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Throughout the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, Mexican academics, inspired by Kingsborough’s reproduction and probably by the foundational role Clavijero endowed the manuscript, used the Codex Mendoza as the axis for a series of political and historical publications rooted in the Mexican nationalist project that was taking shape at that time. Mexican nationalism of the era proceeded through a sequence of stages that included “criollo” imperialism, democratic sovereignty, European colonialism, and despotism.7 In 1877, during this last period, known as the “Porfiriato,” Manuel Orozco y Berra (1877, 185), the director of the National Museum of Mexico, inaugurated the Anales de Museo Nacional de México and published Kingsborough’s reproduction of the Codex Mendoza. In 1885, Antonio Peñafiel, working for the Dirección Nacional de Estadística de México (National Statistics Office of Mexico) and under the sponsorship of the Secretario de Fomento Mexicano (Development Secretary for Mexico), once again published the contents of the manuscript as part of his Nombres geográficos de México. As part of his work, he reproduced the place-name glyphs of cities and towns from the second section of the Codex Mendoza—which he labelled as “municipios de la república” (municipalities of the republic)—alongside a series of linguistic studies. In doing so, Peñafiel (1885, chap. 1) sought to arrange the political and economic geography of the modern Mexican nation around a project of recovery and reconstruction of the place-names for cities and towns of pre-Columbian Mexico.