chinampas (T2681:6:2r)

According to Nahua petitioners from Cuitlahuacan, led by the pueblo’s gobernador don Estéban de Caravajal, a man named Bartolomé Arias was attempting to gain a grant of a house lot and two agricultural parcels ("huerta" in Spanish) from the viceregal authorities that would compromise the Nahuas' land tenure and their ability to grow traditional crops such as maize and chiles there. Arias’ effort eventually failed. The type of property in dispute is labeled camellones (agricultural ridges) by whomever provided the Spanish glosses on the map, but “translated” in related documents by Indigenous witnesses and a Spanish surveyor as either chinamitl or chinampas (for instance, the surveyor reported that they are “camellones que los yndios llaman chinampas”).

Areas of human habitation on the same map seem to be represented, in part, by buildings situated on black-outlined, ovoid elements with green shading that are not anything like the chinampan elements. Instead, it is possible that they are islands. In fact, one of the Spanish records associated with the map contains the statement that one of them, Michcalco, is situation on something “like a kind of island” (folio 4 recto). Whether this is a natural feature, a more substantial kind of chinamitl, or a combination of these things is not entirely clear, but two of them lacking representations of buildings are glossed as tierras rather than as camellones (see the historical contextualizing image).