Tenanco (CmpRG)

Tenanco is not clearly associated with a church structure and thus names a landscape feature rather than a community. Though there are several of these semantic indicators of an inhabited place nearby, each seems to be linked to a different element on the map (see the historical contextualizing image). The tenamitl-like formation at the summit of a hill must have been the origin of the name; someone at some time in the past must have been struck by the similarity of the craggy outcrop to the form of the glyph for “wall.” The semi-naturalistic rendition of the hill/mountain seems to betray a certain amount of Spanish cultural influence, artistically speaking, since in earlier times one might expect to see a more traditional tenamitl element appearing there (see an example from the Codex Mendoza, Tenayocan, below). For more information about the map, see Biblioteca Digital Mexicana, A.C., http://bdmx.mx/documento/mapas-relaciones-geograficas-cempoala-epazoyuca... 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).