tianquizco (CholRG)
This painting of the iconographic example of a marketplace (tianquizco), shows a bird’s eye view of a marketplace or square with a large European fountain. The space is otherwise empty in this view, even though it could be bustling with activity on market day. Around the square are various buildings.
Stephanie Wood
Compare this marketplace with more Indigenous renditions of such spaces, which are typically round and often show footprints that are indicative of the hustle and bustle of activity. One example has a cross planted in the middle, showing colonial influence. The market from the Cempoala RG shows a rectangular space and an octagonal fountain, something like this one from Cholula.
Stephanie Wood
Tianquizco.
tianquizco
Stephanie Wood & Jeff Haskett-Wood
1581
Jeff Haskett-Wood
mercados, tianguises, fuentes
tianquizco, at the marketplace, in the square, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tianquizco
mercado o plaza
Stephanie Wood
https://collections.lib.utexas.edu/catalog/utblac:bfe9df59-d0c1-46a6-8c4...
This map (original: 31 x 44 cm.) of Cholollan (modern spelling: Cholula), from 1581 and housed in the Benson Library at the University of Texas, Austin, which considers it to be in the public domain. It is an indigenous-authored map that was made in response to questionnaires from the Spanish crown about its colonial possessions. Responses to the questionnaires were called Relaciones Geográficas (RG). The map’s glosses are in Nahuatl and Spanish, and the style is mixed indigenous-European. This is an urban plan of the heart of Cholula, emphasizing a grid pattern, which was of special interest to the colonizers. Several altepetl (Nahua socio-political units) are encompassed by the map, although they are called “cabezeras” (cabeceras, Spanish for head town) on the map. San Gabriel is the principal church of the many churches shown. The market square, “tianquizco,” holds a prominent, central place. A fountain occupies this space.
The Benson Library has determined that this pictorial manuscript is in the public domain and is shared through Creative Commons. The library kindly provided this image for inclusion in the Mapas Project, a digital collection of indigenous-authored pictorial manuscripts (soon to be archived) once at the University of Oregon. Student assistant Ellen Heenan processed the images using PhotoShop in 2015, and Stephanie Wood has repurposed these images for use in the Visual Lexicon in 2024.
