The Alzate’s maps and the space use in México City (XVIIIth Century)

Abstract

Among the three plans that Alzate made out of Mexico City, the two first respond to an ecclesiastical conception of the territory and the third to a personal quest of Alzate to investigate the correspondence between the pre-hispanic native neighborhoods and the colonial. The colonial capital was divided on parishes until 1782, when the first civil division by headquarters was created. Considering David Olson’s presumptions, that the maps as well as the manuscripts are representations that participate of a social environment, conform a language and have a specific objective, we will use here the Map of 1769 of Alzate in parallel to the descriptions of the contained landscape in the documentary sources: through different language structures, both intended to represent places. We will depart from a specific point of Alzate’s map –the southeastern limit of the capital- and we will compare it with the information given by the people of the neighborhoods of that zone: we will see that we are dealing with two perceptions of the space that, besides, were contemporaries