and posed much like the emperor, was
likely training to step into the role. Pérez de Ribas
suggests much the same, although he witnessed a
dance with three pages, not just one: “Each one fol-
lows the movement of their prince so exactly that it
seems as though they are part of a single motion.”25
It seems that we have stumbled upon one of those
mimetic rites described by Emile Durkheim, allow-
ing its participants, as they assume altered identities
and move in unison, to “witness to one another that
they are members of the same moral community,
24
Richard Konetzke, Colección de documentos para la historia de la
formación social de hispanoamérica, 1493–1810, 3 vols. (Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953–62), 2:319–22.
25
Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs, 715.
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175
and [to] take cognizance of the kinship that unites
them.”26
Because in Mexico City, the indigenous commu-
nity was more than just an undifferentiated mass on
the margins—it had its own government that ruled
the four indigenous quadrants of the city, and offi-
cials, at least in the sixteenth century, could claim
descent from Mexica kings.27 The social hierar-
chies suggested by the dancers in the Los Angeles
County Museum biombo—shown by the low bows
the other dancers make in front of the figure cos-
tumed as Moteuczoma, suggesting acknowledgment,
if not obeisance—had their real-life counterpart;
an indigenous account of one mitote tells us that it
was a grandson of Moteuczoma and son of an indige-
nous governor who was costumed as Moteuczoma.28
Thus, a mitote like this one seems to have held a mir-
ror up to the social order. For it was the indigenous
government that was responsible for the mitotes,
and in light of this patronage, elements of the cos-
tumes worn by dancers are of particular importance.
For the prevalence of feathers in the accoutrements
of dancers of the mitote, both when shown as part of
the encounter and when depicted as a contem-
porary phenomenon, is notable. In both contexts,
the dancers wear clothing that conforms to Spanish
notions of decent attire. But feathers, where possi-
ble, were retained in the dance costume, and the
presence of this material, purely decorative to Span-
iards, would have carried meaning to indigenous
residents in Mexico City. Feathers had once been
closely associated with pre-Hispanic Mexica terri-
torial control; they were one of the most valued trib-
ute items demanded by the Mexica of conquered
provinces and, as imported into Tenochtitlan,
one of the ways that imperial space found expres-
sion before the eyes of residents of the pre-Hispanic
city. In the pre-Hispanic period, the feathered
costumes brought to the center as part of this im-
perial booty were worn, in turn, by the armies
who marched out of Tenochtitlan to extend the
empire further or to subdue any rebellions within.
After the conquest, feather objects were likely to be
26
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans.
K. E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 362.
27
James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1992), 34; Charles Gibson, The Aztecs
under Spanish Rule (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964),
168–75; Emma Pérez-Rocha and Rafael Tena, La nobleza indígena
del centro de México después de la Conquista (Mexico City: Instituto
Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2000).
28
Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin
Quauhtlehuanitzin, Annals of His Time, ed. and trans. J. Lockhart,
S. Schroeder, and D. Namala (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2006), 66, 67.
176
commissioned by Spaniards to be sent to European
bishops and princes to show the marvelous posses-
sions that the Spanish conquest yielded. However,
feathered costumes and accoutrements continued
to be prized among the indigenous elite and may
have been handed down from generation to gen-
eration. The feathered fan featured in the Los
Angeles County Museum biombo may have been
an heirloom object. Given the frequency of feath-
ered regalia to represent “barbaric” Amerindians
among European artists, the actual use of feathers
by indigenous dancers themselves may have been
playfully putting the trope on its head. But more im-
portantly, feathers remained crucial to the perfor-
mance of the mitote. A lawsuit that broke out among
indigenous residents of the city in the 1560s reveals
how important feathers were in dance costumes:
native officials were accused of exploiting labor
drafts in order to attain more feathers for use
in the mitote—feathers were clearly precious and
scarce, but there seems to have been no substitute
for them, which signals inherent meaning.29 Their
deep association with territorial control may have
made them especially potent signifiers in the mitotes
sponsored by the indigenous governors of Mexico
City, who, in assuming the costume of Moteuczoma,
took on the guise of the last indigenous ruler to
hold sway over the empire.
The mitote that Pérez de Ribas witnessed, which
to him so neatly expressed the success of the evan-
gelizing project, was held within the Spanish part of
the city, on the traza. But mitotes were also held out-
side of the traza, in the indigenous sections of the
city, and just as vantages to conquest-era history
shifted when observed within or outside of this in-
visible iron curtain, so too with the mitotes. Mitotes
within the traza were usually compelled perfor-
mances—that is, just like in the building of arches,
the indigenous government was called upon by
either the viceregal government or the Spanish city
government to organize performances of their cos-
tumed dancers.30 But indigenous leaders also or-
ganized them for their own neighborhoods, most
importantly on the feast days of the neighborhood
patron saints, festivals carried out in front of the
local priest and a largely indigenous audience.
Through the colonial period, expenditures for
29
AGNM, Civil, leg. 644, fol. 1.
30
AGNM, General de Parte, vol. 13, exp. 180 and 181.
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Winterthur Portfolio 45:2/3
these special festivals were the biggest line items
of the local budget.31 In short, the performance
of dances seems to have been crucial to the collec-
tive life of the indigenous neighborhoods; the Los
Angeles County Museum biombo, where the mitote
is connected to mechanisms for social reproduction
(marriage, ritual training, political inheritance)
suggests why.
The endurance of the mitotes through the seven-
teenth century, the importance of the feathers used
in the costumes, and the key role that indigenous
governors played in their sponsorship, particularly
within their own neighborhoods, suggest to me that
far from being coerced events, such dances were
opportunities for the indigenous governors to pub-
licly proclaim an embrace of Catholicism as mani-
fest in the devotion to their particular patron saint.
But perhaps more importantly, the mitotes were
ways to assert their political vibrancy through a rite
that identified them with the great lineages of pre-
Hispanic rulers in the person of Moteuczoma. And
in joining the performance, either as costumed
members of the court or simply to follow the beat
of the drums, other members of the indigenous
community were called to fall in step with them.
What we witness in the biombo, a scene of a city
and its past, allows us to see some of the linkages
between the artwork and the ongoing project of
social formation. Viewed from the perspective of
Mexico City, the biombo helped shape, both in its
imagery and in the ways that it activated viewer
memory, a set of collective memories for urban
residents, which in turn was amplified and rein-
forced by related collective rituals of city life, like
commemoration of San Hipólito and the mitotes.
But the biombo was in turn an object in motion
and thus its meaning was never static—the exis-
tence of Mexican biombos in historic European
collections speaks to their value both as luxury
goods for a transatlantic elite and even more specif-
ically as a token of a New World trip or sojourn.
Taken out of their local context and set in Euro-
pean parlors, they functioned more broadly as sou-
venirs (with all the memory-play implicit in the
word), this novel Asian American form a synecdoche
for Spain’s great overseas empire that was called,
through the nineteenth century, “the Indies.”
31
See Andrés Lira González, Comunidades indígenas frente a la
Ciudad de México: Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco, sus pueblos y barrios, 1812–
1919 (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1983).