From the historian's notes

Mexico City, 1790

Mexico · North America · December 1790 · winter (dry season)

What it was high

viceregal metropolis of roughly 100,000+ — cathedral, university, mint, and a reforming viceroy repaving itbuilt from 1521 on the razed island city of Tenochtitlan; by 1790 the largest city of the Americas

That year

• the Sun Stone (Aztec calendar stone) is uncovered on 17 December 1790 during repaving of the Plaza Mayor — months after the great Coatlicue statue surfaced in August; the capital is accidentally excavating Tenochtitlan 17 December 1790 highthe founding moment of Mexican archaeology, happening as street-works
• the scholar Antonio de León y Gama begins documenting both monuments; the Coatlicue will later be reburied as too disturbing — the argument about what these stones mean is starting in salons now 1790-92 highlearned Mexico City

Who held it high

Viceroyalty of New Spain, crown of SpainKing Charles IV (new on the throne, 1788); Viceroy the second Count of Revillagigedo, an energetic reformer barely a year in officethe viceroy is repaving, draining, lighting and policing the capital — street lamps, garbage carts, numbered houses; the city is visibly mid-scrub, and the digging is what turns up the past

Its name high

México / Ciudad de México; in Nahuatl mouths the old name Mexico-Tenochtitlan persists in prayer and place-loreWritten in Latin

The date, there high

1790Gregorian Anno Domini; the liturgical calendar structures the week and the season — December is Guadalupe (the 12th) into Christmas posadasCathedral and parish bells grid the day; the Angelus stops the street. Watchmen (serenos) now call hours and weather through the night under the new lamps — a brand-new civic soundtrack, one of the viceroy's reforms.

Money medium

silver peso (real de a ocho)8 reales to the peso; tlacos and cacao beans beneath the reala chocolate and a sweet roll: a real or so; a letter's inland postage: some reales by distance — order of magnitude only

Weather medium

December: brilliant dry days near 20 C, nights near frost; dust from the drying lakebeds when wind rises

Things

Objectssilver pesos — the 8-real piece that is the world's trade coin from Canton to Cadiz; tlaco tokens (shop small-change) and cacao beans still filling the tiniest gaps; sealing wax, paper, the post's brass scales; new oil street-lamps on iron brackets; rebozos; fans; rosariesFoodchocolate at dawn as a civic institution; tamales and atole from braziers; tortillas from the comal everywhere; Castilian bread and wine at proper tables; December fruit: tejocotes, cane, jícamas in the Christmas marketsCloththe rebozo on every woman below the elite; mantillas and French silks above; indigo cottons, wool ponchos in from the cold morningsGetting aboutmule-drawn coaches and hired carriages; sedan chairs fading from fashion; canoes still working the remnant canals from Xochimilco with produce; strings of pack mules from Veracruz and AcapulcoIn the aircharcoal braziers and toasting maize; church incense; wet stone from the new paving works; open drains the viceroy has not yet reached

What she'd hear

Spanish over a deep Nahuatl substrate — Nahuatl and other indigenous languages fill the markets; educated salons flirt with French. She passes in Spanish with a story for her accent ('raised in Manila'), which the china category makes self-sealing.

Where she could stand

• Plaza Mayor dig site — paving crews, ropes and shear-legs around a carved monolith face-up in the mud — the Sun Stone in the days of its surfacing
• the Real Renta de Correos — the crown post office — counters, sealing wax, and the lista de correos: uncollected letters listed and pigeonholed under waiting names
• the cathedral and the sagrario front — the great cathedral, its towers finally being completed in these years
• the Alameda and its fountains — the poplar promenade where the city displays itself in the dry-season afternoons
• a pulquería doorway — licensed pulque shop, painted walls, clay cups

Researched for this card · confidence high