View of the Imperial Mexico City

1769-1772

Alzate, José Antonio (1737-1799)

Mexico City, MEX, Museo Franz Mayer (current location)

One of the most important images of the late colonial city, this map depicts the parishes of Mexico City, distinguishing them by color. The map was created as part of an effort to rationalize the divisions between the city’s parishes, which previously fell along ethnic lines.

The map is oriented with west at the top, north to the right, and includes a scale to indicate the distances between sites. The blocks around the main plaza, where the Cathedral was, are filled with houses and religious establishments. Churches, monasteries and convents, many of which exist today, are often shown in elevation. Their economic importance to the city was extraordinary. Many owned extensive rental properties in the city, which helped support them. The peripheral areas of the city are less densely built. They were home to the poorer and mixed-race residents of the city.

The maker of this map, José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez, was a Catholic priest and one of the most active scientists of his time; his interests included geography and cartography. Backed by the reform-minded archbishop of Mexico, Francisco Antonio Lorenzana (1762-72), Alzate launched a plan to reconfigure the centuries-old parish divisions of the city, which grew out of the city’s 16th century divisions which separated Spaniards and indigenes.

The map is hand drawn on a large sheet of paper, with colored pigments added. To make it, José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez seems to have conducted careful measurements of the streets and canals and carefully observed the city’s prominent features.

This manuscript map is now held by the Museo Franz Mayer. It may have been one of a number of copies of this map. In an inscription at the bottom, Alzate y Ramírez writes that he entrusted the map to the secretary of the Viceroy in 1772, perhaps because its original patron, the archbishop Francisco Antonio Lorenzana, was leaving his post.

Ethnic separation between Spaniards and native peoples was embedded in the spatial arrangement of towns and cities early in the colonial period. Into the 18th century, Mexico City was divided into native parishes, led by Franciscans, Augustinians and Dominicans, and Spanish ones. This map expresses the ambition of José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez and others to reform this plan and divide the city along rational, geometrical boundaries. Yet old parish affiliations, with their attendant ethnic distinctions, were still desired by many residents of the city. Thus, ethnic divisions were not always understood as negative barriers in the colonial city.

Reproduced courtesy of the Museo Franz Mayer

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Los planos de Alzate y el uso del espacio en la ciudad de México (siglo XVIII).

Dávalos, Marcela. 2006. “Los planos de Alzate y el uso del espacio en la ciudad de México (siglo XVIII).” Scripta Nova. Revista electrónica de geografía y ciencias sociales vol. X, 218 (54). Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona.

Larkin, Brian. 2004. “Liturgy, Devotion, and Religious Reform in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City.” The Americas 60 (4): 493-518.

Mundy, Barbara E. 2012. "The Eighteenth-Century Urban Reform in Mexico City and the Plan of José Antonio Alzate." Colonial Latin American Review 21 (1): 45-75.

O’Hara, Matthew D. 2006. “Stone, Mortar and Memory: Church Construction and Communities in Late Colonial Mexico City.” Hispanic American Historical Review 86 (4): 647-680.