Tetliztacan (TetlRG)

Tetliztacan (as normalized) is a cabecera (head town) in the vicinity of the better known Zempoala. As Barbara Mundy has noted, the RG map associated with the latter place intersperses communities and landscape features linked to Tetliztacan (as well as a third independent cabecera, Epazoyocan), a function of overlapping municipal jurisdictions. One of these shared features is the mountain of Tetl Iztac (or Teliztac as it is glossed on the present map, below), which gives the cabecera of Tetliztacan its name. The Spanish text of its Relación Geográfica states that the place name comes from the nearby “hill of white stone” (folio 1 recto). Indeed, on the Tetliztacan map there is a deliberate pairing of the hill with a church; they are connected by a red line. This magnificent church, in reality a Franciscan establishment, sits in the town center bounded by interesting roads, one of which has footprints seeming to indicate that people and perhaps clergy from a dependent community with a chapel and tianquiztli marketplace are under the authority of the cabecera’s religious authorities. The church itself is a powerful semantic indicator for the head town’s administrative and socio-political status. Foliage painted on the map glosses the magueys, nopal cacti, and trees that are common in the area (see historical contextualizing image). For more information, see Mundy, Barbara E., “Mapping Babel: A Sixteenth-Century Indigenous Map from Mexico,” The Appendix, 1:4 (October 2013), and the same author’s book, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).