Itzocan

Itzocan, the Nahua centre now known as Izúcar in Puebla, experienced conquest as a crisis of local succession as well as a military upheaval. In the summer of 1520 its ruler and inhabitants abandoned the town before the conquering army. The account preserved in historical scholarship describes a substantial urban place, not an unnamed farming village.

When residents returned, they proposed the son of another local lord as the successor; that lord had earlier been killed by Motecuhzoma. The episode shows how local dynastic claims remained important while Spanish intervention altered the conditions under which authority could be restored. Religious institutions subsequently gave the colonial town another public centre. Dominicans reached the region in the first half of the sixteenth century, with Francisco de Mayorga settling in Izúcar around 1533. The Santo Domingo convent complex developed during the following decades, incorporating evidence of an earlier building. Itzocan's sixteenth-century transformation thus involved contested lordship, returning inhabitants and the construction of Christian institutions within an existing Indigenous town.