Calle de Pedro Barreda

Behind this name is a jurist born in seventeenth-century viceregal Mexico. Pedro Barreda won by examination the senior chair of law at the Mexican university and served as prosecutor in the royal courts of Guatemala and Guadalajara. His written mark remained in a legal plea in defense of the heirs of Isabel de Moctezuma, the emperor’s daughter, over their right to the lordship of Tacuba: a suit that linked the lineage of the house of Moctezuma with the courts of the Spanish crown. Why Madrid brought the name of such a little-remembered overseas jurist to this corner of Bellas Vistas has not survived clearly. Today it is less than two hundred meters of housing amid the bustle of Tetuán, and almost no one passing through imagines that the sign holds a distant echo of Moctezuma’s court.