THE AZTLAN MIGRATIONS OF THE NAHUATL CHRONICLES: MYTH OR HISTORY?

This article examines one of the major themes of central Mexican native history-the Aztlan migrations-and attempts to establish its historical validity. Two independent sets of historical accounts are analyzed, revealing considerable consistency and agreement. First, narrative accounts of Prehispanic history concur in the relative arrival order of three major contingents of Nahuatl speaking immigrants: an early Basin or Mexico contingent, followed by one settling the surrounding valleys, and finally the Mexica. Second, arrival dates from diverse local histories throughout the highlands corroborate this tripartite ordering and provide calendar dates for the arrival of the Aztlan migrants. The resulting historical reconstruction is supported by current work in Mesoamerican historical linguistics and by available archaeological data. The various Nahuatl speaking peoples of central Mexico encountered by Cortes in 1519 traced their ancestry to one or both of two semi-mythical places in northern Mexico. According to written and oral native histories, their ancestors had migrated south from either Aztlan or Chicomoztoc several centuries before the Spanish conquest. Although the bulk of the extant information on these migrations pertains to the Mexica, the politically and economically dominant group in 1519, the Mexica in fact represent only the last of a series of migrating peoples said to have settled in the Basin of Mexico and adjacent valleys. In the sixteenth century, the inclusion of these various groups in lists of migrants from Aztlan and/or Chicomoztoc served to reinforce and validate their ethnic identities (Davies 1980:85f). Although it is often the case that such accounts of "tribal" or "ethnic" origins belong more to the realm of mythology than history (see for example Brown 1973), there are two strong a priori reasons for attributing a large measure of historical validity to the Aztlan chronicles. First, central Mexican native history is notable for its attention to chronology and record-keeping (Nicholson 1955, 1971), and the migration accounts are presented in the historical as opposed to the ritual or patently mythological portions of indigenous accounts. Second, Mesoamerican historical linguistics has established that the Nahuatl language is not native to central Mexico, but was carried south from a north Mexican hearth in the final centuries of the Prehispanic era. Since the Aztlan migrants were Nahuatl speaking, an association between the historical and linguistic movements is likely. Given the general historical plausability of the Aztlan migrations, this article attempts to determine: (1) how reliable are the native sources on the migrations? (2) who were the migrating groups? (3) when did they arrive in central Mexico? Mesoamerica is the only area of the New World in which indigenous cultures developed written historical records prior to the arrival of Europeans. Within Prehispanic Mesoamerica, four independent traditions of written history evolved-the Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec and Nahuatl traditions (Marcus 1976). The Nahuatl written histories of central Mexico are the best documented and most understood corpus of the four, due to the efforts of Spanish and native