The Plaza Mayor's nascent urbanscape

After the Spanish Conquista of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the Spanish began an ambitious, and brutal, program to demolish the Mexica capital and build a new urban environment using its materials. Starting in 1521 and through the first decades of the 19th century, the Spanish produced spaces that embodied their sociocultural and political value systems. The chapter focuses on Mexico City's Plaza Mayor or Plaza de Armas (later known as the Plaza de la Constitución or Zócalo), describing the plaza and surrounding buildings' iterative spatial development and redevelopment over the centuries. As the Plaza and surrounding buildings evolved to host housing, State bureaucracy, the university, markets of various types, the plaza's spatial production evolved correspondingly. Analytical emphasis is placed on exploring how the plaza and its context's spatial manifestation embodied sociocultural and economic aspects of Viceroyal society, including the marginalization of those who were not Spanish. This spatial historic narrative provides a contextual background for the next chapter's discussion of the significant events that occurred in the Plaza throughout the Viceroyal period.