This work, a study of the building activities of Mexico’s first bishop, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, focuses on the early history of Calle de Martin López (later del Arzobispado, and afterward, de la Moneda), which opens onto the northeast corner of the Zocolo east of the cathedral and fronts the north side of the Palacio Nacional. Porras puts the well-known ecclesiastical and political aspects of Zumárraga’s career aside, to place the bishop in his own neighborhood.
If this focus is unusual, the subject is not. Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Alberto María Carreño, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Richard E. Greenleaf, and José María Marroquils have been over much of the ground. Yet, as usual, Porras read a massive amount of published and unpublished materials, and he adds details and corrects errors.
The actual houses that concern Porras are those that Zumárraga purchased to establish his residence, an ecclesiastical jail, a bell factory, a convent, a house designed to house Indian girls who would be “taken from their parents at age six or seven or less and raised, indoctrinated, and trained” (p. 110) by the conventuals, and, finally, a hospital for syphilitics. Porras’s main concern is to locate the buildings precisely and to specify when, how, and, to a lesser degree, why Zumárraga acquired and developed them. He says less about their functioning.
Material that Porras sometimes mentions only in passing might have been of greatest interest. The house used as a bell factory, for example, only remained as one for a short time, because “very soon the Indians made the bells in their own houses” (p. 83). Yet that Indian artisans so quickly mastered European metallurgy is precisely what is of interest, and we would like to know the process. The failure of the house for Indian girls provides another example: young women raised there were rejected as marriage partners by Indian men. This chance to explore possible Indian resistance to acculturation is largely ignored (p. 117).
This interest in artifacts more than processes emerges in what Porras does find important. Thus, the exact location of the bishop’s house matters, because this also locates the table on which, after the apparition of the Virgin in 1531, Juan Diego laid the cloth containing her image (pp. 39-40).
Personas y lugares de la Ciudad de México provides an interesting way to explore Calle de la Moneda and its immediate vicinity. As guide, Porras lies closer to the encyclopedic tradition of José María Marroquí (La Ciudad de México) than to the whimsy of earlier guides such as Antonio García Cubas (El libro de mis recuerdos) or Luis González Obregón (México viejo: Noticias históricas, tradiciones, leyendas y costumbres), who, for all their lighter touch, were no less knowledgeable than Porras.
