“In the place of the hardened tunas”: Tenochtitlan in the half-caste chronicles

Abstract

Space, city, displacement, trip have been fundamental axes in the literary colonial Spanish– American studies in the last decades. In this frame, the attention towards the discursive western traditions, the weight of the rhetoric, the humanist inflexions in the history and the philology have contributed new looks to a corpus that, on the other hand, one finds in constant expansion. This work registers in the above mentioned line, but it proposes to read the convergences and the differences that two half–caste chronicles novohispanas put in scene at the moment of antagonist narrates a city: Tenochtitlan. The historical works of Diego Muñoz Camargo and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl will allow us to show the crossings between discursive western and indigenous traditions, the tensions, the uses of the past and the representation of an emblematic city as narrative space in the one that registers the polemic.