Acoustic Maps of Colonial Mexico City

Santa Cruz Map, ca. 1550. The original document is housed at Uppsala University Library, Swe-den. Online source.

Acoustic Maps of Colonial Mexico City

My project dealt with the urban design and reconstruction of Mexico City after the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521. My work focused on the analysis of the utopian plan of the city (i.e. no on how the city actually worked, but on how the city was planned), where bells played a pivotal role. In doing so, I explored the degree to which sound was present in the early stages of urban planning and the effects it had on the conceptualizations of Mexico City’s urban spaces. Along with the Alonso de Santa Cruz Map (ca. 1550) and town ordinances, I studied the most influential architecture treatises during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These documents greatly influenced sixteenth-century Spanish architects, and are thus crucial for understanding the connections between music, architecture, and politics in the first plan of Mexico City.

            For the purpose of this project, I focused on the Santa Cruz Map. The Santa Cruz Map shows that the cathedral was located in the middle of the city and also shows the strategic location of Mexico City’s smaller temples, chapels, churches, monasteries, etcetera (some of which were placed in Indian districts and beyond). All these religious buildings were connected by a sophisticated system of bell ringings that enabled the transmission of messages across the territory (from the traza to the Indian neighborhoods).

            Unlike Europe, the New World afforded the possibility of designing and building cities from scratch. Not because the Americas were an empty land, but because Spanish settlers imagined them as empty, as a white canvas onto which they could project their utopian urban projects. Mexico City was the first and perhaps the most ambitious of these projects. Church and tower bells certainly existed in Europe before the Spaniards’ arrival to the New World, but it was in the Americas that these bells were placed in a perfect gridiron plan.

            The grid plan played a crucial role in the urbanization and colonization of the Americas since it helped to “give expression to the fundamental principles that policía entailed” (Richard L. Kagan)—policía in the sense of politeia (πολιτεία), communal life organized by a government that provides order and peace to its citizens. My final research shows that Mexico City’s system of bell ringings contributed these order and peace through a careful arrangement of churches, the sounds of which regulated the rhythms and habits of public and private lives.

Image credit: Santa Cruz Map, ca. 1550. The original document is housed at Uppsala University Library, Sweden. Online source.

Researcher: Isaac Canton