1

A Way Back to Aztlan:
Sixteenth Century Hispanic-Nahuatl Transculturationand the Construction of the New Mexico

Danna Alexandra Levin-Rojo

Thesis for PhD in Social Anthropology

London School of Economics and Political Science
University of London

2001

UMI Number: U615219

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ABSTRACTThis thesis is a library and archive-based study within the field of historicalanthropology. It is concerned with one particular case of cross-culturalborrow ing that occurred during the sixteenth century Spanish conquest of
mainland N orth America; a process of imperial expansion that resulted in theestablishment of several colonial provinces, which comprised all of present-day
Mexico, Guatemala and some parts of the United States of America and w ere
administratively dependent on the viceroyalty of N ew Spain. The thesis focuseson the creation of the m ost northerly province within this territory, Nuevo
Mexico, which —unlike other provinces in the Spanish overseas dom ains— hada social and political existence before it had an actual geographic embodiment.
Rather than the actual politico-geographic entity founded as a colonial"kingdom" in 1598, Nuevo Mexico is understood in this study as a "disembodied
im aginary world," mainly consisting of the image of the Aztec ancestralhom eland that Spanish conquerors and their Indian allies a n d /o r subjects
fabricated in the context of their colonial interaction. Therefore the focus of thisthesis is on the transform ation of abstract, symbolic space into concrete,politically m arked territory. Through the semantic analysis of the term Nuevo
Mexico and via reconstructing the process of its form ulation and reification(1539-1598) I have explored issues of alterity, local knowledge, cultural
hybridity and misunderstanding.
Part one of the thesis discusses the relevance of historical case-studies foranthropological theorisation on colonialism and the creation of culture. It also
provides an ethno-historical background for the area and people addressed in
the thesis and displays the chain of events related to the exploration andconquest of Nuevo Mexico. Part two argues against traditional interpretations of
the colonisation of Nuevo Mexico as entailing the transplant of the European
mediaeval imagery and proposes instead that it was the N ahua pre-conquest
m yths of origin w hat prom pted the Spanish conquest of the area. Finally, it
discusses the complexity of cross-cultural interaction and the creation of culture
in colonial contexts.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
A cknow ledgem ents__________________________________________________ 7
N o t e s ______________________________________________________________ 8

Part One: Defining the Issue and The Setting_________ 9
One: Introduction___________________________________________1 o
1.1- "The possibility of a co n ju n ctu re"____________________________________________ 12
1.2- The facts: P ortuguese bishops or N ahua a n c e s to rs ___________________________ 19
1.3- The theories: Colonialism, cultural borrowing and th e representation of"Self" and "O ther"_________________________________________________________ 22
1.3.1.- E urope confronts "the O th e r" ______________________________________ 23
1.3.2.- "The Other" confronts E urope_______________________________________26
1.3.3.- Europe in "the Other": T he dialogic sp a c e of transculturation___________ 30
1 .4 -T hesis structure ___________________________________________________________31

Two: The Semantics of Place Names:New Spain and New Mexico_ 33
2.1- The co nquest of m ainland A m e ric a _________________________________________ 36
2.2- The p ro cess of hom ologation______________________________________________ 39
2.3- The conditions for toponymic tra n s fe re n c e __________________________________52
2.4- Hernan C ortes and C hristopher C olum bus___________________________________ 60
2.5- Repetition: Cibola a s a New M exico_________________________________________ 63

Three: Mexican, Chichimeca and Pueblo Indians________________

68

3.1- The land forms and climate of New S p a in ____________________________________ 72
3.2- The relevance of culture a re a classifications_________________________________ 75
3.3- The concept of M esoam erica_______________________________________________ 79
3.4- The constitution and history of M e so a m e ric a ________________________________ 84
3.5- Marginal M esoamerica: The movable frontier_________________________________ 88
3.6- Arid America and O asis A m eric a ____________________________________________95
3.7- Settled M esoam ericans Vs. unsettled C h ic h im e c a s __________________________ 106

Four: The Conquest and Exploration of the North and theEstablishment of the Province of Nuevo Mexico_________ 1 1 5
4.1- The key to older Mexico: Early settlem ent and exploration of New Spain_________ 119
4.2- Guzm an Vs. Cortes: The conquest of Nueva G alicia ___________________________ 125

4.3-The prom ise of Cibola: C ab eza d e Vaca, Niza and V azquez de C oronado

132

4.4- Searching for Nuevo Mexico: Francisco d e Ibarra and Nueva Vizcaya ___________ 142
4.5- Cibola beco m es Nuevo Mexico: The 1580's non-authorised expeditions

148

4.6- Ju an d e O nate and the foundation of Nuevo Mexico__________________________ 153

Part Two: Nuevo Mexico as an Imaginary World_______ 164
Five: The Mediaeval Hypothesis______________________________ 1 65
5.1- Indian and S panish focused s o u rc e s ________________________________________ 165
5.2- Indigenous migration / Spanish "de-m igration"_______________________________ 167
5.3- Marvels and m onsters coming from E u r o p e _________________________________ 173
5.4- New Spain and the A m azons_______________________________________________

178

5.5- T he Island of Antilla and its S even B ishops___________________________________ 188

Six: We all Came Walking from the North: Traditions of Ancestral
Origin among Nahuas___________________________________ 199
6.1- The s o u rc e s ______________________________________________________________ 202
6.2- Foreign ancestry and migration: A M esoam erican idiom for politics_____________ 215
6.3- To be or not to be one single people: N ahua identity and "ethnicity"___________ 219
6.4- T hree intersecting a re n a s of corporate identity: The calpoili, th e altepetl andth e tlatocayotl____________________________________________________________ 228
6.5- From Aztlan to Tenochtitlan: The Azteca/M exica migration_____________________ 233

Seven: Your Past is our Future. Documenting the Cross-Cultural
Loan__________________________________________________ 247
7.1- S om e explicit trac es of the Azteca/M exica migration in colonial chronicles

251

7.2- Amirrorimage: Mexico-Tenochtitlan and Nuevo Mexico/Cfbola/Copala __________261

Eight: Conclusion. _________________________________________

269

8 .1-R ecognising "Self" in "the O ther"____________________________________________270
8.2- Localising the Euro-American encounter: Intersubjectivity and thetransculturation p ro c e s s __________________________________________________ 277

M ap s_____________________________________________________ 287
Illustrations________________________________________________ 2 9 8Bibliography.

319

5

LIST OF MAPS

M ap 1 - Provincia del Nuevo M e xic o _________________________________________________288
M ap 2- Extent of S panish control in 1 6 0 0 ____________________________________________289
M ap 3- Mexico in 1519, with a detail of the Lake basin and Tenochtitlan_________________ 290
M ap 4- M esoam erica, Arid America, O asis America
M ap 5- R egions of Mexico_______________________

291_______________________________________________________ 292

M ap 6- Central M exico_____________________________________________________________ 293
M ap 7- S panish colonies in Mainland North Am erica___________________________________294
M ap 8- Map of Mexico-Tenochtitlan attributed to H ernan C ortes.
N urem berg, 1524_______________ .______________________________________ 295
M ap 9- M esoam erica in th e Post-C lassic p e rio d _______________________________________296
M ap 10- Terra antipodv regis castele inveta: a xpoforo colvbo: ian vesi.
Num ber 1 of th e Atlas by Vaz Dourado, 1 5 8 0 ______________________________297

6LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1- C h ap u ltepec. Codex Boturini, plate XIX___________

299

Fig. 2- Foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Tira de Tepechpan, plate V________________ 300
Fig. 3- Year-sign grouping. Codex Aubin, p ag e 12____________________________________ 301
Fig. 4- Chicom oztoc. Codex Azcatitlan, plate IV___________________________ 302

Fig. 5- Chicom oztoc. Selden Roll, plate II___________________________________________

303

Fig. 6- Chicom oztoc. Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, folio 16r.__________________________ 304
Fig. 7- Chicom oztoc. Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2 _________________________________ 305
Fig. 8- Aztlan. Mapa S ig u en za _______________________________________

306

Fig. 9- Aztlan. Codex Boturini, plate I

307

Fig. 10- Aztlan. Codex Azcatitlan, plate I _______________________________

308

Fig. 11- Aztlan. Codex Aubin, p ag e 1 _______________________________________________3 0 9
Fig. 12- Foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Histoire Mexicaine depuis 1221
jusqu'en 1594, folio 8r.___________________________________________________ 310

Fig. 13- Foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Codex Mendoza, folio2 r __________________ 311
Fig. 14- Foundation of M exico-Tenochtitlan. Codex Aubin, p ag e 15___________________ 312
Fig. 15- T he breaking of th e tree. Codex Boturini, plate III_____________________________ 313
Fig. 16- Teocalli d e la G uerra S agrada. Engraved monolith preserved in the
M useo Nacional d e Antropologia, Mexico___________________________________ 314
Fig. 17- The life in Tenochtitlan. Codex Azcatitlan, plate X III___________________________ 315
Fig. 18- Cipolla (Cfbola / Zuni). Tlaxcala Codex, in Diego Munoz C am argo's
Descripcion de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala, folio 317____________________316

Fig. 19- T he arm y that viceroy Antonio d e M endoza com m anded to fight in the
Mixton War. Codice de Tlatelolco, plate I____________________________________ 317

7

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Several institutions and m any people supported me and collaborated to m ake
this thesis possible.
I am grateful for funds from the Direction General de Asuntos delPersonal Academico (DGAPA) of the Universidad N ational Autonom a de
Mexico (UNAM), which sponsored m y studies w ith a six year scholarship (19941999) to pay m y fees at LSE and my living expenses in London. Also theCentral Research Fund of the University of London aw arded me a grant fromthe Irwin Trust (December 1995) to carry out archive research in Spain betw een
May and August 1996. W ithout their financial aid this thesis could hardly havebeen done. The support and advise of m y supervisors in Mexico —Alfredo
Lopez Austin (UNAM)— and in Britain —Joanna Overing (LSE), Alfred Gell
(LSE), Fenella Cannell (LSE), and Peter Hulm e (University of Essex)— w ere ofinvaluable importance at different m oments in the process of this research. I
w ant to thank particularly Fenella Cannell, who took m ost of the burden,
providing me not only with her theoretical guidance but also correcting evenm y language mistakes. Any error in this thesis, however, is m y ow n
responsibility.
The idea for this project evolved from the work I developed, and thescholarly discussions I participated in, as a contributor to the project "Historia
de la Historiograffa Mexicana," coordinated by Juan A. Ortega y Medina andRosa de Lourdes Camelo in the Instituto de Investigationes Historicas(UNAM), for which I held a collaborative research grant from DGAPA/UNAM.
I therefore thank the members of the seminar on the colonial period, directedby Rosa de Lourdes Camelo, to which I was ascribed (1991-1993). I am alsoindebted with several colleagues who generously shared their specialised
knowledge a n d /o r materials with me throughout the last six years, reading,commenting and criticising preliminary drafts or simply discussing m y ideas
and clarifying specific doubts: Tristan Platt, Jose Ruben Romero, Jose Luis
Mirafuentes,

Federico

Navarrete,

IsabelMedina,H um berto

Medina,Cuauhtemoc M edina, and Emily Carreon.
Finally, I w ant to thank Emily Carreon for copy-editing the final draft ofthis thesis, cleaning my prose from the syntax and gram m ar mistakes typical of
non-native English speakers, and Edith Llamas for helping me in the final
revision and correction of my references and bibliography.

8

NOTES

1) For the present thesis it is im portant that the reader can readily access theoriginal sixteenth and seventeenth centuries texts quoted. Therefore I
have decided to provide an English translation within the m ain body ofm y text, and the original in Spanish in the footnotes, although w hen the
fragm ent quoted or referred is minimal (a short phrase, one or twowords) I have incorporated it in brackets in the m ain text. All thetranslations from Spanish colonial texts into English are mine, except fora few cases, in which case I specify the edition I quoted.
2) Also it is im portant for the reader to distinguish w hen I am using
secondary, m odem studies and w hen I quote colonial (sixteenth andseventeenth century) texts. I have tried to m ake this clear by providing,in the reference m arks of m y texts, the date of the edition I am using+followed by the first publication or elaboration date in square brackets. I
have also done this w ith m odem literature every time the edition I use ism ore than ten years posterior to the first publication date. The sam e
criteria are followed within the m ain body of m y text and in the
bibliography.
3) I do not include a detailed index of the archive documents or archive
sections I consulted and used. Each docum ent quoted is fully referred
within m y text, in brackets, with its location in the archive w here it ispreserved. The Names of the archives consulted and the abbreviations I
use to refer to them in m y text appear at the beginning of m ybibliography.
4) Explanations for m y word-choice in such instances as N ew Mexico or
Nuevo Mexico, Azteca or Mexica, etc. are provided where appropriate.

Part One
Defining the Issue and the Setting.

10

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
This thesis is based on the analysis of docum entary sources relating to thesixteenth century definition, search and conquest of the Spanish kingdom of
Nuevo Mexico (maps 1 & 2) established in 1598 in the territory today comprised
approximately w ithin the N orth American states of N ew Mexico and Arizona.1
As such it is an unusual type of anthropological work for instead of the field it
draw s upon the archive, which means of course that m y argum ent w as notdeveloped

throughparticipant observation,

generally consideredsinceMalinowski (1978 [1922]) the characteristic feature distinguishing anthropology
from other disciplines (Radcliffe Brown 1958 [1931]: 76-77, Cohn 1990: 21,
Howell 1997:106-107 & 115).
W hat I am writing here, however, is not traditional history or
ethnohistory either, as the object of my study is neither the politico-military
past of a colonial province nor the culture and social arrangem ents of its
original indigenous inhabitants. My aims are at once m ore restricted and m ore
comprehensive since my argum ent delves upon the cross-cultural dealings
betw een Spanish conquerors and Native Amerindians in the process ofconstructing an "imaginary" piece of hum an geography. Specifically I trace theimpact that certain forms of local, indigenous knowledge —namely, a corpus of
narratives on ancestral past and origins— had upon the way in which Spaniards
perceived the new land, grounded their expectations and devised theircolonialist m odus operandi. Thus although this thesis exceeds the geographic
and tem poral scope traditionally covered by scholarly work on the history andethnohistory of N ew Mexico, understood as a concrete politico territorial
1 Throughout the thesis I consistently use the Spanish form Nuevo Mexico when referring to
the Spanish colonial province of that name, and its English translation when talking about themodern North American State of New Mexico into which the form er evolved. Despite
territorial and other overlaps th ese entities are not the sam e, even when the latter's nam e issimply the translation of the former's.

11

entity, it has a narrow point of focus that I shall describe sum m arily as thedeconstruction of a toponym. That is, the detailed assessment of the social andcultural meanings such toponym codifies, the particular forms of social
interaction that the process of its formulation reveals, and the theoreticalchallenge it poses to m odern scholarly discourses on the Europeans' encounterw ith the "Others" they colonised.
Unlike other Spanish colonies in the American continent Nuevo Mexico
existed in the conquerors' imagination as a province within the rightful
jurisdiction of the Spanish crown, nam ed and imagined in elaborate detail long
before it corresponded with any particular spot on the ground. The
hypothetical territory was imagined through the allocation of place names, andw hat interests me is that this occurred in a w ay which was extremely untypicalof Spanish colonial nam ing practices of this period. After H em an Cortes
baptised, in 1520, the territory he seized from the Aztec em peror "N ew Spain"(Nueva Espana) a novel m ode of geographic nam ing emerged, designating theAmerican new found lands as recapitulations of European locations (Nueva
Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya, New England, etc.). But rather than a European place,
Nuevo Mexico —the only toponym of its kind among those form ulated by
Europeans in the colonial period— is a recapitulation of an Am erindian space,since it partly reproduces the name of the indigenous m etropolis on whose
destruction the birth of New Spain itself was predicated: Mexico-Tenochtitlan(map 3). This simple and apparently trivial fact, hitherto overlooked byhistorians and anthropologists alike, suggests that our interpretation of the
N ew World colonial experience should pay more attention to the Europeans'cognitive response to hum an difference and the practical implications this hadfor the design of territorial expansion strategies.

1.1.- "The possibility of a conjuncture."
Early tw entieth century scholars saw history and anthropology as hopelessly
opposed, one defined as the reconstruction —through the herm eneutic analysisof original sources— of past events or chains of events as they did in fact occur(Cohn 1990: 23, 31-35), the other as the synchronic study of cultures andsocieties aiming to understand the functional and structural links of institutions,
ideas and behavioural patterns in the ethnographic present (Radcliffe Brown
1958 [1931]: 76-77, 84).2 But the once valid assertion that anthropology is m oreinterested in regularities, less narrative and m ore classificatory, the notion that
historical research belongs to the realm of contingency and particularity whileanthropological thought pertains to the sphere of structure and generalabstraction does not hold true anymore. Since the 1950s both disciplines havebeen increasingly perceived as less diverse in nature, for not only they havedeveloped overlapping concerns but they also turned to share a num ber ofmethodologies and theoretical worries. Thus while Evans Pritchard argued
some fifty years ago (1963 [1950]: 22-25) that the difference betw een history
and anthropology is of a technical, not a methodological order insofar as bo thlook for the general patterns that render a society culturally and sociologicallyintelligible, more recently Bernard Cohn noted (1990: 42) that despite their tw odifferent modes of practice, historians and anthropologists share a lot at theepistemological level, since the latter work in space and the form er throughtime but they both construct "accounts of otherness."
2 Historical thought has never been entirely absent from anthropology. In fact E. B. Tylor, L.
H. Morgan, E. Durkheim, M. Mauss and other founding thinkers of the discipline w e reconcerned with a kind of chronology, comparing modernity with past and contem porary n o n ­modern cultures and establishing historical sequences of social and cultural developm ent(Moore 1997: 17-39, Douglas 1990). Kinship theory itself, the most em blem aticallyanthropological speciality, originated from the consideration of the history of Roman Law,
while the historically based work of sociologists like M. Weber, particularly his book on the
P rotestant ethic and the rise of capitalism (1930), have been highly influential inanthropological scholarship. Nevertheless, towards the beginning of the twentieth c e n tu ry
anthropology self-identity cam e to be abundantly reinstated by establishing a sharp b o rd e rwith other disciplines, history among them.

In the field of history this rapprochem ent has contributed to renderirrelevant the classical notion that its practitioners aim, above all, "to discover
how events were connected to each other and fix their chronological order"(Mandelbaum 1967: 414). Likewise, it has contributed to shift the focus awayfrom the narrow consideration of the institutional aspects of the nation stateand its inevitable stress upon the economic and public policy spheres,3 orculture understood as the sum of individual achievements in the arts, science or
thought in general. Its effects are most noticeable in the 1960s and 1970s French
History of Mentalities (e.g. Le Goff 1974), and the subsequent emergence ofHistorical Anthropology (e.g. Ginzburg 1980, Darnton 1985), both a by-productof the methodological reorientation that had led historians of the Marxist
School, the "New History" and the Annales School to distance from event-based
history and ground the study of hum an past in socio-economic concerns,
incorporating the quantitative m ethods developed in sociology and focusing
upon "long duration" phenom ena of the kind studied by contem porary
ethnology (Cohn 1990: 64-66, Chartier 1995: 23-27).
Both the History of Mentalities and Historical A nthropology make thestudy of history "from the bottom up," focusing on the masses, the inarticulate
and the deprived in their intent to view culture as the store of collective
representations pervasive in everyday life, which pertain to the sphere ofautomatic, non-reflexive thought that regulates w ithout going explicit people's
judgem ent and behaviour in society (Cohn 1990: 39-40, Chartier 1995: 23). Bothdraw heavily upon Durkheim and Geertz. Nevertheless, while mentalite
historians privilege quantitative evidence and m ethodologies, historicalanthropologists have turned to a micro qualitative level of research m ore akinto ethnographic practice, applying Geertzian "thick description" to the study of
specific cases and small communities which they analyse in term s of the
3 In recent years Benedict Anderson's anthropologically oriented revision of the nation s ta te
as an "imagined community" (1983) and the publication of anthropological studies on n eo ­nationalism and other fundamentalist movements (e.g. Tambiah 1996, Anderson 1998) seem sto have renewed scholarly interest in political history.

14"structures of signification" (Geertz 1993 [1973]: 9) em bedded in the apparently
trivial routines that enforce a particular world view. Thus they aim to rendersociologically meaningful the particularities of unique historical settings, which
they do not see as constituting bonds in a causal chain of events orcircumstances but as particular instances of things generally hum an (etiquette,
codes of conduct, marriage, the experience of death, etc.).
Geertzian thick description has been severely criticised in anthropologicalcircles for reducing culture to the status of a text. An operation that m erges,
according to Talal Asad and Maurice Bloch, cognitive, ideological andcommunicative questions thereby obscuring "the ways in which discourse andunderstanding are connected in social practice" (Asad 1993: 31, see also 1979:609) and leaving experience acquired through the interaction w ith theenvironm ent out of play in the game of social transform ation (Bloch 1986: 178181 & 1989:106-108). I will come back to this in m y conclusions. For now I justw ant to note that historical anthropology only informs m y research insofar as
it shows that it is possible to conduct ethnography in the archives, as long as w etreat individual documents as concrete expressions of general idioms andsearch for w hat they reveal about socially shared responses to the w orld, which
reside in the intersection of thought and practice (Darnton 1985: 3).
Nevertheless, I do not simply aim to take a specific, past com m unity as
equivalent to any other ethnographic present. While historical anthropology
turns history to synchronicity, adopting a holistic perspective that views
societies at any given m om ent in their past as organic wholes, I m ove
essentially in the diachronic dimension, the consideration of which has
contributed

im portantlytoa varietyof

post-functionalist

auto-criticalreflections within anthropology (Asad 1973, Cohn 1990, Dirks 1989 & 1992,
Thomas 1991, Taussig 1993) reminding us that the world, as E. Wolf contends(1982), is not divided into atomistic societies or peoples. Every sociocultural

15

form ation

ratherexists within extra-community

relations of symbolic

exchange, commerce, m utual dependence, dominance and subjection.
Rather than an ethnography-like depiction of an historical setting thisthesis is an attem pt to effect the conjunction of history and anthropology that
Cohn (1990: 42) advocated w hen dem anding an anthropological history thatwould reassert "an epistemology and subject m atter common to the tw odisciplines," which he further defined as follows:
An anthropological history is not about a place being a place in the sense ofbeing a bounded geographic location, or, for that matter, in the sense ofwhat in the older anthropological literature was called a tribe, village or
category of people. We might choose to study in a certain place, but the unitof our study is not a place. Nor is it a segment of time as a sequence of
empirical events.
The units of study in anthropological history should be cultural andculturally derived: honour, power, authority, exchange, reciprocity, codes ofconduct, systems of social classification, the construction of time and space,rituals. One studies these in a particular place and over time, but the study isabout the construction of cultural categories and the process of that
construction, not about place and time (Cohn 1990: 46-47).
In this sense the unit of m y study, unlike that of m ost anthropologists andanthropologically informed historians, is not one specific com m unity or
category of people but m any as m utually related in the process oftransform ing, through categorical construction and colonising practice, abstract
geographic space into concrete socio-political place. As a body of empiricalevidence it comprises a long period of happenstance and a geographically widearea, extending temporally from 1519, w hen Spaniards first arrived in them ainland N orth American territory that later became Mexico, to approxim ately
1600, w hen a different group of Spaniards re-founded a "New" Mexico in theSouthwest of w hat is today the United States of America. As a theoreticalreflection it explores a series of issues raised in the last thirty years by scholars
devoted to analysing the process of accommodation undergone by peoples
suddenly imm ersed in the kind of asymmetric cross-cultural confrontations
that have characterised European colonialism. More particularly, it addresses
recent debates regarding culturally specific modes of handling contingency and16

com prehending alterity (Sahlins 1981, 1987 & 1995, Bloch 1989, Friedm an 1988,
Obeyesekere 1992, Todorov 1999 [1982], Mason 1990), thereby touching upon
the age old problem of the conditioning pow er of culture and the boundedcharacter often attributed to the particular sociocultural form ations theanthropologist studies as relatively well integrated and stable wholes,
organically structured to automatically reproduce themselves w ithout theindividuals' conscious intent.
A genuine conjunction between history and anthropology does not residein the simple operation of bringing history to anthropology as context for theparticular ethnographic present studied through a longer or shorter period ofparticipant observation, or making sense of particular events occurred during
the fieldwork with the aid of documentary evidence. Neither does it reside in
w idening the scope of our studies of past realities to incorporate the structural,
often inarticulate aspects of everyday social life that do not qualify as highculture products, and which most documentary evidence tied to the economic
and political processes of the State seldom enunciate or elaborate upon. Rather
it entails a double approach at once processual and classificatory to the complex
arena where social intersection between culturally diverse individuals occurs,
aiming not to discover how the structural or functional coherence of kinshipsystems, gender identities, political institutions, technological and economic
conditions that characterise particular sociocultural formations is upset by"cross-culture contact" but to understand how concrete people create culturalforms through social engagement across cultures. Needless to say this field,
particularly visible in the colonial situation, exists in the past and in the present
and m ay be accessed through direct observation within a presently extant
setting, or, as I have chosen, through the indirect assessment of past
happenstance as revealed in documentary evidence.
Ananthropologicallyorientedreassessment

of

N ew

World

docum entation that pays attention to both non-state determ ined forms of17

power and non-power conditioned forms of perceiving and organisingexperience is fundamental, I think, in order to take late discussions of how
cultural difference has been dealt with "colonially" a step further.
Since O'Gorman (1984 [1958]: 79-89) form ulated America's unforeseen
irruption into European cosmology as "invention," and even m ore so after
Todorov (1999 [1982]: 4) proclaimed that America presented Europe w ith anentirely unanticipated hum an difference, sixteenth century N ew W orld
scenarios have become the symbol of radical, incomprehensible alterity forscholars w riting on the colonial representation of otherness (e.g. McGrane 1989:
7-42, Ainsa 1992: 67-71, Thomas 1994: 52, Greenblat 1991: 132-133). Yet as Ishow in this thesis America also confronted Europeans —or Spaniards atleast— with the unexpected experience of witnessing Am erindian orders
similar to their own. The conquerors' response to this often neglectedcircumstance testifies against the categorical imperviousness that recent
alterity-taming hypotheses devised for the assessment of self-other relations
attribute to W estern cultural orders. A dangerous assum ption that could beparalleled to Martial Sahlins' (1981, 1987 & 1995) treatm ent of non-W estern
peoples as entrapped in the over determ inant webs of their symbolic systems,
so severely criticised by Bloch (1989 & 1998), Friedman (1988), and Obeyesekere(1992). At the same time it challenges the fundam ental pre-supposition of uni­
directionality that m ost alterity-taming models share with m ore traditional
notions of acculturation and cultural imperialism.
This assum ption of one-way inflection has been recently denounced by
Nicholas Thomas, who w arns the critics of Orientalist and other associatedcolonial discourses against lapsing into the illusion "that prospectively or
already colonised places are tabula rasa for the projection of European pow er
and European representations" (Thomas 1991: 36). We should abandon theidea, as Thomas contends, that the effect of imperial intrusions upon thedominated groups has been so shattering and so pervasive as to render local,

precolonial forms of sodality and representation

insignificant forthesubsequent development of colonial societies (Thomas 1991: 36). And this is
only possible if, beyond interpreting colonised responses in term s other thanmere resistance and accommodation, we bring the European colonist and theindigene —as Cohn (1990: 44) advised— into the same analytic field. Recent
studies concerning colony-metropole relations have gone a long w ay inquestioning the imperviousness of colonial discourse and the hom ogeneity
traditionally attributed to each of the tw o sides engaged in the colonial
circumstance, exploring internal socio-economic diversity and competing
agendas in both (e.g. Fabian 1990, Stoler 1989, Comaroff & Com aroff 1991,
Thomas 1994, Cooper & Stoler 1997, Radding 1997). Nevertheless they rarely
address the intersubjective arena wherein a new society w ith culturalcharacteristics and agendas of its own is coming into being, perhaps because in
the late m odem examples they normally address colony and m etropole
rem ained more distinct than in sixteenth century America.
Unlike most literature on colonial encounters focusing on the effects ofcultural and political imposition upon dom inated peoples —often with ateleological view of the colonising individual as if his dom inant position had
never been at stake and his views were always untouched— this thesis ismainly concerned with the constitution of a new culture and a new society.
Rather than the forceful accommodation, open or concealed resistance of thecolonised, the wealth of routines and representations the colonists enforced anddisplayed, or the modifications that the Spanish imperial project underw ent in
adapting itself to local indigenous responses I intend to describe one am ong
m any forms in which the concrete Spaniards who came in the N ew W orld tostay became culturally naturalised.

19

1.2.- The facts: Portuguese bishops or N ahua ancestors.
The sequence of events constituting the factual backbone of m y research took
place over a vast territory that scholars in the field of Native American
ethnohistory divide in three more or less distinct culture areas: Mesoamerica,
Arid America and Oasis America (map 4).
Two regions within this extensive piece of land are particularly im portantfor m y overall argum ent because they represent respectively the starting andending points of the "world making" process41 analyse, which I term "the quest
for Nuevo M e x ic o One is Central Mexico (maps 5 & 6), stretching betw een the
coasts of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans across the south of the Central
Highland Plateau of Mexico and roughly coinciding with the maximum expanseof the so called Aztec Empire, an area primarily inhabited in the contact period
by N ahuatl and Otomf speaking peoples (Cline 1971:170, 173). At its heart lays
the lacustrine basin of Mexico w ithin the valley of the same name, that together
with the adjacent valleys of Toluca and Puebla-Tlaxcala, and the tierra caliente(hot land) of the present day state of Morelos, has always been the m ost
densely populated spot in mainland N orth America. During colonial times
Central Mexico became the m ain seat of governm ent for the Viceroyalty of
N ew Spain, and w hen the Spanish sway extended beyond its limits, the nam e
New Spain continued to be primarily associated with it.
The second region I focus on is that encompassed within the nebulous
boundaries of the colonial kingdom of Nuevo Mexico. Before the Spanish
conquest it was primarily inhabited by a num ber of linguistically diverse
groups of sedentary, full-time farmers today know n as Pueblo Indians andincreasing num bers of imm igrant hunter-gatherers.

Several parties ofconquerors,

enteredmissionaries, and prospective

colonists

this

area

successively after Marcos de Niza first sighted the Pueblo villages in 1540, but
4 I take this concept from Nelson Goodman (1978).
concluding chapter.

It will be further

discussed in m y

20

for a long period the Spaniards addressed it as Cibola, or The Seven Cities, andonly in the decade of 1580 it was identified as the much ambitioned province of
Nuevo Mexico that several conquerors had been searching for elsewhere at least
since the decade of 1560. Thus besides all those undertakings com posing the
traditional narrative of New Mexico's early history —which starts w ith the all
too famous odyssey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and finishes w ith Juan deOnate's 1598 act of possession— I also review an additional set of conquering
endeavours that did not reach, or aim at reaching, the Pueblo Indian country
but were som ehow devised against the horizon provided by personal
memories of Aztec splendour and indigenous versions of Aztec past.
Central for the argum ent this thesis develops is the concept of "imaginary
world" as defined by Peter Mason; that is, an imaginary accretion (1986: 43, 5360) referring to the configuration of the world perceived but having nocorrespondence with any concrete empirical object, although it has "a certain
reality effect" deriving from the fact that it is linguistically expressed as "anensemble of names" which interlocks with other objectification system s
empirically grounded (chronological, topographical, etc.) (Mason 1990: 17). As
Mason rightly argues (1990: 15-27 & 1991), imaginary worlds have no concrete
em bodim ent "in the material external world" but nevertheless inscribe specificattitudes tow ards the social and natural objects they address. Therefore, they
are constitutive of the social practice of individuals w ithin the world .
Attending to documentary evidence Nuevo Mexico was indeed an
imaginary world, constructed by Spanish conquerors and settlers, and their
Indian allies throughout a period of approximately thirty years after the fall of
Mexico-Tenochtitlan. During this period a long series of verbal reports,
generally vague, suggesting the existence of seven rich and populous cities lost
beyond the northern reaches of New Spain w ere systematically p u t inconnection with a widespread body of local N ahua traditions concerning a
distant origin land: Aztlan-Teoculhuacan-Chicomoztoc. Towards the mid

21

sixteenth century this world making process had crystallised in the chimericalrealm of Nuevo Mexico, non-localised but conceived as the abundant, well
populated original hom eland of the ancient Mexicans, which successive partiesof religious and lay adventurers then tried to locate.
Taking the semantic analysis of the toponym s Nueva Espana and Nuevo
Mexico as a vantage point, the thesis shows that the construction of Nuevo
Mexico, and its later reification, are closely related with the Caribbean phase ofearly colonial intrusion, the Spaniards' initial accession to the coastline of the
Gulf of Mexico, and their subsequent arrival in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Indeed, thesurprise that Spanish conquerors experienced before the complex, urban
societies they confronted in Mesoamerica elicited a process of homologicalcomparison that led them to grant authoritative status to certain forms ofindigenous historical discourse. Thus the link I suggest betw een the Caribbean
experience, the conquest of Central Mexico and the posterior search for Nuevo
Mexico consists of a line of interconnected epistemological ruptures withm om entous practical implications as conquerors began to dream of the origin
land of N ahua narratives, increasingly interpreting the hum an and naturalscenery they came across as empirical evidence of their proximity to that placeand of the trustw orthy character of those narratives. Simultaneously the thesis
argues against the widespread historiographic tendency to present theconquest of Nuevo Mexico as yet another instance of the multiple figures of theEuropeanmediaeval

imagerytransplanted

to

the

N ew

W orld.

Aninterpretation based on the equivocal thesis that conquerors w ho tried to reachthe seven cities of Cibola that Niza described in 1539 believed to be on the righttrack to finding certain Christian cities that, according to a popular legend,seven Portuguese bishops had founded in the island of Antilla after having
escaped the Moor invasion of the Iberian Peninsula taking a group of followers
across the Atlantic Sea (Gandfa 1929, Beck 1969, Weber 1987, Gil 1989a, Pastor
Bodmer 1992).

22

Both argum ents intend to dem onstrate that Spanish conquerors did not
simply experience the New World as the passive scenario for the enactm ent of
their ow n pow er games and prejudices but actually underw ent a process of
self-transformation through their engagement with the cultural realities they
intruded. This is not to say that colonised and European cultures w ere
dialectically integrated in a harmonic synthesis. The debate that evolved around
Fifth Centennial commemorations of the discovery of America (e.g. O 'Gorm an
1987, Aznares & N orm a 1992, Estrada 1992) makes evident that such anargument, implicit in the notion of the "Encounter betw een the Old W orld andthe New," is, at least, questionable, since Europeans and Am erindian peoples
took part on these events in conditions of inequality. Nevertheless, w hen
asymmetric pow er relations are inscribed in situations of cultural difference theoppressors, like the oppressed, often inhabit the alien discourse of the opposing"Other", building up hybrid representations that become the basis of m uchcolonial practice.

1.3.- The theories: colonialism, cultural borrow ing and the representation of"S e lf' and "Other."

Scholarly models for the assessment of cross-cultural interaction betw een
Europe and non-European societies are of two basic types. Either they focus on
the European experience of "the Other," stressing Europe's imposition of her
own cosmological premises onto the alien worlds she interferes, or they
concentrate on the response of non-W estern societies to European presence,
addressing the form in which "the Other" perceives, appropriates andrepresents the West, and the ways in which it accommodates to, or resists
against, the colonial intrusion.

23

1.3.1.- Europe confronts ”the Other.”
Perhaps the most powerful and influential among the first group of m odels isthat defining "Western systems of alterity." That is, the systematic store ofimages and discourses that individuals of W esternculturedeploy inconstructing images of otherness. A fundamental category of experience andreflection in the humanities and social sciences since the 1980s and 1990s thatemerged as part of a general shift of emphasis in scholarship which is a reaction
against the m ost characteristic paradigm s of m odernist thought (evolutionism,
structuralism, and functionalism), constructed along the lines of identity andunifying identification (Corbey & Leersen 1991: x, Rapport & Overing 2000: 9).
Most literature in this new analytic field is primarily concerned w ith thepolitical significance and epistemological basis of difference, viewing W esternimages of otherness as products of a process of exclusion (e.g. Said 1995 [1978],
Pagden 1982, Hulme 1986, Todorov 1999 [1982], McGrane 1989, M ason 1990,
Karstens 1991, Ainsa 1992, Thomas 1994, Bhabha 1994) that assum es theessential superiority of Self before all external entities thus functioning as a
strategy of disempowerm ent of "the Other." The argum ent draw s heavily upon
Emmanuel Levinas' contention that understanding difference in term s of "Selfand "Other" always entails reducing "the Other" to "Self," either by conceiving
alterity as the reverse side of identity, or by constructing an alter ego simply
defined as that which is not oneself (Levinas 1969:40-42 & 215-236; 1987: 67-90).
On the other hand it follows closely Foucault's analysis of the tactics of pow er
implied in the changing perception of madness (Foucault 1967, Sheridan 1980),
comparing the "Self-Other" opposition of W estern cosmology to the "reasonunreason" partition Foucault studied insofar as "the Other," like "unreason,"seems to be often defined in purely negative terms expressing the absence or
privation of the qualities attributed to the defining Self (reason). As aconsequence, so the argum ent goes, the properties of "the Other" thus deprivedof a positive identity of its own are perceived as strange, hidden, frightful and24menacing

therefore

inviting

physicalsuppression,confinement

andmarginalisation (Karstens 1991: 78-82, Mason 1990:169-178, Ainsa 1992: 70-71).
The analysis of European perceptions of Amerindian civilisations in theearly colonial period has been particularly im portant in this theorising, given
the paradoxical value frequently accorded to the New W orld appearance in theEuropean horizon. Thus Johannes Fabian (1983) and Bernard McGrane (1989),
for instance, categorise the New W orld encounter as the quintessential
experience of absolute hum an and geographic alterity but assert that at thesame time it founded, with the Copemican revolution, the process of unifying
identification culminating in the Newtonian and Cartesian paradigm s that cameto rule m odernist thought. For as the theological heavens transform ed into
astronomical space in post-Copemican Europe turning the earth into justanother planet —Bernard McGrane explains (1989: 30-37 & 43-52)— Europe also
became just another continent in the post-Columbine world; and this initiated aprocess of categorical homogenisation both in the natural and the hum an
dom ains that aimed to reduce the menacing properties of otherness tocontrollable intelligibility.
Of course this view on m odernist thought as essentially rational is open to
criticism, but this is another discussion. The point I w ant to make here is thatseveral authors working on the conquest of the Americas from an alteritytam ing perspective set out to dem onstrate that physical conquest entails
suppressive definition and so they contend that in colonial discourse
Amerindians appeared as the exotic and pathological antithesis of w hat theconquerors thought themselves to be (e.g. Pagden 1982, Hulm e 1986, Mason
1990 & 1991). Sepulveda's position in his debate with Las Casas in 1550-1551—which described American Indians as brutish, irrational beings naturally bornfor slavery— has been taken to be the most prototypical example of this kindof representation (Pagden 1982: 117-118, Mason 1990: 52-53). Nevertheless it isalso noted that generally speaking sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

25

depiction of N ew World peoples widely used all those derogatory references
which had been devised to describe those social groups which, since antiquity,
had stood outside the scope of hegemony.
According to Mason (1990, chapter two) the imagery of the exotic used
for the American Indian was but a projection of the im agery signifying bothlack and excess already in use by the European upper classes to define theirow n internal "Others." A language for alterity that allowed for the fixation of
the natives' status at the lower echelons of the conqueror's ow n society, am ong
the Jew, the m ad, the child, the peasant, and which incorporated non European
m onstrous and fabulous races depicted in Greek and Roman travel lore andcosmography. For McGrane such a projection of European fantastic motifs andclassical imaginations represents above all an epistemological strategy to bridge
incommensurability by applying familiar notions of theunknow ntocom prehend unfamiliar settings. Arranging the inhabitants of the N ew Worldand the ancient Greeks on the same horizon sixteenth century Europeans could
see the strange geography and alien beings of the present (savages) as
elucidating and being elucidated by the strange geography and alien beings ofthe past, and so the unknow n was not explained by the know n but brought
into the vicinity of another unknown, which suddenly transform ed both
unknow ns into knowns (McGrane 1989:16-23).
For all its illuminating contributions most of this literature admits without
question the unlikely assum ption that the American experience represented forEuropeans a one sided process of cultural imposition, N ew W orld peoples
being merely acted upon as the object of self inscription, w hereas forindigenous peoples the European intrusion was an experience of culturaldeprivation and submission to which they only responded in term s of open
rebellion or concealed cultural resistance. The focus being the imposition of thepremises of "Self' upon "Other," this insight seldom regards the alien forms ofsociality and representation confronted by the dom inant subject in the Euro-

26

American encounter as having any actual effect upon those discourses built by
the dom inant subject itself. Furtherm ore, in stressing the asym m etry betw een
Indians and Europeans, as betw een any pair of conquered-conqueror, authors
like Mason (1990: 164) assert that while examples abound of Indians w ho
perforce adopt the values of their conquerors, there are few instances of thereverse. Thus the general picture we end up w ith is that of an endlessm onologue that allowed Europeans, through form ulating representations(discourses) that contributed to maintain the asymmetric situation, to rem ain
fundam entally European while the Amerindians increasingly adopted the ways
and perspectives of their super powerful conquerors.
I object to the idea that the logic of exclusion totally pervade W estern
attitudes tow ards America, leading Europeans to dismiss local know ledge
altogether. This unwillingness to recognise that Native representations w ere
often

incorporated totheinvader's cognitive

repertoire,

bearinganauthoritative status in the eyes of European individuals and institutions, alsocharacterises a rather traditional and much earlier historiographic position thatviewed Spanish conquerors as little more than a mystified and lustful lot unable
to see beyond the fantastic realm of its own mediaeval imagination (Gandfa
1929, Hanke 1959, Weckmann 1951 & 1984).
1.3.2.- ftThe Other" confronts Europe.
Similar levels of stubborn intra-referentiality are implied in Martial Sahlins1(1981) structural theory of history, largely developed through the analysis of
Captain Cook's death in Hawaii to explain the articulation of change andpersistence in history and which is one of the most controversial m odels
addressing non-W estem responses to European intrusion.
After having conducted a series of scientific expeditions in the Pacific,
Captain Cook was commissioned to search for the N orthw est Passage —anavigable w aterw ay that since the sixteenth century people had believed tocross N orth America from East to West. In Novem ber 1778 his ships cameacross the hitherto unknown Hawaiian islands. On the 26 they arrived off Mauib u t did not anchor until the 17 of January 1779 at Kealakekua Bay, after
circumnavigating the island of Hawaii. Upon landing, Cook was escorted to
Lono's temple and went through w hat he interpreted as rites of worship.
H aving m ade some barter transactions and a brief survey Cook and his m enleft on February 4, prom ising to return the following year but a few days later
the Resolution sprung her foremast and the ships w ent back to Kealakekua,
arriving on February 11. Relations between Europeans and Hawaiians
degenerated rapidly and Cook was killed in a skirmish while trying to take thechief as hostage against the return of a stolen cutter. Based upon thefundam ental premise that culture encodes practical action, Sahlins explained
Cook's killing as a by-product of the categorical accommodation thatHawaiians m ade of his unexpected arrival in term s of the received structure of
their own culture, thus using the incident to prove that the empirical world ofcontingency is mediated by structures of significance, that is, notions andcategories that find articulation through a culturally constituted consciousness(Sahlins 1981: 6-8).
Cook's arrival in Hawaii, Sahlins explains, fell within the annual
celebration of the traditional Makahiki, a four lunar m onths rite dedicated to
God Lono, w ho came every year w ith the winter rains to renew the fertility ofnature causing the tem porary suspension of the regular ceremonies involved in
the w orship of god Ku, closely connected to the legitimacy of political rule.
Thus the Makahiki ritual cycle was as well a symbolic enactment of mythicalnotions concerning the advent of political usurpation and sacrificial cults.
Ceremonially it involved the procession of Lono's image around the island
following a right circuit, and a closing perform ance of hum an sacrifice.
Chronologically its beginning was marked by the appearance of the pleiades
on the horizon at sunset, which in 1778 was about Novem ber 18, one w eek
before Cook's ships appeared in the horizon. Hence attending to therem arkable correlation between the ritual movements of Lono’s image and thehistorical m ovem ent of Cook in 1778-1779, and taking into consideration theritualised treatm ent that Cook reported to have been accorded by Hawaiian
natives, Sahlins concluded that the European captain was m istaken for, andtreated as, the god Lono until he committed the ritual fault of returning
unexpectedly and unintelligibly when the Resolution sprung her mast. The
direction that Cook followed in circumnavigating the island before anchoring
was, just by chance, the prescribed direction of Lono's yearly procession, andhis initial departure coincided almost precisely with the final day of Makahiki,
w hen Lono is supposed to leave as well. Therefore

his unforeseen

reappearance brought about his killing as a means to re-establish, ritually, thedisturbed cosmological order (Sahlins 1981:11-24).
This interpretation of the apotheosis of Captain Cook, and its attendant
theoretical propositions have been the object of m uch debate and severe
criticism, to which I will return towards the end of the thesis. At this point I justw ant to bring to the fore Obeyesekere's dem onstration that Cook's killing was
not reduced to his irruption, symbolically expected in the context of Makahiki
rituals but was in fact the result of the interplay of practical pow er politics andHawaiian symbolic values (Obeyesekere 1992: 84). His counter interpretation of
Cook's apotheosis sustains convincingly that the local chief receiving theEuropeans tried to enlist their aid against his Maui rivals, for which he gave
their captain the dignity of a local chief and the name of a god, a usual practiceam ong chiefs of high ranking that Cook entirely m isunderstood. Consequently
in returning after the sprung m ast incident Cook did not behave as an ally but
tried to impose himself, thereby stepping into the position of a violent betrayer
deserving death (Obeyesekere 1992: 26-50). W hat this interpretation shows isthat any analysis aiming to understand the killing of captain Cook m ust accord
a fundam ental explanatory value to the relationship betw een foreigners andHawaiians. Seen from this perspective Cook’s arrival in Hawaii becomes an29unforeseen event of which the natives took advantage of in a pragm atic way,though following all the ritual formalities imposed by local cosmologies(Obeyesekere 1992: 84-88). Beyond the particularities of the case, the relevanceof this approach is to show that the study of cultural systems should not be
informed by the study of language as an abstract system of signs (langue) but
as communicative performance (parole), following the type of situational
analysis Dell Hymes (1986) advocated in emphasising actual language use as
circumscribed by the political and economic contexts surrounding the relations
betw een speakers.
A different approach to non-W estem experience of incoming Europeans
is represented by a massive num ber of studies treating indigenous responses
primarily in term s of acculturation (e.g. Redfield, Linton & Herskovitz 1936,
Linton 1940, Benedict 1943, Beals 1952, Spicer 1981 [1962], Aguirre Beltran 1970,
Wachtel 1978), that is, the assimilation of imposed cultural traits by oppressedpeoples in the process of their subjection to foreign political domination, m ore
recently reformulated as "occidentalisation" (Gruzinski 1991).
The concept of acculturation, generally used in anthropology —since
Redfield, Linton and Herskovitz 1936 definition— to designate all processes ofculture change evolving from the contact betw een tw o or m ore autonom ous
cultural systems whose interaction results in an increase of similarity of each tothe other (Barfield 1997: 93) is linked from birth to the study of colonialsituations. Hence although it implies heterogeneity (Wachtel 1978: 136) it
focuses on situations of inequality where one society is dom inant and theother(s) weak (e.g. Benedict 1943: 207), frequently emphasising those forms ofsocial reorganisation and cultural adaptation that entail the assimilation of theweaker by the stronger contacting group(s) while neglecting the production of
distinctive successor cultural forms. Several authors, it is true, distinguishdifferent forms of acculturation: a) controlled or imposed through violence andother m eans of enforcement, b) non-enforced or spontaneous am ong peoples

30

over w hom no direct control is imposed (Linton 1940, Spicer 1981 [1962]),c) integrative in the case of indigenous systems that incorporate external
elements in terms of their own schemes and categories, d) assimilatory in thesense of implying the total or partial abandonm ent of indigenous beliefs andtraditions (Wachtel 1978:142-146). All of these modalities, however, carry along
the assum ption that individuals or groups who take on the new culturenecessarily compromise their ow n identity rarely ever enticing their oppressors
into significant cultural adjustment.
1.3.3.- Europe in "the Other: The dialogic space of transculturation.
All the models reviewed above, from "debasing othering" to "acculturation"
share in the social scientist m yth of "the Other" that Obeyesekere exposed(1992: 16), which presum es "a radical disjunction" betw een W estern self andpreindustrial peoples, generally seen as pre-logical, living in cold societies
governed by rigid, relentless cosmologies that nevertheless dissolve into
nothingness as the West projects itself through discourse, technology,
m anagem ent and merchandise. Thus while Robert Ricard, Lewis Hanke andother early Latin America specialists tended to see the introduction of things
European into a relative vacuum, m ore recent authors like Mason (1990) andTodorov (1999 [1982]) see the imposition of European cultural and political
hegem ony in America as a m atter of semiotic m anoeuvre. All these analysts
create, each in his way, a picture of unilateral inflection that the adoption of a
dialogic perspective refutes.
In a classical but long

disregarded(Coronil

1995:

xxxvi-xxxviii)

m onograph titled Cuban Counterpoint Fernando Ortiz coined the termtransculturation (1995 [1940]: 97-102) to express the varied phenom ena that
occurred in Cuba as a result of the confrontation and intermeshing of different
cultures as different hum an streams, some forcibly dislocated, some m igrantsof their ow n will and some local, converged in the island:
I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses thedifferent phases of the process of transition from one culture to another31

because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which iswhat the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also
necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could
be defined as a deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of theconsequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called
neoculturation. In the end [...] the result of every union of cultures is similar
to that of the reproductive process between individuals: the offspring always
has something of both parents but is always different from each of them
(Ortiz 1995 [1940]: 102-103).
I have adopted Ortiz' term because, as Coronil contends (1995: xv) itapprehends at once "the destructive and constructive m om ents in histories
affected by colonialism and imperialism," making operative the prem ise that
culture contact affects all the groups engaged in cross-cultural interaction,
w hether hegemonic, marginal or subservient. Hence it is particularly pertinent
for understanding the sort of cognitive and practical processes that theimaginary construction of Nuevo Mexico implied.
Also Walter Mignolo's "colonial semiosis" (1994a, 1994b, 1995) and som e
recent disquisitions on the dynamics of mimicry in both "first encounters" and"second contacts" (Taussig 1993, Stoller 1995) offer powerful theoreticalw eapons for the analysis of the creative process of cross-cultural interaction.
Both perspectives deal with localised, quotidian forms of negotiating pow erthrough representation and, as we shall see in due course, facilitate theform ulation of dynamic models to understand how colonial societies live theircultural predicajnent underneath the apparently hieratical surface of w hat I
shall call the "imposition-resistance-conformity" complex.
1.4.- Thesis structure.
The thesis is divided in two sections, each comprising three chapters. Part one
analyses the semantic im port of the toponymic practice developed by the
Spaniards in the wake of the encounter with Mexico (chapter two); then it
provides an ethnohistorical overview of the territory w here the quest for
Nuevo Mexico evolved (chapter three) and a narrative story presenting thesequence of events I suggest it should be seen to comprise (chapter four). Part

twoarguesagainst theabove

mentioned

hypothesis

concerning thedeterm inant character of mediaeval motifs in Nuevo Mexico's early history(chapter five), it analyses the N ahua traditions of ancestral origin that I found torule the enterprise instead (chapter six), and provides docum entary evidence tosupport the overall hypothesis that Spaniards took the native stories as
authoritative statements about the w orld ahead, reading the landscape throughN ahua historical discourse (chapter seven). Finally, in the concluding chapter I
turn

to

discussing

theimportanceofdefiningcolonialsocietiesasintersubjective spaces where colonial semiosis and transculturation give raise to
hybridity, and also dedicate some paragraphs to revisit, in the light of m y casestudy, recent anthropological critiques of the idea that culture, as a system ofsymbolic meanings, encodes practice.

33

CHAPTER TWO
THE SEMANTICS OF PLACE NAMES: NEW SPAIN AND NEW MEXICO
In the beginning of November 1519 a group of nearly four hundred Spaniards
under the comm and of H em an Cortes entered Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the capitalof the ancient Aztec state that occupied most of central present day Mexico. The
intruders came from Cuba and were following the track to a vast and gold-richland which, according to previous explorers, stood som ew here

to theN orthw est of the recently colonised "Islands of the Ocean Sea." The perplexity
they experienced in confronting the city has been widely com m ented upon.
However, few studies have

explored theformalexpressionof suchbew ilderm ent in the toponym s formulated at the time.
In this chapter I will examine the picture that the conquerors drew of thephysical and social scene they observed in Mexico and will relate it to theprevious and later perceptions they had of other lands and peoples. My
purpose is to underline —through the analysis of the subtleties observable intheir descriptions— the epistemological im port of a series of acts of toponym yperform ed in the wake of the encounter between Europe and m ainland
America. I refer specifically to the fact that in formulating the toponym Nuevo
Mexico, which they imposed many years later on a rem ote region inhabited byvillage dwelling farmers, the Spanish conquerors took the nam e from the first"civilised"1 territory they subdued —Mexico— which they had previously
renam ed Nueva Espana (New Spain). As will become evident in the following
pages this is an extraordinary fact: First because both toponym s are novel
1 The term "civilisation" in its modern sense a s the ideal order of human society in gen eral,
accomplished through the exercise of rationality, was coined in France in the 1750's todesignate the superior stage within a unitary and universal scale of progress that only a fe w
societies —the French among them— had achieved. The term seem s to have com e into English
around 1772 (Long 1977: 5, Sahlins 1995: 10-11) and probably entered Spanish in the sam e
period. Yet similar notions about the ideal conditions of social life and the existence of an
overall scale of human perfection, of which Christians occupied the pinnacle, began to develop
among W estern Europeans in the Age of Discovery given the exposure to deeply co n tra stin g
indigenous ways of life in the Americas. Documents of that period do not speak of more o rless civilised peoples; they speak of peoples with more or less rational capacity, with o r
without instituted governm ents, organised religious cults, and policfa (civility / urbanity).

34

formulations representing significant ruptures in the practice of geographic
naming. Second, because although they seem to be of the sam e kind (Newsomething), one has its referent in Europe (Spain) while the other has it inAmerica (Mexico).
Place names are endow ed with more semantic attributes than we usuallytend to acknowledge. They are tokens that people establish to relate togeographic space. Hence, not only do they describe particular m arks in alandscape —a physical characteristic or a contingent event— often they encode
political arrangem ents and project on to the signified terrain all sorts ofrepresentations of social and cosmic orders. For this reason toponym s can beseen as empirical traces of cognitive operations; i.e., they illustrate some of themechanisms whereby people make sense of the world.
As far as I know, Edm undo O'Gorman was the first author to discuss the
epistemological implications of toponym s in a book titled La invention deAmerica (1984 [1958]). However, his analysis was very m uch restricted to theterm America itself and did not reach the level of regional or local toponym y.
His argum ent that the New World was hot ’’discovered" but "invented," andthat the label "America" am ounted to the categorical incarnation of suchinvention, has been lately rephrased in term s of colonial discourse. Several
authors in the fields of anthropology and cultural studies have embraced
O'Gorman’s geographical criticism; nevertheless, if they devoted any attention
to toponym y, it is just through their concern for the strategies of dom inationthat might be em bedded in words. Even though this perspective has proved
illuminating in a num ber of ways, it assumes, misleadingly, that hierarchicalrelations always have the consistency of a monologue. As indicated by a m ore
detailed analysis of local and regional place-names, the conclusion that the N ew
W orld was totally constructed from Europe's ow n standpoint, which m any
authors have attained,2 m ust be qualified.
2 Mason, McGrane and Todorov among others use exam ples from the conquest of America todevelop argum ents on cultural imperialism based on the notion of "alterity a s defect". The

35

Early documentary sources concerning the Spanish conquest of mainland
America suggest that the shift in the practice of geographic naming, which thecouplet Nueva Espana / Nuevo Mexico exemplifies, reflects a change in the orderof knowledge of the sort Foucault (1967) recognised in the transform ation offolly into madness, or in the birth of medicine as a science w ith anatomo-clinicalrather than classificatory m ethods (Sheridan 1980: 37-40). That is, a radicaltransform ation of the principles after which experience is codified, which
configures novel forms of practice in a wide variety of ambits. As I willdem onstrate this metamorphosis entailed the formulation of composite framesof conceptual reference which —precisely because of their transcultural
nature— go against the currently popular thesis that, via colonialism, the N ew
W orld was doom ed to the role of blank paper for W estern inscription.
It is true that European expansionism, as Corbey and Leersen contend,
w ent "hand in hand w ith an attem pt to subdue the strangeness of "the Other" incognitive term s" (1991: viii). However, and this is precisely the m ain point of
this thesis, m any of the linguistic actions perform ed as part of the process ofcolonial appropriation —particularly the naming of geopolitical entities—
reveal the opening of a space for cognitive negotiation betw een Indigenous
and Spanish wisdom. A negotiation rooted in the conspicuous comparability
perceived betw een Spain and N ew Spain that turned the local scene from a
subsidiary reality, understood by reference to the subject's culture, into areferent to which new realities would be later referred. In this sense thetoponymic chain I analyse in this chapter is a clear example, within the sphereof socio-geographic representation, of w hat Mignolo (1994b: 16) has term ed"colonial semiosis":a network of semiotic processes in which signs from different cultural
systems interact in the production and interpretation of hybrid cultural
main point in such theorising is that W estern self-identity rests on a bipolar system ofcategorisation, which confronts "Self" and "Other" through a series of c o n tra stiv edistinctions standing along a positive-negative axis. According to this view, America w as
defined in conformity with previously established notions of alterity and therefore underw ent
a process of inferiorisation, with the consequent deprivation of speech.

36artefacts [and concepts]. In colonial semiosis the meaning of a sign nolonger depends on its original cultural context [...] but on the new set of
relations generated by communicative interactions across cultural
boundaries?

2 .1 .-

Theco n q u estofm ainlandA m erica.

Before I substantiate the previous statements a few w ords on the pattern ofcolonial expansion are necessary to contextualize further assertions. The
administrative structure of the Spanish empire shall also be briefly explained.
The subjugation of mainland America was accomplished by military
forays that started off from the island of Hispaniola (today Santo Domingo)
where Christopher Columbus established the first European colony in the N ew
World. Due to new epidemic diseases and to the pattern of extreme
exploitation enforced by the colonists the native population soon began to
decline. A consequence was that slave raiding m oved to new and m ore distantplaces such as the neighbouring islands of Puerto Rico and Cuba and fromthere to the continental shoreline (map 7). Thus, an ever larger area fell under
Spanish control. As is well known, betw een 1492 and 1550 indigenous peoples
were virtually extinguished in the Caribbean, a demographic disaster that was
repeated in some portions of the mainland despite the gradual devising of
official policies to prevent it. It has been calculated, for example, that in Central
Mexico the Indian population dropped from around 25,200,000 in 1519 to
1,069,225 in 1608 (Cook & Borah 1971: 80-82).4 Figures for north-w est N ew
3 Mignolo's intention in coining this term , which encom passes that of colonial discourse, w as
to redraw the limits of a field of study mainly inhabited by texts alphabetically written bycolonisers or in their languages, opening it up to a wider spectrum of semiotic interactions in
Amerindian languages and non alphabetic scripts (1995: 336 n10). His own work places
em phasis on the scriptural aspect of colonial sem iosis; that is, on texts and the sem iotic
interactions they involve. Personally, I use the concept to describe an even wider set of
semiotic interactions, those occurring at the level of certain categories irrespective of th e ir
placem ent within any specific text. The notion of colonial sem iosis a s defined in this quotation
provides a sophisticated analytic tool which will aid in a better understanding of cultural
hybridisation, more so than concepts such a s acculturation or cultural synthesis.
4 R oss Hassig (1985:155-159) provides an interesting analysis of the regional distribution of
population decline in this area. He attributes the disparity in mortality between the coastal
lowlands —which suffered a more precipitous drop— and the highland plateau to the patterns ofsettlem ent prevailing in each area and to the type of disease introduced by Europeans. Despite
the criticism that Cook & Borah's estim ates have undergone they are still the m ost w idely
accepted for Central Mexico.

37

Spain, an area corresponding roughly to present day Colima, Sinaloa andSonora are just as dramatic: native population was reduced from 820,000
individuals in 1519 to 310,000 in 1600 (Gerhard 1982: 24).5/Beyond the Antilles two major lines of conquest can be identified. One,
organised from Cuba, swept through Mexico betw een 1519 and 1522 and thenraided both north and south of the Mexican Central Plateau. The other started
in Panam a in 1522 and after moving briefly up to Nicaragua, took the Pacificroute southw ards for the conquest of the Inca empire (1531-1533), the Am azonbasin and Chile (1525-1549) (Elliott 1984a: 171-172, Gibson 1984: 384-385). The
events that m y thesis is concerned with fall in the Cuba-Mexico path, and can
divided into two phases. The first wave of colonial advance ended in 1542 witha fruitless expedition led by Francisco Vazquez de Coronado to the area know ntoday as the American Southwest (Arizona and N ew Mexico); the second
began in the 1550's and was over by 1693 with the precarious consolidation of
Nuevo Mexico, thenorthernm ost

Spanishpossession

in

the

W estern

Hem isphere.
Although I will not delve upon those enterprises that fall beyond the areaof m y concern, this overall colonising pattern m ust be kept in mind for thisthesis' discussion regarding the w ay in which Spaniards reacted both toindigenous discourse and to regional variations in native social orders, material
culture, and landscape.
The Spanish empire's administrative structure was defined early on. By
the beginning of the sixteenth century two organisms existed at them etropolitan level to handle the affairs of the Indies. The Casa de Contratacion de
Sevilla established in 1503 to regulate trade and navigation "was responsible fororganising and controlling the passage of men, ships and merchandise betw een
Spain and America" (Elliott 1984b: 289), whereas the Real y Supremo Consejo deIndias, founded in 1524 to assist the King in the formulation and enforcement of
5 For the northern portion of New Spain the best demographic studies are by Carl S auer
(1935) and P eter Gerhard (1982).

38

global policies for the colonies, was vested with legislative and judicial
functions. The spontaneous leaders of the early years, w ho perform ed asgovernors of the lands they had conquered, were gradually subjected to acomplex bureaucratic apparatus consisting of a num ber of perm anent legal
tribunals or Audiencias, on

which all regional governorships

becamedependent. The first Audiencia, established in Santo Domingo in 1511, wasfollowed by eight more as the colonial domination extended over new regions.
The system was completed with the creation of two viceroyalties to centralise
the adm inistration of large and distinct territories, New Spain in 1535 and Peru
in 1546. The functionaries that occupied the higher offices of this m achinery
were appointed by the Consejo de Indias. Thus the C row n m anaged toconsolidate its hegemonic control overseas, tem porarily threatened by theentrepreneurial model that conquest endeavours adopted initially.6
At the turn of the fifteenth century as the Spanish m onarchy could only
engage scarce resources in overseas expansion it had to hand over the
responsibility for settling and developing the new lands to private individuals
w ho volunteered to fund, organise, and carry out conquest expeditions. Basedon contractual relations, formally stipulated in the so-called capitulaciones, theC row n bestow ed each volunteering captain with a series of privileges and thelife-time title of governor of the lands he m ight subdue, reserving for the king
only the ultimate sovereignty over the provinces thus established and apercentage of the booty and wealth they produced.7 As part of the laterbureaucratisation of the colonial rule governorships were transform ed into
short-term

posts; therefore,

although capitulaciones continued toexist,

governors began to be periodically shifted, as were judges of the Audiencias
and viceroys. Furtherm ore, a system of perm anent scrutiny was set up forevery functionary in America. Periodical inquiries (visitas) w ere conducted by
6 This administrative system , however, remained rather flexible in a number of ways due todifficulties of long distant control. On this issue se e for instance J. H. Parry (1967) and J. H.
Elliott (1984b).
7 This w as technically termed Quinto Real (Royal Fifth).

39

independent judges, and everyone in public office was subm itted to a residencia
trial at the end of his term, allowing aggrieved parties to state their case before
a presiding judge. W ritten allegation flourished under this highly legalistic andbureaucratic regime; the abundant testimonies and reports it produced arefilled with elaborate argum ents and m inute descriptions of places and events
than frequently m anipulated concrete information to suit the interests of theindividual or group concerned.
2 .2 .-T he

p r o c essofh o m o lo g a tio n .

The foundation of the first municipality (ayuntamiento) of Veracruz and thesubsequent fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlan before the forces led by H em an Cortes,on the 23 of A ugust 1521, were the first steps in the creation of a Spanish colony
in N orth America that received the name of Nueva Espaiia and became, in due
course, the political centre controlling the kingdoms and provinces that Spanish
settlers thereon established to the N orth (map 7). The toponymic choice is quite
significant, for although this was not the first occasion w hen a section of the
N ew World was nam ed after a place in the Old, the referential value inscribedin this term was of a completely original kind. And it could have not beenotherwise, given the unusual circumstance in which it was formulated.
The earliest use of the term as a toponym we know about corresponds toa certificate signed in August 1520 —after the Spaniards w ere tem porarily
expelled from Mexico-Tenochtitlan— w hereby Cortes em pow ered Juan Ochoa
de Lejalde to act as his attorney before the m etropolitan authorities. Given theform in which the docum ent incorporates the term —"... I H ernando Cortes,
captain general and major judge of the N ew Spain of the Ocean Sea..."8— wem ay assume it was formulated before this date but after July 1519, since it does
not appear in the letter then w ritten to report on the events occurred from the8 "... yo Hernando Cort6s, capit&n general e justicia mayor de la Nueva Espna del Mar Oc6ano[...] otorgo todo mi [...] poder [...] a vos, Juan Ochoa de Lejalde." (Poder que otorga Heman
Cortds a Juan Ochoa de Lejalde. Tepeaca, August 6, 1520, in Martinez 1990-1992: I, 115).

40m om ent the arm y had left Cuba.9 According to Friar Juan de Torquem ada(1975 [1615]: II, 23) it was captain Juan de Grijalva who, in 1518, devised the
toponym while travelling along the coast from Yucatan tow ards Veracruz
because he saw m any things which resembled the Iberian Peninsula. As the
expedition's chaplain, Juan Diaz, does not m ention such an episode or term in
his report —the only contem porary testimony we have concerning thisexpedition— there is no direct evidence to corroborate Torquem ada's
assertion.10
In any case, at the end of his second letter to the king (October 30, 1520)
Cortes himself explains w hy the name was chosen:
From all I have seen and understood touching the similarity between thisland and that of Spain, both regarding its fertility and grandeur and its cold
climate, and many other things which make them alike, it seemed to me thatthe most suitable name for it was New Spain of the Ocean Sea, and so inYour Majesty's name I called it that.11
It is in those "many other things that make [Spain and N ew Spain] alike" w here
the extraordinary character of the circumstances that the toponym encodes
m ust be searched, rather than in the mere physical resemblance that thepassage remarks.
W here does the singularity of the encounter with Mexico lie? We only
have to look at the accounts of soldiers involved to realise that, in contrast to
previous experiences in the Caribbean, their feeling of alienation before native
peoples was attenuated by partial recognition. Some features of indigenous
attire and w ay of life resembled, however superficially or misleadingly, the9 1 refer to the Carta del cabildo (July 10, 1519), a report-letter signed by the officials of
the municipality of Vera Cruz appointed by Cortes to legalise his conquest. He sent it to theKing with two representatives, the procuradores Francisco de Montejo and Alonso Hernandez
Portocarrero (Cortds 1960: 3-22).
10 Itinerario de la Armada del rey catolico a la isla de Yucatan, en la India, en el ano 1518, enla que fue por comandante y capitan general Juan de Grijalva (in Vazquez 1988: 37-57). The
original m an uscript, written in 1519 and published in Venice in 1520 is today lost. We only
know the text through the Italian version used in this Venice edition (Garcia Icazbalceta 1 8 5 8 ,I: xiii-xvi).
11 "Por lo que yo he visto y comprendido acerca de la similitud que toda esta tierra tiene a
Espana, as! en la fertilidad como en la grandeza y frios que en ella hace, y en otras m uchas
cosas que le equiparan a ella, me parecid que el m as conveniente nombre para esta dicha
tierra era llamarse la Nueva Espana del Mar Oceano; y asi, en nombre de Vuestra M agestad,se le puso aqueste nombre." Segunda carta-relacion de Hernan Cortes al emperador (C ortes
1960: 79).

41

Spanish universe of things and habits, as the private mail of a courtier of the
Spanish monarch, Peter Martyr d' Anghiera,12 makes clear:
They have brought numerous and magnificent presents for the king from
Coloacana, Olloa, and Cozumela, where [...] people live in a civilisedmanner, under the rule of law.13
In writing these lines M artyr was just repeating w hat he had heard from acouple of Cortes' captains who had arrived bringing goods and letters from the
newly discovered lands. The courtier wrote in March of 1520, before any new s
concerning the marvels of Mexico-Tenochtitlan had reached Europe —themessengers had already parted w hen the Spanish party entered the city at the
beginning of N ovem ber 1519. Nevertheless, M artyr's quotation reveals an
early awareness of the radical contrast between Caribbean and mainland n o rth
American peoples, and shows that even before Tenochtitlan came into view,
soldiers in the field and politicians in Europe regarded the local societies justencountered as comparable to their own. Like Spain, these societies had aruling class that exercised full sovereignty, as Cortes m ade clear w hen herem arked upon the lengthy scope of Moctezuma's authority, "because in noneof the places where he sent his messengers, two hundred leagues from his
magnificent city in either direction, was his command disobeyed; even though
he sustained w ar w ith some provinces within that area."14 Likewise, they had aseries of institutions and administrative routines which surpassedthe

12 Known in Spanish as Pedro Martir de Angleria. His name w as originally Italian, P ie tro
Martire d'Anghiera (Mignolo 1995: 171).
13 "Desde las Indias han traido para el rey num erosos y magmficos regalos de Coloacana, Olloay Cozumela, donde [...] se vive conforme a las leyes y civilizadam ente." carta a losmarqueses, March 14, 1520. The use of the term "civilised" com es from the Spanishtranslation here quoted (Martir de Angleria 1990: 106). I ignore what is the word in th eoriginal Latin text but it most probably is a derivation of the term civitas signifying theexistence of a body politic in the classical sense, essentially characterised by non-kin-based
forms of political authority, law and urbanism. By Coloacana Martyr certainly m eant C u lu a o r
Colua, nam e of a Nahua community in the valley of Mexico that, as we shall see in c h a p te rs
three and six, the Aztecs had adopted as their own. The Spaniards who had explored the c o a stof the Gulf of Mexico in 1517 and 1518 had repeatedly heard the word used by natives who
referred to Mexico, core of the Aztec empire. Olloa (Ulua) w as an island off the coastal
village of Vera Cruz where Cortes founded the first municipality in New Spain, and Cozumela
the island where he first landed, off the coast of Yucatan.
14 "El senorio de tierras que este Mutezuma tenia no se ha podido alcanzar cuanto era, porquea ninguna parte, doscientas leguas de un cabo y de otro de aquella su gran ciudad, enviaba su s
m ensajeros que no fuese cumplido su mandato, aunque habia algunas provincias enmedio dee sta s tierras con quien el tenia guerra." Segunda carta-relacidn... (Cortes 1960: 54).

42

apparently simple structures characteristic of the small chiefdoms that earlyaccounts of the Caribbean and the N orth Atlantic coast of South America
scarcely describe.
The conquerors m ade few comments on the social and politicalorganisation of the first indigenous peoples they came across before the coastof Yucatan was discovered. Generally speaking the writings that pertain to the
Caribbean phase describe nature and geography in detail, but w hen it comes topeople's beliefs and customs, they focus on their "superstitions", the objects
they worshipped (zemes or cemts in the Spanish transliteration of the local
language), nakedness and the practice of cannibalism. The m ention of "kings"(reyes/reyezuelos), "rulers" (regulos) and "principal men" (hombres principales),whom the Indians called caciques, appears constantly in early accounts such as
the first Decade of M artyr's De Orbe Novo Decades (1530),15 and in the writings
by Columbus, by friar Ram6n Pane (c. 1498) and by H em an Perez de Oliva(1525-1528). Nevertheless the fact that they provided no proper description of
w hat to be a king or cacique meant indicates how far rem oved they felt fromthe societies they encountered.16 This difficulty to relate to the native Caribbean
w orld is manifest in the presum ed "absence" of social and political order that
Columbus reported in a letter addressed to the Sovereigns on March 4,1493:
After I arrived at Juana [Cuba ...] I sent two men inland [...] so that they
could see and determine if there were any cities or large settlements [...]
They found many settlements and innumerable people, but no governmentof any importance [...] All these islands are densely populated [...] women
15 An Italian translation of Martyr's first Decade w as published in 1504, although the originalLatin text w as not printed until 1511 (Seville) and then again in 1516, together with theother Decades, in a volume titled Deccas Occeana (Alcala de Henares). In 1530 a new Latin
edition appeared a s De Orbe Novo Decades (see the introduction to Pane 1974 [c. 1498]: 11).
For this thesis I consulted the Spanish translation by Millares Carlo (Martir de Angleria
1 9 6 4 -1 9 6 5 ).
16 In Columbus' diary, under the heading for December 17, 1492, we can read that in theisland of Hispaniola "they saw a man the Admiral had for the governor of that province, whom[the natives] called cacique" (vieron a uno, que tuvo el almirante por gobernador de aquellaprovincia, que llamaban cacique). The entry for the next day say s that "there the Admiralknew that in their language they called the king cacique” (alii supo el almirante que al re yllamaban en su lengua cacique). Quoted by Jo se Juan Arrom in a footnote to his edition of theHistoria de la Invencidn de las Indias by Hernan Perez de Oliva, who glossed the episode a sfollows: "Columbus diligently pondered those people's m anners a s best a s he could [...] andthrough sign language he knew that there were kings governing the island, one of whom w aspresent" (Coldn consideraba diligentemente la m anera de aquellas gentes io mejor que podia[...] y conocio por senales que habia en aquella isla reyes que la gobernaban, uno de los cuales
era presente) (P6rez de Oliva 1991 [1525-1528]: 46).

43

and men alike, go about naked [...] And I have not learned that any of them
have any private property [...] Nowhere in these islands have I known the
inhabitants to have a religion, or idolatry.17
The connection between the absence of a proper political order and the lack ofreligion or even idolatry that this paragraph establishes is consistent w ith theexclusive use of the indigenous w ord zeme for all sorts of objects of worship inother contem porary documents, which has its correlate in the proliferation of"vassals", "lords" and "idols" in most eye-witness accounts of the conquest of
Mexico and the two expeditions along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico thatpreceded Cortes’; the first led by Francisco H ernandez de Cordoba (1517), thesecond by Juan de Grijalva (1518).
Like the fetish for the Portuguese during their sixteenth and seventeenth
century mercantile activities along the West African coast (Pietz 1985 & 1987),
the Caribbean zeme of Spanish accounts escaped the definition of idol, which
implied, according to Pietz, a "relation of iconic resemblance to som e
immaterial model or entity" (1985: 7). Distinguished from other objects ofw orship by its "irreducible materiality," the fetish was a god-object in itself, amaterial em bodim ent of a particular force or natural property (Pietz 1985: 7).
Likewise, zemes were non figurative, venerated objects of direct worship used
to induce beneficial effects, such as health or abundant crops, which exerted no
moral authority and entailed no institutionalised ritual (Bernard & Gruzinski
1992: 190-191). Conquerors thus perceived them as the cultic counterpart of alawless, disjointed society.
The portrayal of indigenous culture that Pane drafted in the report hew rote after living am ong the Tamo of Hispaniola for nearly three years
includes only two references to the socio-political order. First he asserts that"their law is compiled in ancient songs, after which they govern themselves;
and w hen they w ant to sing these songs they use a certain instrum ent [...]

17 Translated into English by Margarita Zamora in an article published by Greenblat (1993: 3 -

8 ).

44

which the principal men play."18 Then, in a different paragraph, he describes thesecret consultations held by the "hombres principales," w ho used a certain
pow der to propitiate visions through which they could foresee the results of
w ar (Pane 1974 [c.1428]: 42). Perez de Oliva wrote his Historia de la invencion delas Indias in Spain, based on Pane and Peter Martyr. Like the latter, he had
never been to America and found it too easy to render into "kings" all thecaciques,"regulos" and"hombres principales," while clearly stating that

Caribbean people "knew no literacy and for law they followed nothing but
custom."19
In N ew Spain things were different. Socio-political comparability wasincontestably signalled by bare, observable facts. The new land was filled withcities, buildings were "constructed with lime and m ortar,"20 and people
gathered periodically in large squares to "buy and sell" all the things theyneeded.21 Of course there was idolatry as well, as "temples" could be seen allover the place; that is, "towers"22 topped with rooms exclusively used for"devotional purposes." But as Bernard and Gruzinski contend, in the sixteenth
century for the Spanish conquerors to say idolatry was to say civilisation, albeit
civilisation plus the devil or without the true God. Like in Peru and in contrast
18 "Tienen su ley compendiada en canciones antiguas, por las cuales se rigen [...J Y cuando
quieren cantar su s canciones tocan cierto instrumento [...] y lo tocan los hom bres principales"(P an e 1974 [c.1428]: 34).
19 "Letras ningunas tenian, y por leyes guardaban sola la costum bre." (P6rez de Oliva 1991
[1525-1528]: 47).
90 The sam e expression ( edificios de cal y canto) repeatedly appears in official or personal
letters and legal testim onies of the time. It was one of the first things noted in the Carta delCabildo (C o rtls 1960: 6, 17). Francisco de Aguilar, who participated in the assault on
Mexico-Tenochtitlan also remarked the point in the Relacion breve de la conquista de la Nueva
Espana that he wrote around 1570 (in Vazquez 1988: 161-206). Other relevant docum ents
include Juan Diaz' report on the expedition led by Juan de Grijalva from Yucatan to V eracruz
in 1518 ( Itinerario de la Armada ... in Vazquez 1988: 37-57) and an early letter by abureaucrat called Alonso Zuazo, dated in Cuba November14, 1521 (Garcia Icazbalceta 1 8 5 8 ,I: 358-367). It w as on the grounds of the information gathered by Grijalva that the governorof Cuba decided to send Hern£n Cort6s to further explore the area. Mr. Zuazo held a ju d iciary
post in the island and was among the most enthusiastic supporters of the enterprise. Later on
he w as sen t to New Spain and he occupied Mexico's government temporarily when C ortes w asabsent in Honduras (Garcia Icazbalceta 1858: I, xvii). The sam e remark about lime andmortar buildings is conspicuous in Martyr’s account of the first expedition to sight Yucatan,that is, the one by Hernandez de Cordoba in 1517 (see W agner 1942: 33).
21 Segunda carta-relacion... (Cort§s 1960: 33, 51-52), Conquistador Anonimo (1986: 1 4 7 ),Diaz del Castillo (1982 [c. 1555]: 192).
22 This is how Spaniards described pyramids, which they also called "mosques" (m ezquitas).
The worship of idols in m osques is one of the most repeated them es in sixteenth c e n tu rysources concerning New Spain; se e for example the fragm ents of early chronicles on the f i r s t
arrivals at Yucatan in 1517 reproduced by W agner (1942).

45

with the Caribbean conquerors immediately identified a religion, which they
compared w ith Islam and defined as idolatry. In both places they assum ed thatas a perverted religion idolatry could only exist within civilisation, since itreplaces chaos and always appears w hen there is a constituted, superiorauthority to centralise pow er (Bernard & Gruzinski 1992:14-17,29-30, 40-56, 6869,190-191; Gruzinski 1994: 20-21).
The term inology employed by eye-witness accounts of the first three
expeditions to the m ainland is in itself revealing; the Carta del cabildo (July 1519)
for example, is partly presented as a report on the "land's issues [...], the people
that possesses it, and the law or creed, rites and ceremonies they live by."23 It
was in this geographic space that w ords like market-place (mercado), priest(sacerdote), street (calle, calzada), law and administration of justice (ley,administracion de justicia), governor (gobernador), vassals (vasallos), lords andlordships (senores, senorios), ally (aliado), ambassador (embajador), citizen(ciudadano) and emperor (emperador) were applied to describe native societies
for the first time.24 Rather than a mere coincidence this was a linguistic
manifestation of a recognition of similarity that m ade Spaniards m ore open to
indigenous views, a first step tow ards the establishment of communication
across cultures. In this sense the Spanish encounter with Mexico/Nueva Espana
is an early instance of w hat Joanna Overing (1987: 74-75), using as example thevarious translations of Beowulf in the nineteenth and tw entieth centuries, calls"the pow er of labels in the conjuring up of new worlds," insofar as thepossibility to categorise w hat they saw after landing in Yucatan according totheir own labels gave the Spaniards a more clear idea of w hat they had
previously seen. Paradoxically, the notion of cacique, a Tamo w ord initially usedas synonymous w ith "indigenous ruler" in general, acquired a definite m eaning
23 "... que vu estras m ajestades fuesen informados de las cosas de e sta tierra [...] y de lagente que la posee, y de la ley o secta, ritos y cerem onias en que viven" (Cortes 1960: 16).
24 S ee for example the letters by Peter Martyr and also the fourth of his Decades (Martir deAngleria 1990 & 1964-1965). See as well Cortes' segunda carta-relacidn ( 1960: 3 1 -1 0 0 ) ;Diaz' Itinerario de la armada..., Aguilar's Relacion breve..., and the two Relaciones by A ndresde Tapia and Bernardino Vazquez de Tapia (In Vazquez 1988: 40, 57, 79, 86, 93, 97, 1 4 0 ,141, 142, 165, 171, 173, 174).

46

precisely in N ew Spain, as it gradually ceased to signify any type of ruler andbecame the specific term to designate local chiefs whose pow er wascircumscribed.25
Politics and religion were the m ain locus where recognition led the
Spaniards to bridge incommensurability because those were precisely thecornerstones of their identity. These natives, is the concluding rem ark of the
Carta del cabildo, "live in a more political and reasonable m anner than any of thepeoples seen until now in this part" of the world.26 Indeed, the Spaniards
adm ired m ost of w hat they saw among the natives of New Spain because they
saw their dealings and cultural achievements —including even their idolatry—
as a sign of civilisation, in the Roman-derived sense of a civic oriented
comm unity life.
M any of the soldiers enrolled in Cortes' arm y had already spent som e
years in the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba, and were now aghast at thepresence of fortified cities, stone and lime buildings, formal marketplaces,
cotton clothing, and book-like records. Cortes himself w rote that Haxcala had"buildings as good as Granada and many m ore people than that city had w hen
it was taken," stating as well that the governm ent of the province was "almost
like in the lordships of Venice, Genoa or Pisa" because rather than one
25 Compare how this term w as used before the Spaniards arrived in Tlaxcala ( Carta delcabildo, in C ortes 1960) and after (Cortes 1960, segunda carta-relacion). Consider th efollowing statem ent by Diaz del Castillo a s well: We explained to the Indians in Mexico th a t"we cam e from faraway lands and that we were vassals of a great em peror called Don
Carlos, who has many great lords and caciques for vassals" (vemamos de lejas tierras yeram os vasallos de un gran em perador que se dice Don Carlos, el cual tiene por vasallos amuchos grandes senores y caciques). Note that em peror, lords and caciques are c le a rly
differentiated a s three hierarchical positions in the scale of ruling power. For the origin andindigenous meaning of the word cacique see Manuel Alvar (1970: 55-56), who quotes th ispassage. Haskett (1991: 133) a sse rts that cacique w as the Arawakan word for lead er(kassiquan - to have or maintain a house), and that having adopted it during the e a rly
Caribbean phase of settlem ent, the Spaniards later applied it to the tlatoque and other highnobles of central New Spain. Men described a s caciques, argues Haskett, held th e
governorship with great frequency in sixteenth century New Spain though in many regions
their statu s gradually eroded in the face of competition from aggressive figures of le s s e r
status. Thus by the mid seventeenth century it was rare to find caciques in high public office.
H askett's sixteenth century governor/cac/'gi/es had been tlatoques before the conquest but
integrated into the colonial administration they occupied subordinate positions within th e
overall scale of rule. As a concept in the Spanish language, then, cacique implied
circum scribed authority from the sixteenth century accession to Central Mexico on. N either
Moctezuma nor the Cazonci (Tarascan overlord) were ever labelled caciques.
26 "Viven m6s politica y razonablem ente que ninguna de las gentes que hasta hoy en e s ta spartes s e han visto" (Cortes 1960: 18).

47

"overlord" there was "many lords" living in the "city," of w hom the "peasants ofthe surrounding villages [were] vassals."27 About Churultecal (Cholula) he said
that every piece of land was cultivated and yet in m any quarters people
suffered from scarcity so "the poor beg am ong the rich in the streets, thehouses and markets like the indigent do in Spain and other places w here there
are reasonable people."28 Examples could be multiplied but the previous suffice
to prove that the conqueror's amazement did not actually spring from facing
an absolute oddity in the form of unrecognisable objects. It was rather derived
from the fact that the hum an order they found was readable, or so they
thought at least: "In the services they have and the m anners they follow", said
Cortes about Tenochtitlan "there is almost the same w ay of life as in Spain, withthe same concert and order."29
In conclusion, it is the paradox entailed in this particular combination of
surprise and familiarity w hat makes the accession to Mexico such an
extraordinary event, both for us (analytically) and in term s of historicalactuality (for the individuals involved). Two propositions derive from this
discussion. First, that this which I call the "Mexican paradox" established an
epistemological precedent: the apprehension of the exotic entourage by m eansof its assimilation with familiar notions about society.30 Second, that the nam e
27 Tlaxcala tiene "tan buenos edificios y [...] muy mucha m as gente que Granada tenia altiempo que se gan6 [...] La orden [...] que la gente de ella tiene en gobernarse, es casi como lassenorias de Venecia y Genova o Pisa, porque no hay sefior general de todos. Hay muchos
senores y todos residen en esta ciudad, y los pueblos de la tierra son labradores y son
vasallos de esto s senores" (Cortes 1960: 33-34).
28 En Cholula " ni un palmo de tierra hay que no este labrada, y aun con todo en m uchas p a rte s
padecen necesidad [...] hay mucha gente pobre y que piden entre los ricos por las calles y por
las c a s a s y m ercados, como hacen los pobres en Espana y en otras partes que hay gente derazon" (C ortes 1960: 37).
29 "...en su servicio y trato de la gente de ella hay la m anera casi de vivir que en Espana, y
con tanto concierto y orden como alia..." (Cortes 1960: 54).
30 In a couple of recent studies Jam es Lockhart has developed the concept of "Double M istaken
Identity" to define one of the mechanisms at the root of cultural interaction between Nahuas
and Spaniards which corroborates the nature of the "paradox" I herein describe. According tohim, the m assive contact between indigenous and immigrant Spanish population entailed a gooddeal of misunderstanding between the members of two societies superficially resembling eachother. Each side in this process assum ed that certain forms and concepts of the other w e reessentially already known to itself and therefore operated in much the sam e m anner as in its
own tradition, and acted accordingly. As a result both cultural patterns affected each o th e r
and w ere partially preserved. Thus the Spanish conquest of Central Mexico —or for th a t
m atter New Spain— was possible, in a sense, precisely because there w as a certain degree ofcoincidence between native and Hispanic practices and institutions. As he rem arks, Nahua
pre-conquest societies were surprisingly similar to their European counterparts, and for th isreason a lot of apparently Hispanic structures could immediately be established (Lockhart

48

Nueva Espana imposed on these lands entitled the whole process.31 Bothpropositions run against most recent interpretations concerning the link
betw een conquest and knowledge of "the Other" in the N ew World,
persistently described since the 1990s as a form of conceptual domesticationentailing the reading of absolutely unfamiliar American realities against earlier
European notions of alterity deriving from the Classical and Christiantraditions.32
Toponymic practices during the initial Caribbean phase of colonial
expansion w ere heterogeneous. Sometimes, colonists simply endorsed w hat
they thought to be the indigenous nam e of a given place (Cuba, Paria, Uraba)
seldom realising that, like in the case of Yucatan, the w ord they took for aterritorial

denomination

actually conveyed

quite a different

message.

According to Alonso de la Cruz, Peter M artyr and Francisco L6pez de Gom ara
Yucatan was a mishearing of the Mayan expression tectetan m eaning '1 do notunderstand you" (quoted in W agner 1942: 33, 42).33 Perhaps the m ost frequent
device, however, w as to call locations after the Christian calendar according to
the dates in which they were "discovered" or their inhabitants w ere reduced topolitical obedience (San Salvador, Santo Domingo, Trinidad, Corpus Christi).
Finally, some places received the name of a European province or some otherlocation back in the Old World in accordance with the provenance of theconquerors or w ith the perception of a certain geographic similarity (Cartagena
de Indias and Castilla del Oro). Thus, upon applying a grammatical analysis we
can say that a name, which particularises, almost became simply a noun and1992: 445 & 1999). In recent years Hugh Thomas has also pointed out the sim ilarities
between sixteenth century Spain and pre-conquest societies in Central Mexico (1992: 1 9 -2 8
& 1993: xi-xiv).
31 I take the concept of entitlem ent from Kenneth Burke (1966: 359-379) who used it toremark upon the capacity of symbolic action to confer particular identities to persons, thingsand situations.
32 This point will be further discussed in chapters five and seven and also in the conclusions.
33 Hugh Thom as (1993: 91) provides other alternative derivations for the word, like ciuthan,m eaning "they say so."49

therefore there are cities like Merida which have three or m ore different
embodiments in Spain and its colonies.34
Strange as it m ight seem, we cannot classify Nueva Espana as an instanceof the latter kind of toponymic logic. A detailed analysis reveals a fundam ental
difference between the representational value attributed to individual w ords inthis name, and others that seem equivalent at a first glance. Cartagena de Indias,
for example, reproduces the name of a city located in the Iberian Peninsula
supplem ented with a distinctive companion that qualifies the m ain noun via
specifying the geographic location (de Indias). The same can be said about
Castilla del Oro: the name of a European territory is followed by a naturalistic
qualification (del Oro). In both cases the qualifying particle is a further
description that differentiates the Old W orld referent from the place it
designates in the N ew World.
"Nueva Espana " works under different semantic principles. Once m ore wehave a European name reproduced, this time that of the m otherland itself.
Again, a qualifying particle (Nueva) is added to distinguish the original from the
double am ong the homonyms. But "new” only allows the distinction betw een
tw o entities, and not many. The w ord "Espana " does not become a substantive
b ut remains a name with two referents related almost in a symmetrical fashion.
Thus, the distinctive particle in this toponym does not function as a modifierthat changes the original m eaning of the term. On the contrary, the adjective"Nueva " (New) remarks upon the meaning of "Espana ", taking the body of theconcept, intact, to the new territory. Com pared to an example like Cartagena deIndias, it w orks through displacement and replication rather than bymodification. This goes with the fact that "Espana" signified a political entitythat articulated in one single legal order a num ber of different communities,

34 T hese naming strategies were also used in the later mainland phase of conquest, to g e th e rwith another modality which consists in using the nam es of Spanish kings and v ic e ro y s:
Fernandina for Cuba in honour of king Ferdinand, the Philippine islands after king Philip II,
Cape Mendocino after viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, etc. (Portillo y Diez de Sollano 1 9 4 7 :

1 10 ).

50

and even peoples, under the same sovereignty, like the em pire that
Moctezuma ruled apparently did to the eyes of the labelling intruders. It should
be clear now that the link between this "new" sign (the newly coined toponym )and its referent (the lands and peoples formerly subjected to the Mexica state,or contesting its domination) is not restricted to the previous play of particularfeatures resembling the metropolis. In this case the signifier, though altered b y
the new context, carries the connotations of its previous m eaning, draw ing a
relation of hom ology between Spain and N ew Spain. After this m om ent
circumscribed resemblance, incidental consonance or the m ere acceptance of anative nam e gave w ay to a global and normalised conceptualisation, powerfulenough to project itself as the principle operating in future circumstances.
Indeed, the term Nueva Espana gave rise to the centennial practice ofm irroring the European sovereignties in their American dependencies: N ew
France, N ew England, N ew Holland. It became a formula to establish rights ofconquest against rival European powers, a legitimising device laid across the
Atlantic Sea. However, despite its importance, I will leave the colonialist
structure of N ew W orld toponym y aside as I intend to focus upon a different
issue. Rather than reconstructing the consequences that the term Nueva Espana
had over the imperial carrier of the European nations, I am interested in thecultural predicam ent from which it was born. That its coinage established alabelling code for imperialist endeavours is undeniable, yet this does not m eanthat it was primarily conceived as a signal of colonial appropriation. In thissense, N ew Spain stands in sharp contrast with that other nam e form ulated by
Christopher Columbus for the first island he claimed in favour of the Spanish
Crown: La Espanola,35 anglicised as Hispaniola. "Espanola" is a genitive

35 Columbus wrote to the Pope in 1502: “Esta isla es Tharsis, e s Cethia, e s Ofir y Ophaz e
Cipango, y nos la habemos llamado Espanola” (This island is Tharsis, Cethia, Ofir and Ophaz
and Cipango, and we have called it Espanola) (quoted by Ainsa 1992: 119).

51

grammatical form literally m eaning "it that belongs to Spain;" actually theabbreviated form of "La Isla Espanola " (Spain's Island).36
We are so familiar with the linguistic overtones of the imperialist
competition that we frequently dismiss the cognitive value inherent to thew ords of the conquistadors, which m eaning we take for granted assum ing they
are just signs and therefore have a straightforward and unproblem atic relation
to the things they signify. Nevertheless, docum entary sources testify to a
linguistic process that runs parallel to that of colonial accomplishment but is not
fully encompassed within it. There is in fact one instance, at least, in which the
linguistic phenom enon seems dissonant with respect to the toponym ic
encoding of the Indian's subjection to the European metropolises. That isprecisely the formulation of the toponym Nuevo Mexico, and of course theconstitution of its semantic content in the collective imagination. The issue isrelevant because even though this toponym fits in the same m ould as Nueva
Espana and the like, we cannot possibly interpret it as a mere side effect ofEuropean appropriation. In this case the hom ology did not involve theprojection of anything metropolitan; rather it was achieved via reproducing thenam e of a section of the land that was being colonised.
The semantic relation existing betw een Nuevo Mexico and Nueva Espana
provides substantial evidence to argue that in this portion of the American
land-mass,the

Spaniards

grantedauthoritative

statustoindigenous

understandings. As this constitutes the core issue of my thesis I shall return to it
later on. In w hat remains of this chapter I will show that if w e do not place
conquest and colonial domination as the m ain or sole explanatory device,alternatively interpreting both place-names in relation to the cognitive process
w hereby they came into being, we get a different picture of the interactions
occurred betw een the two main parties involved in the Euro-American
36 P eter Hulme (1994: 166-167) elaborates on the possible meanings and implications of th istoponym, arguing that besides it being a literal way to represent the act of taking possession
by naming it w as a form of possessing the foreign in language through domestication and, inconsequence, a device to familiarise the menacing exotic.

52

encounter (natives and intruders). As Stuart B. Schwartz recently noted (1995:
6):
if one views cultural encounters and evaluations as governed by aperspective of power and hegemony [...] there is the danger of falling into
the reductionist argument in which ultimate goals determine cultural
understandings in a somewhat simplistic fashion.
The birth of a nam ing practice entails subtle epistemological transformations. In
this case the m etam orphosis implied, first, the introduction of homologicaloperations to mediate betw een certainty and surprise, two elements that in aw ay characterise Cortes' enterprise and are unique in respect to previous andposterior experiences in the New World; and secondly, the increasing recourse
to analogies for which Spanish institutions and customs, and also the newly
know n aboriginal served as the source domain. Thus McGrane's contention
that in the New World "the unknow n was not explained by the know n but
brought into the vicinity of another unknown, which suddenly transform ed
both unknow ns into knowns" (McGrane 1989:16-23), is only partially valid; forafter the encounter with Central Mexico —and

this is precisely the

epistemological innovation the term Nueva Espana incarnates— the exotic wasoften m easured against the "self-constitutive."
The following section is an overview of those aspects of the indigenous
political economy in Central Mexico that explain w hy the conquerors perceived
the region as a "New Spain". For as James Lockhart contends (see note 30
above) they mistook superficial similarities for a systemic equivalence ofconcepts and institutions.
2 .3 .-

Thec o n d itio n s

fo r

to p o n y m ic

tr a n sfe r e n c e .

Surprise was undoubtedly the first feeling that held Cortes and his m en preyw hen they reached Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the political centre of the powerful
empire that their Indian informants had been pointing to since they put ashore
in Veracruz. According to their own testimonies, the size of the city

53

—extending over an area of 1000 hectares or 13 square kilometers (Noguera
1974: 67)— particularly surprised the conquerors. Diego de Ordaz, the first
Spaniard to catch a complete glimpse of the valley of Mexico during a scouting
mission to m ount Popocatepetl in September 1519, declared in returning to the
Spanish encam pm ent "that he was astonished/frightened37 at the scene hecould see" from the summit: "another new world of large settlements andtowers, and a sea, and a huge city built within it."38 Cortes himself, describing
the portent in his second letter to the king (1960: 51), said that Tenochtitlan was
as big as Cordoba or Sevilla, tw o of Spain's largest urban settlements of thetim e (Martinez 1990: 54). But if size seemed overwhelming, the very location of
the city —am idst the waters— was no less disturbing, as Ordaz' testim ony andthe ephem eral nickname of "Venecia la Rica" (Venice the Rich) that conquerors
initially used39 suggest.
Tenochtitlan stood on an island within a lacustrine basin in the centre of abroad valley (nearly 3000 square miles in size). Over time the natural island,
located near the juncture of the salt and fresh waters of tw o of the fiveinterlocking lakes constituting the basin (map 3), Tetzcoco and Xochimilco, hadbeen extended by an indigenous technique of land reclamation of m arshy areas(Berdan 1989: 18-22, Noguera 1974: 66-7). Thus at the m om ent of the Spanish
arrival most of the city was built atop a collection of artificial square plots(ichinampas), laid out in a grid pattern criss-crossed by a system of streets and

37 The word in Spanish is "espantado," which can also be translated as "appalled,""staggered" or "scared." The definition for the word “e sp a n to ” provided by the 1 7 3 2
Spanish Royal Aacademy quotation dictionary on the basis of its usage in d iffe ren t
authoritative texts is the following: “T error, asombro, consternacion y perturbacidn delanimo, que cau sa inquietud y desasosiego y altera los sentidos [...] Vale asimismo adm iraciony asom bro, no causado de miedo, sino de reparo y consideracion de alguna n o v e d a d ...”
(terror, am azem ent, a state of emotional disturbance and consternation, something th a t
ca u ses disquiet and alters the sen se s ... Also meaning admiration and awe, not out of fear but
due to the realisation and consideration of som e novelty) (Real Academia Espanola 1984).
38 "Otro nuevo mundo de grandes poblaciones y torres, y una mar, y dentro de ella una ciudad
muy grande edificada, y que a la verdad al parecer, ponia tem or y espanto." (Francisco deAguilar, Relacidn breve..., in Vazquez 1988: 176). It seem s that captains Pedro de A lvarado
and Bernardino Vazquez de Tapia, who were sent to have a look at Tenochtitlan around thesam e time but were only able to reach Tetzcoco did not reach a point where they could attaina panoramic view of the whole valley (V&zquez de Tapia, Relacidn de meritos y servicios, inV azquez 1988: 139-141).
39 M£rtir de Angleria, carta a los marqueses, March 7, 1521 (1990: 109)

54

canals leading towards all four cardinal points from a central walled-in precinct(map 8).40 Here, within this enclosure stood the city's m ain ceremonial district.
Most of the seventy-eight buildings that it contained, according to friar
Bernardino de Sahagun (quoted by Noguera 1974: 56) w ere sacred, the m ost
im portant being the great twin tem ple-pyram id dedicated to the gods
Huitzilopochtli and Haloc. However, it was the m ulti-roomed palaces of rulers
and nobles which provided the scenario for the luxurious court-life thatchroniclers so vividly described. Moctezuma's palace, for instance was said tohave a hundred rooms including dormitories, saloons and granaries, plus a
num ber of magnificent gardens (Noguera 1974: 57). A series of causeways
connected the island with three major cities ashore, Tlacopan, Tetzcoco andColhuacan, dividing the city in four cardinal sectors, or wards. Together with adike that separated fresh and salt water, they also served as an hydraulicsystem to control the currents and prevent floods. All five lakes w ere
constantly navigated by canoes of different sizes transporting people andgoods and were surrounded by m any towns and small cities, each with its ow n
civic and ceremonial centre though subjected to the dom ination of Tenochtitlan
or one of its tw o allies: Tetzcoco and Tlacopan.
The lengthy descriptions contained in Cortes' second report-letter to theKing and the accounts of some soldiers in his arm y such as the so-called
A nonym ous Conqueror, Andres de Tapia, Francisco de Aguilar, and Bernal
Diaz del Castillo give us a hint of the aspects that drew the Spaniards'
attention.41 The conquerors adm ired the city's layout just as m uch as cultivation
40 Ross Hassig (1985: 41-45) provides a detailed description of the valley including its size
and topography, the hydrological conditions connecting the lakes, and the developm ent of thechinampa agricultural system . Frances Berdan (1989: 29-32) also describes the valley w ith
detail. For a more recent evaluation of the socio-political implications of chinampa agricultures e e Elizabeth M. Brumfiel (1991) and Jeffrey R. P arsons (1991).
41 This letter by Cort6s, almost contem porary with the events, is the earliest testim ony wehave of the Spaniards' accession to Tenochtitlan. The other documents herein referred to a realso eye-w itness accounts but they were written from memory som e y ears later. The
account by the Anonymous Conqueror, first published in 1556 by Giovanni Batista Ramusio in
an Italian translation, was written somewhen between 1531 and 1556 (Conquistador Anonimo
1986:13); the chronicle by Diaz del Castillo dates from c. 1555, Tapia's Relacidn (in Vazquez1988) from 1539, and Aguilar's Relacidn Breve de la Conquista de la Nueva Espana (inV&zquez 1988) from c. 1570.

55

techniques. But it was two aspects of the political economy that they were m ost
am azed by: commercial activity and structures of prestige. This is clearlyattested by the disparately extensive passages they devoted to marketplaces
and ruling class etiquette. Diaz del Castillo (1982 [c. 1555]: 192) w rote that in them arket-square of Tlatelolco his fellow soldiers were deeply im pressed to see"the m ultitude assembled there" to buy and sell their goods, and also that som essoldiers "who had been in m any parts of the world, in Constantinopole, Italy
and Rome," said they had seen nothing similar before.42 Equally impressed,
Francisco de Aguilar (in Vazquez 1988: 180) noted that em peror M octezuma
behaved at every m om ent in a "very authoritative manner" (con mucha
autoridad) and was served "like a great prince and lord" (su servicio era como degran principe y senor)43
The enthusiasm transpiring in the Anonym ous Conqueror's descriptionof Tlatelolco's m ain square (1986: 147) shows that the Spaniards foundm arketplaces so appealing because they resonated w ith their ow n world andcould be seen as microcosms revealing the complexity of the indigenous society
at large. Like courtly routine, they unveiled the prevailing degree of productive
specialisation, and the concomitant social stratification this implied. Therefore
they stood as rem inders of things left behind in the Iberian Peninsula:
Tenochtitlan has very large and beautiful squares where they sell everything
they use; especially the great square they call the Tutelula [Tlatelolco],
which may be three times the size of the great square of Salamanca, and is
all surrounded by porticoes; from twenty to twenty five thousand people
gather every day in this place to buy and sell; and in market-days [...even]
forty to fifty thousand people. They have good order, both in that each classof merchandise is separately sold in its own section, and in their dealings.
On one side of the square they sell gold; and in a nearby area [...] precious
stones of various classes mounted in gold shapes of different birds andanimals. In another section they sell beads and mirrors; somewhere elsefeathers and tufted crests of birds of all colours to adom the cloths theywear at war and in festivities. Further away they are busy turning stones
into knives and swords [...] Here they sell the grains they use, there several
42 "... tornam os a ver la gran plaza y la multitud de gente que en ella habia, unos comprando yotros vendiendo [...] y entre nosotros hubo soldados que habian estado en m uchas partes delmundo, y en Constantinopla y en toda Italia y Roma, y dijeron que plaza tan bien com pasada ycon tanto concierto, y tam ana y llena de tanta gente, no la habian visto."
43 S ee also Andrds de Tapia's comments on Moctezuma's m eals and palaces (in Vdzquez 1 9 8 8 :105-106), and the descriptions of Tenochtitlan by C ortes (1960: 51-56) and by the
C onquistador Andnimo (1986: 141-153).

56

kinds of bread; in one spot they sell pastry, in another hens, chickens andeggs, and in the proximity hares, rabbits, deer, quail, geese and ducks. Then,in a different area they sell wines of various classes, and .in yet another all
sorts of vegetables.44
Archaeological evidence for the pre-conquest urban netw ork in the lake basin
is scarce, since Mexico city is now built atop the m ain settlements of that period.
For the central part, which was originally the island, we have isolated thoughsignificant findings45 dem onstrating that m ost descriptions recordedinchronicles and other documents from the early fifteen hundreds are fairly
accurate regarding the extension and physiognom y of the urban area, thenum ber of its inhabitants and their occupation.
The Anonym ous

Conqueror

observedthat Tenochtitlan wasincircumference "more than two and a half leagues, or perhaps th re e /'46 Based on
this and other testimonies, and also by means of projecting over a m ap of them odem city the ancient quarters, Josd Luis de Rojas (1986: 43) calculated its size
at approximately 13.5 square kilometres. The same witness stated that m ost
conquerors "estimate the city's population at seventy thousand inhabitants,
rather m ore than less."47 Given the fact that other chroniclers m ention aroundsixty thousand houses rather than individuals it seems that the Italian editor of
the now lost anonym ous report mistranslated vecinos (neighbours) as personas(persons), which is probably incorrect because in the Spanish usage of the
44 "Hay en la ciudad de Temistitan Mexico grandfsimas y bellisimas plazas, donde se venden
todas las co sas que se usan entre ellos, y especialm ente la plaza mayor que ellos llaman deTutelula, que puede ser tan grande como seria tres veces la plaza de Salam anca, y todo su
entorno est£ porticado; en esta plaza se reunen ordinariam ente cada dia para com prar ovender veinte o veinticinco mil personas; y el dia del mercado [...] de cuarenta a cincuenta mil
personas. Tienen su orden, tanto en estar cada mercancia separada y en su propio lugar, comoen el vender; porque en un lado de la plaza estan aquellos que venden oro; y en otro lado
prdximo a este, estan los que venden piedras de diversas clases engarzadas en oro con laforma de diferentes plantas y animates. En otra parte se venden cuentas y espejos; en o tra ,plumas y penachos de todos los colores para adornar y coser a los vestidos, que llevan en laguerra y en su s fiestas. En otra parte tallan las piedras para navajas y esp ad as [...] Aqui sevende el grano que ellos usan; y alia el pan de diferentes clases; en un sitio se venden
pasteles, y en otro las gallinas, los polios y los huevos, y a III cerca liebres, conejos, c ie rv o s ,codornices, o cas y patos. A continuacion, en otra parte se vende el vino de diferentes tipos, yen otra las diferentes clases de hortalizas..."45 The most im portant were made in the 1970s and 1980s during the construction works of
the underground transport system and in two major excavation projects held at the G reat
Tem ples of Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlan.
46 "puede tener esta ciudad [...] m£s de dos leguas y media o casi tres, poco m as o m enos, decircuito" (Conquistador An6nimo 1986: 141)
47 "La mayor parte de aquellos que la han visto juzgan que tiene m as de 60,000 habitantes, yantes m£s que menos" (ibid.).

1

57

period vecinos generally meant householders (Thomas 1993: 612). Twentiethcentury academia has engaged in long demographic debates. Total figuressuggested vary widely; nevertheless, after examining all past estimates Rojas(1986: 65) concluded that total num bers for the m om ent of Cortes' arrival arem ost likely to fall within the range of two to three hundred thousand
inhabitants. In any case it is clear that Tenochtitlan was the largest city in theAmerican continent, and by 1519 it was also unusually large for the European
standards of that age.48
W hatever the precise figures m ay be, we know that the am ount oflabour and resources visibly invested in the city, and the large quantities andvariety of luxury goods and every-day consum ption products that its
inhabitants required, overflowed the productive capacities of the valley. Thisw as as clear for the Spaniards as it is for us. M oreover, even w hen they did notentirely understand the particular social and political structures that articulated
the relations of economic dependence betw een Tenochtitlan and its sustaining
hinterland —thoroughly studied by Ross Hassig (1985)— they did realise thatsuch a concentration of wealth and people entailed some sort of imperial
control, thus corroborating the profuse reports pointing in that direction they
had gathered from Veracruz. About this m atter Mr. Zuazo commented:
Among the lords of these cities, villages and places some are more principal
and others are less so; therefore they pay tribute to each other [...] enter
each other's councils and assemblies, and hold consultation meetings,
mainly regarding war.49
Indeed, the so-called Aztec empire was a military tribute state constituted by
num erous heterogeneous, self-contained polities, subject to the dom ination of aconfederation of three city-states in the valley of Mexico: Tlacopan, Tetzcoco
48 Hugh Thomas (1993: 609-614) provides an excellent sum m ary of twentieth cen tu ry
demographic debates concerning New Spain, and the valley of Mexico in particular. Compare
the figures quoted from Rojas with the contem porary population of G reater London, that is,
London with W estm inster and suburban environs (about 50 to 60 thousand inhabitants in the1520s) and Paris (about 200,000 inhabitants at the end of the sixteenth century) (Corfield
1990: 39 & Benevolo 1993: 140).
49 "Destos sehores destas cibdades y villas y lugares, hay unos m as principales y otros menos
principales que pagan unos a otros tributos [...] e entran en sus cabildos e ayuntam iento, yhacen su s consultas, mayorm ente en cosas de guerra." (Letter by Mr. Zuazo, November 1 4 ,1521, in G arcia Icazbalceta 1858: I, 366).

58

and Mexico-Tenochtitlan linked in a triple political and military alliance under
the leadership of the latter. Rather than a territorial dom ination system of thekind that characterised the late Roman empire, however, the Aztec system, likethe early Roman did not entail the physical occupation of the conquered
territories or the replacement of local officials. In this sense it was a hegemonicem pire (Hassig 1985: 92-103) which attained its political dom inance without
direct territorial control, via clientelism, tribute imposition and m ilitary threat.
For ninety years before the Spanish arrival, the Aztec state had secured
its grow th and material well being through w ar and forced alliance b u t had not
deprived the defeated opponents of their political autonom y and local customs.
Instead it subjected all conquered territories to the paym ent of annual tribute,
usually consisting of products of the land although instalments w ere som etim es
replaced w ith a supply of auxiliary troops and the obligation to provide"peripheral security against low-intensity threats" (Hassig 1985: 93). W ar andconquest had not only turned the Mexican rulers into the overlords within thevalley b ut had also secured their regular access to the varied resources the
Spaniards saw in the market-place, which came from three distinct ecologicalmilieus: the tropics, near both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans; the tem peratezones beyond the volcanoes, and the fairly cold m ountainous area nearby.
. Tribute to Tenochtitlan included agricultural, game and mineral products andraw materials such as maize, beans, chilli, cacao, am aranth, honey, m aguey
syrup, w ooden planks and beams, cotton, rubber, amber, lime, salt, gold,
turquoise, deerskins, jaguar skins, and feathers, as well as m anufactured items
like feather-work dresses, tunics, standards, shields and head-dresses; cotton
cloaks and clothing; gold, jadeite and turquoise shields, diadems, and necklaces;
copper bells and axe heads; bulrush seats, mats and crates; pottery and gourd
bowls; maguey and amatl paper.50 Hernan Cortes was well aw are of thistributary structure almost from the time of his landfall, and he took advantage
50 Codex Mendoza (see Berdan 1997) lists the tribute collected from four hundred tow ns
betw een 1516 and 1518.

59

w hen he occupied the position of the ruling lord. More than the brilliant m indof the "hero,” this attitude (repeated by subsequent administrators) illustrates
the extent to which he granted native institutions and cultural achievements
w ith authoritative value.
Chapters three and six provide further detail on the structure and historyof the Aztec empire. Here I just w ant to insist that although resemblance with
the Iberian Peninsula was determ inant in the Spanish conceptualising ofm ainland N orth America from the very beginning, the significant resemblance
expressed in the toponym Nueva Espana did not pertain to the realm of natureb u t to the sphere of urban life and politics, despite the rem arks on thesimilarities concerning landscape, climate, plants and animals contained in the
Carta del Cabildo (Cortes 1960: 16), Cortes' second report-letter (1960: 79) andother early accounts. Yucatan, coastal Veracruz, Haxcala, and Mexico w ere thefirst American sites where the Spaniards found societies they could consider
analogous to their own; having, as it were, a high degree of labour
specialisation and a ruling class totally detached from productive activities. N oother people in the portions of the American continent explored until then had
an administrative apparatus linking such a num ber of lands and villages,
located several days of horse-riding distance apart from each other. N ot asingle instance of the previous Caribbean experience had led Europeans into
proper urban centres, walked by people dressed in handsom e garm ents andliving in houses as perm anent as brick and stone can guarantee. Reason w hy
Juan Diaz concluded his Itinerario de la armada... asserting that in the land of
Ulloa (Ulua) people "go about dressed in cotton, they display a lot of civility andlive in stone houses, and they have their laws and ordinances and public places
reserved for the administration of justice."51

51 "...gentes que andan vestidas con ropas de algodbn, que tienen harta policia y habitan enc a sa s de piedra, y tienen sus leyes y ordenanzas y lugares publicos disputados para laadministracibn de justicia." (In Vazquez 1988: 57).

60

2.4.-

H ern a n

C ortesandC h ristop h er

C olum b us.

C ontrary to w hat had been the case with Columbus twenty-seven years
before, w hen Cortes and his m en left the village of Veracruz heading inland
tow ards the valley of Mexico, in August 1519, they had a fairly clear idea of thescene awaiting at the end of the journey. This is hardly surprising, for Cortes
had tw o enorm ous advantages over Columbus: means for establishing efficient
communication with aboriginal population and the precedent of previous
experiences that had secured significant knowledge about the land.
Columbus, as we all know, attem pted to reach Asia heading West acrossthe Atlantic in a time w hen Europeans ignored the existence of the American
continent. All geographical notions orienting his steps derived from textual
sources predicated upon an opposite route to the one he chose to follow. Hencethe languages that Luis de Torres, his only interpreter spoke: H ebrew Amharic,
and Arabic (Hulme 1986: 20), nothing of course that could be of any help before
A m erindian interlocutors. The marginal annotations Columbus w rote in thebooks he carried along (Pierre d'Ailly's Imago Mundi, an Italian version of Pliny
the Elder's Historia Naturalis, a copy of Aeneas Sylvius' Historia Rerum Ubique
Gestarum and a Latin version of Marco Polo's travels) and the comments hem ade in his Diary show that he was constantly relating his findings to
kingdom s know n in antiquity, the Bible, or Marco Polo, like Tarshish, Ophir,
Sheba, Cathay, Mangi and Cipangu (Pastor Bodmer 1992:12-13).
In contrast, Cortes' notions were empirically rooted in tw o expeditions
preceding his ow n that explored the coasts of Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico.
A small party under the command of Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba had
accidentally "discovered" the region in 1517, driven astray by the force of non­m astered currents during an expedition originally planned for slave raiding in
the vicinity of Cuba.52 Since natives w hom they were not prepared to confront
52 Testim onies concerning this expedition were compiled, translated into English and publishedby Henry R. W agner in 1942. These include the Carta del Cabildo, Martyr’s fourth decade of

61

expelled them violently, these adventurers had but a small taste of the land;enough, however, to engage the governor of Cuba in the preparation of asecond journey that he entrusted to Juan de Grijalva (1518).53 As for the
language, Cortes at an early stage could rely on the translating services of tw oMaya Indians that H enm andez de Cordoba had captured, a Spanish survivorof a 1511 shipwreck —Jeronimo de Aguilar— w hom he rescued at Cozumel,
and a bilingual (M aya/Nahuatl) w om an —Malintzin— that he received in
Tabasco as part of peace settlement arrangem ents (Martinez 1990: 121, 157,
161-162).
The brief comparison above suggests that if exploration in the times ofColum bus —as O'Gorman 1984 [1958]) and Pastor Bodmer (1992: 20-23)
insist— was based on the systematic transposition of concepts that allowed
empirical data to fit into a preconceived scheme of the world, direct
observation and personal dialogue with indigenous individuals was far m ore
im portant for conceptualising "the Other" twenty seven years later, once theidentity of the new-found-lands was established as a theretofore unknow ncontinent. As Cortes and his men traversed the would-be land of N ew Spainfor the first, second or third time —m any had participated in Grijalva's, andsome, like Diaz del Castillo, even H ernandez de Cordoba's expeditions(M artinez 1990: 129, Diaz del Castillo 1982 [c. 1555]: 7-29)— they came acrossseveral indigenous groups holding different types of relations with the Aztecs,
from total independence and perpetual confrontation to partial or complete
subjection. Thus w hen Cortes came in touch w ith Moctezuma's am bassadors in
Veracruz (April 1519), he already possessed valuable first-hand information on
regional conflicts and allegiances. He knew that num erous peoples exploiting aw ide variety of resources were subjects to M octezuma's empire, to which they
De Orbe Novo, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's Historia General de las . Indias, and Francisco
Lopez de G6m ara's Historia de las Indias.
53 The Aztec emperor, Moctezuma, may have been informed of the presence of strange people
since the ships of Hernandez de Cordoba were seen. He certainly was when Grijalva cam e, fo r
he sen t m essengers that the Spanish captain received near San Juan de Ulua. By this time the
S paniards had already heard tell of the rich and powerful country of Culua-Mexico (M artinez
1990: 120-122).

62

paid tribute but whose domination m any resented. He also knew that an
extraordinary commercial network allowed Aztec merchants to reach places far
away in the South, for not only did they travel frequently to Yucatan but theyalso sustained regular trade in w hat is now H onduras, Costa Rica and Panama.
He knew, in brief, that he was heading for a densely populated and highly
urbanised settlement, the navel of a complex society with highly centralised
adm inistrative structures.
Of course Mexico's conquerors, like those of the Caribbean, applied theterm inology they knew from their ow n cultural tradition to the newenvironm ent; we have seen that their testimonies are filled w ith "temples,""priests," "merchants," "lords," and "vassals." Nevertheless, these term s were nolonger defined through the structure of self reassurance that H ulm e (1986: 2036) identified in Columbian discourse because, having lost the specific identities
to which they were tied in Columbus' Diary —Cipango, Quisnay, or the
Terrestrial Paradise— they could assume new semantic relations. And I will
indulge in a metaphoric argum ent to close the present discussion.
While the concepts that Columbus used in creating a picture of the landand people he encountered were like the pieces of a gigantic puzzle, in thesense that they could only match according to previously existing images of the
far Eastern Asiatic empires, Cortes' concepts rather resem bled the bricks ofchildren's building blocks, for they did not determine in advance the precise
shape of the construction they were used for. Reason w hy Colum bus kept on
looking for alternative explanations to salvage his geographical notions,w hereas Cortes could adopt certain flexibility of interpretation that enabled
him to p ut the structural features of Spain and the society he was firstencountering in connection with each other. Ironically for Colum bus, w ho
thought to know the realities he was exploring, surprise resulted in progressive
uncertainty as he attested, day after day, the collapse of his ideas, crushed by
the w eight of evidence. Conversely, an increased feeling of certainty

63

accompanied the continuous surprise felt by Cortes and his men, who had
prepared themselves to live an experience for which European conceptualfram eworks w ere insufficient. But even if Cortes and his arm y could anticipate
some of the things they would see in the Aztec capital, reality surpassed any
expectation they m ight have possibly held; and this re-appearance of theunprecedented resulted in a complete epistemological re-arrangem ent. From
now on, Mexico and the Caribbean frequently substituted Spain as theconceptual frame to which new geographic and ethnologic representation
w ould be referred.

2.5.-

R epetition:

Cibolaasa New

M exico.

N am es are not always fortuitous. This is the lesson the evidence analysed inthis chapter teaches. Forty years after Nueva Espana was carved out fromoriginal Mexico, a series of expeditions quickly lined up in w hat w e m ay call thequest for Nuevo Mexico, an ill defined entity which as yet only existed in theimagination but was finally reified, at the turn of the century, in the form of an
actual province.
The spread of effective Spanish occupation in m ainland N orth America
w as conditioned by the indigenous existence of two different types of culturaland economic complexes. One, covering a smaller geographic area but havingm ore dem ographic significance, was an agricultural and mercantile econom ythat prevailed in northern Central America and southern Mexico, w here
urbanisation had

developed handin hand with advanced

cultivation

techniques. The other was a predom inantly hunting-gathering and fishingeconomy, practised by the sparser nomadic and semi-nomadic population of
the steppes and deserts of the North, m any of w hom the Spaniards came toregard as crude savages similar to the Caribs and Arawaks of the Antilles. Once
the Spaniards achieved sufficient control over Central Mexico they entered the64realm of these "uncivilised" Chichimeca Indians,54 more efficient in resisting
domination. Thereon, the rhythm of penetration slowed dow n, becom ing
almost stagnant by the decade of 1550, despite the enorm ous breath of the
explorations conducted north-westw ard between 1529 and 1542.
Most elements later to be central to the process of geographicalform ulation that gave birth to Nuevo Mexico were amassed precisely during
these thirteen years of hectic exploration; namely, a series of rum ours and eye­witness reports regarding a wealthy province, deep in the N orth, w herem erchants traded in gold and turquoise and people wore cotton clothing. The
seven marvellous cities, with multi-storied, stone houses of these reports w ere
actually the settlements of the so-called Pueblo Indians living in Arizona andN ew Mexico. The Spaniards referred to them as "the Seven Cities of Cibola"
since 1539-1540 but was later known as Nuevo Mexico.
The earliest, or at least most influential reports concerning a m arvellous
northern country had reached Mexico City with four survivors of a
shipwrecked expedition to Florida w ho arrived in 1536.55 Viceroy M endoza
commissioned the verification of these rum ours to a certain friar Marcos deNiza, w ho claimed in his w ritten report that Cibola was larger than Mexico
City and also the doorw ay to other provinces of no less grandeur further
ahead.56 On this basis M endoza launched an elaborate expedition of conquestthat he entrusted to the comm and of Francisco Vazquez de Coronado.
Nevertheless, since this colonising attem pt (1540-1542) ended in a complete
failure, systematic, official efforts to penetrate the N orth were abandoned until

54 The term Chichimeca is complex and ambiguous. I will discuss it in chapter two but here I
am using it in the sen se it most commonly had during the colonial period; i.e., a s the genericname which designated all part-tim e agriculturists and hunter-gatherers living in the arid
environment of what is today northern Mexico.
55 None of the written testimonies they produced them selves mentions the province but th e reare letters by viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and the chronicler Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedosuggesting that in the context of informal conversation they did say to have heard the rum ouramong som e of the natives they cam e across. For further detail on this expedition and th e
attendant reports and chronicles se e chapter four.
56 Marcos de Niza's 1539 report (in Mora 1992: 158).

65

around 1560. From then on people explicitly form ulated the aim of discovering
Nuevo Mexico, an ideal kingdom that was at last identified w ith Cibola.
I describe this chain of events in further detail in chapter four. As of now ,m y purpose is to show that an overall pattern of projection and repetition links
this experience with Cortes' initial accession to the heart of M octezuma's
empire. According to the sources I reviewed in section 1.2, the toponym Nueva
Espana was carved out of the original Mexico sometime betw een June 1519 andA ugust 1520. Forty years or so later, a Franciscan friar nam ed Jacinto de San
Francisco set out from the capital of the viceroyalty in search of Nuevo Mexico,an enterprise that other Spaniards soon took over. Hence if Mexico had invitedthe conceptual reflection of Spain, the semantic void in which its original nam e
was left led to an after-story: the longing for a "New Mexico."
Putting together the essentials of the tw o conquest periods underdiscussion, the pattern of repetition stands as follows: A) the Spaniards settle in
the Caribbean; B) vague rum ours about more sophisticated societies to the
N orthw est spread through Indian voices; C) verbal rum ours are empiricallyconfirmed by three expeditions that reach the Yucatan peninsula; D)
inform ation about even greater provinces to the West is gathered along thecoastline; E) the Spaniards settle in Veracruz; F) once again the information
provided by native informants is verified in Central Mexico; and G) rum ours
about magnificent cities and kingdoms to the N orth spread through Indianvoices convincing soldiers, state officials and individual adventurers, w ho w ere
increasingly using the term Nuevo Mexico, to attem pt the new verification.
Needless to say, they expect this province to be substantially similar to Mexico/Nueva Espana, almost a replica, but perhaps one that slightly surpasses their
expectations, as happened once before w hen they first came to Tenochtitlan.
Repetition is also expressed in the Spanish use of ethnic categories. A
num ber of late sixteenth century documents literally describe Chichimecas as
being "Caribs" by definition. Once again a grammatical perspective is66

illuminating: N orth of New Spain the ethnonym Caribe became an adjective,
conveying a sense of uncontrolled aggressive instincts, disorderly customs andduplicity. But rather than an equalising comparison, the taxonomic connection
thereby draw n between Caribbean and northern N ew Spain's population,
points to the use of analogy as a fundam ental epistemological tool. It is difficult
to know w hether the Spaniards realised that Caribs and Chichimecas w ere
culturally very different. It is clear, however, that in calling the Chichimecas"Caribes" the conquerors not only drew an analogy concerning the natives theyw ere thus comparing (Carib : European :: Chichimeca : Mexica), the operation
also m ade reference to their ow n lived-in experience. M any am ong the
Spaniards w ho occupied leading positions in the expeditions heading N orthfrom Mexico City (or their kin) had perform ed as conquerors in the Caribbean
as well and no doubt perceived similarities in the circumstances they now w ent
through. Both in the Caribbean and northern New Spain, conquerors
confronted societies they considered uncivilised in relation to the world they
had left behind —Spain and Mexico-Tenochtitlan respectively— and in bothcases the barbaric interlocutors insisted upon the existence of a m uch m ore
sophisticated society somewhere further ahead.
The series of repetitions piling up before the Spaniards drove them tothink that, if the rum ours gathered among the islanders found confirmation in
Mexico Tenochtitlan, the same could be expected to happen w ith Chichimeca
reports about the w onders of the North. Ironically, Nuevo Mexico turned out tobe a difficult place to live in. Being sparsely populated by self-sufficient,
autonom ous communities who stubbornly resisted against submission, andlacking in gold and silver, it did not produce much wealth that idle intruders
could appropriate. Although disenchantment was tem porarily overcome by
the prospect of further military conquests that seemed to offer, at least,
opportunities for ransom, barter and fame, the increasing attacks of Apache
Indians convinced the settlers that it was not w orth staying in a place w here

67

individual prosperity dem anded the investm ent of hard personal labour.
Therefore, by 1602 they began to abandon the province, taking their few
belongings w ith them as they returned southwards.
The disconnection between facts and fancies cutting through the N ew
Mexican adventure opens a big question m ark about the cornerstones uponwhich the glittering dream of the Spaniards rested. Expectations aroused by theoverw helm ing experience of the Valley of Mexico do not provide a complete
answer. In order to develop into feasible projects, these expectations needed
the further support of reputed evidence that could counter-balance the risks
implicit in the pursuit of a dream. I suggest that Aztlan-Chicomoztoc, themythic place of ancestral origin of the Mexica and other N ahuatl speaking
peoples from the central highlands, worked as the most fundam ental catalyst in
the form ulation of imagined geographies that this thesis explores.

68

CHAPTER THREE
MEXICAN. CHICHIMECA AND PUEBLO INDIANS
This chapter is an ethno-historical overview of the portion of m ainland N orth
America conquered by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. It pays particularattention to those areas associated with the construction and search for Nuevo
Mexico; namely, the north-western and central portions of present day Mexicoand the south-western section of w hat is today the United States of America.
The m ain purpose of this account is to provide contextual informationindispensable to understanding the cultural transactions and adjustments
entailed in the confrontation between European conquerors/settlers and local
Am erindian population. It covers a long period of pre-conquest autochthonousdevelopm ent, and is organised as a summarised assessment of key academic
debates concerning the definition of the regional boundaries that m odern
scholars have draw n to divide the American continent into "culture areas,"
particularly those labelled as Mesoamerica, Aridamerica and Oasisamerica.
I will discuss the relevance of culture area classifications later b u t ageneral point needs to be established here: To a large extent this classification of
Native American peoples, like the categories of tribe or caste or the very ideas
of India and Africa (Cooper & Stoler 1997: 4), rests in the "colonial knowledge"that European invaders produced in the process of m apping and surveying thepeople they expected to subdue. Therefore, despite its extensive incorporationof m aterial evidence elicited from m odern archaeological research, it largely
depends on the comparison between economic, political and cultural traits thatthose intruding observers chose to emphasise. Such "reproduction" of colonial
knowledge in academic analysis may be problematic for some scholars, but if
the focus of our interest is precisely the way in which colonising parties
conceived the territory they came to occupy, it seems reasonable to take thisvalue-laden culture area taxonomies as a vantage point.

69

There is yet another good reason to opt for this choice. Recent literatureshows that the 1860's bureaucratic classifications of people leading to thefixation of notions of caste in the British Raj (Dirks 1989: 61, 71-72; Cohn 1990:
238-247), correlates with the formulation of the notion of tribe by different
colonial administrations in Africa (Iliffe 1979: 323-324, Ranger 1983: 247-254,
Chanock 1985: 20-21 & 219-239). Both were colonial constructs which defined
the constituents of colonised societies according to static categories so as tofacilitate the control of otherwise fluid and confusing social and political
relationships. Yet both were re-elaborations of a set of pre-existing local
categories collected among elders or pandits1 rather than the pure invention of
astute European officers. Something similar had occurred in N ew Spain m ore
than three hundred years before. Certain indigenous discourses concerning theclassification of hum an groups, namely the partition that sedentary farm ers
from Central Mexico drew between themselves and the peoples they called
Chichimeca, became the template of the colonial administrative classification for
the aboriginal population. Although in the pre-conquest era this term
—Chichimeca— was generally used w ith reference to hunter-gathering lifestyles
and peoples of northerly provenance, it carried along a great deal of am biguity
that was lost in its colonial version, which, as in so m any other instances ofcolonial labelling (e.g. Taussig 1984, Stoler 1985, Scully 1995) set up high levelsof killing, raping and dispossessing permissiveness.2
I do not bring this up merely to provide yet another example of how ,under colonial circumstances, social taxonomies w ork to allow for different
intensities and specific forms of violence. Rather, I am interested in highlighting
the successive transfer of "ethnographic" taxonomic principles from pre­conquest folk taxonomies to colonial representations, and then to m odern"culture area" classifications such as the one that organises this chapter. Keeping

1 Hindu "law officers".
2 A full discussion of this term and the ambiguities it carries
ch ap ter.

along com es later in th is70

in m ind this connectedness between indigenous, colonial, and m odern
academic modalities of ethno-cultural representation will prevent us fromlapsing into easy depictions of colonising-dominant-ruling parties as internallycoherent bodies impervious to tensions and influences em anating from theencounter w ith the colonised Other. This is a simplified perspective that various
recent studies on colonialism oppose (e.g. Fabian 1983, Stoler 1989, Cooper andStoler 1989 & 1997, Comaroff 1991 & 1997, Thomas 1991 & 1994).
Rather than displaying an itemised inventory of the Amerindian peoples
that Spanish colonisers gradually incorporated into the viceroyalty of N ew
Spain, the broad ethno-historical panoram a I draw in the following pages ism eant to show that the geographical distribution of certain sodo-culturalfeatures, ranging from diet and clothing to cosmology and governm ent
institutions, was decisive to the Spanish construction of Nuevo Mexico. My
strategy, therefore, is to emphasise those regional contrasts

that led

conquistadors to believe that another Mexico existed in the N orth and to
decide, m any years later, that they had finally found it in the Pueblo Indianvillages of present day New Mexico and Arizona. The same contrasts, albeit forvery different reasons, were picked up by scholars w ho developed the culturearea classification.
One of the m ost characteristic features of N orth America in the contact
period w as the extreme cultural diversity of its inhabitants, partly derived froma long process of regional adaptation to the wide variety of naturalenvironm ents prevalent across its uneven topography. All along the coast of
the Gulf of Mexico from Yucatan to Veracruz, and on the inland route theconquistadors took into the Mexican highland plateau lied a series ofcentralised, urban societies of an ever increasing degree of complexity. Most
had a farm ing economy based on advanced agricultural techniques, and thus
contrasted deeply with the groups living beyond the reach of Aztec control.
U nder the harsher environm ental conditions prevailing in the N orth, people

71

with a m ore rudim entary way of life based their subsistence on variable
combinations of primitive farming, hunting, fishing and gathering. H ow ever,small groups in some ecologically fit areas cultivated the land on a regularbasis.
Only against the background of this long-standing divide betw een people
for w hom agriculture represented the basic form of livelihood and people w ho
depended on hunting and gathering can we com prehend the response of bothSpaniards and Indians to their m utual challenge. The multiple social andpolitical arrangem ents found in association with these two contrasting m odesof subsistence, and their combination, entailed different degrees of resistanceand collaboration on the part of the Indians. This not only m eans that the
Spaniards w ere forced to develop a multiplicity of strategies for domination,
they w ere also variably enticed into cultural borrowing. Cross-culture contact
in Hispanic N orth America, therefore, evolved into a process of change far
m ore complex than that implied by the notions of acculturation and resistanceoften applied to assess the indigenous experience of colonialism. Native
Americans, as the quest for Nuevo Mexico dem onstrates, w ere not always
forced to choose betw een imposed adaptation and complete rejection; neither
w ere European understandings and behavioural patterns in the N ew W orld
unaffected by the impact of indigenous customs and ideas.
Since the 1980s extensive appraisals within the fields of anthropology,
history and literary studies have been increasingly concerned about the
intricacies of colonial relations. The extent and m anner in which particularcolonising projects are inflected by the indigenous societies they come across,as well as the degree of accord and efficacy one could attribute to thecolonisers' agency have been reformulated. To the point that now adays it has
almost become commonsensical to affirm, as Cooper and Stoler do (1997: 1),
that "Europe's colonies were never em pty spaces to be m ade over in Europe's

72

image or fashioned in its interests; nor, indeed, were European states selfcontained entities that at one point projected themselves overseas."
Nevertheless, m ost of this literature tends to focus on how the stability ofparticular colonial regimes, and the accomplishment, or failure, of theirprojected aims was often conditioned by: a) the complexity of non-W estemreactions to European dominance; b) the existence of competing agendas andstrategies of control within the colonisers' "social field"; and c) a series of
unforeseen, disruptive forms of social configuration and political alignment
resulting from the reproduction of class distinctions among colonisers overseas,
the enacting of coloniser supremacy in all sorts of every-day behaviour, andcertain policies originally devised to m aintain the hierarchies of rule. Thus
Reynaldo Ileto (1979), Vicente Rafael (1993) and Jean Com aroff (1985), forexample, examine how Christianity was m ade local in the Philippines and South
Africa, turning into a form of resistance against the colonial institutions ofchurch and state. On the other hand, Karen Fields (1985) and John Com aroff(1997) discuss respectively the underm ining effects that missionization had
upon the legitimacy of the system of indirect rule that British administrators
negotiated in Central and South Africa. So far I have not come across any study
that explores the naturalising transform ation that colonisers undergo in theprocess of cross-cultural intercourse at the level of every-day, personal
experience; that is, beyond (or shall I say beneath) the grand sphere ofm etropolitan politics or colonial-project enforcement. The following accounthas the single purpose of enabling the reader to follow me in this attempt.

3.1.- The land forms and climate of N ew Spain.
Looking over a map of N orth America it is impossible to avoid posing a basic
highland/low land divide for the territory that former New Spain occupied. It is
located on the south-western side of the continental mass, structurally
constituted by an almost uninterrupted cordilleran system running southwards

73

from Alaska to Central America, that represents mostly folds originated inrecent geological time (Jaffe 1992). Biotic and climatic zones in this part of thew orld are very m uch dependent on the altitude variability that a turbulent
geological history impressed on the terrain: A series of m ore or less parallelridges w ith elevations ranging from near sea-level to approxim ately 5700
m eters alternating w ith valley basins and fairly flat highland mesas (Lipe 1978:
328, Hall 1989:34; Carmack, Gasco & Gossen 1996: 9-12).
Besides the partly subm erged line of volcanoes that forms the peninsulaof Baja California, w ith a northern extension in parallel ranges that fall beyond
the area of our interest, four m ountain chains of major proportions shape theprovinces that physiographers identify in this territory (Gerhard 1982: 3, Kelley
1966: 95). From north to south they are, first, the Southern Rocky Mountains,extending south through central Colorado into north-central N ew Mexico.
Second, a couple of parallel ranges, the Sierra M adre Oriental and Sierra M adre
Occidental, that run across Mexico in a south-east direction and both along thecoasts of the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean descend abruptly to lower
ridges, piedm ont slopes and coastal plains. Third, the Cordillera Neovolcanica
that, in south-central Mexico, interlocks with the Sierra M adre Oriental andOccidental.
A physiographic province in their ow n right, the Rocky M ountains arerich in coniferous trees and large game; but they have always been sparsely
populated because they have little arable land and a short grow ing season due
to the heavy winter snows that contribute m uch of the waters to the Colorado,
the Rio Grande and the Pecos rivers. Towards the west its forested ranges
descend into a transitional province, the Colorado Plateau, interrupted b y
volcanic intrusion and lava flows that give the landscape its characteristic
deeply cross-cut canyons and steep-walled mesas; except for the C olorado
River the province has few perm anent streams. On the opposite direction lay
the High Plains, a vast grass and shrub area, hom e of the bison and bison

74

hunters, which in central New Mexico include the drainage of the Pecos River(Hall 1989: 35-36, W oodbury 1979: 25, Cordell & Smith 1996: 207-210).
As elevation decreases to the north-west and south-west of the Colorado
Plateau, isolated but num erous m ountain chains of reduced extension m ark theterrain, scattered throughout basin areas that once contained shallow lakes but
are now deeply filled with eroded alluvial material. Physiographers call thisarea Basin and Range province, draw ing an internal division betw een a higher
and cooler section in western Utah and N evada —generally know n as GreatBasin— and a south-east ramification, mainly consisting of hot, extensive
deserts stretching from lower Arizona and New Mexico across the international
frontier on the eastern and western sides of the Sierra Madre Occidental. The
Rio Grande river that flows approximately 3000 km from the Rocky Mountains
into the Gulf of Mexico cuts through this zone in the north-eastern extrem e(Bonine 1970: 7, Lipe 1978: 328-332, W oodbury 1979: 25, Hall 1989: 35). The
highest tem peratures and lowest rainfall levels of the whole province occur on
the w estern rim of the sierra in Sonora and Sinaloa, although large rivers(Sinaloa, Fuerte, Yaqui and Sonora) flow across the desert creating narrow andfairly fertile valleys. East of the sierra the environm ent is probably harsher due
to the combination of extreme day-night tem perature variations and a very
low precipitation (Bonine 1970: 7, Carmack, Gasco & Gossen 1996:18-19).
Further south stands the Mesa Central, a rather flat elevated plateau
flanked on the east and west by the Sierra M adre and composed of low, hilly
areas and wide basins of volcanic origin, some containing shallow lakes(Chapala, Patzcuaro, Yuriria, Cuitzeo) and others the dissected beds of extinct
lakes (e.g. Mexico, Puebla, Toluca, Guadalajara). Due to its plentiful level, arable
land and very fertile soils it is, and perhaps always was, the m ost densely
populated area in N orth America. The Cordillera Neovolcanica forms thesouthern rim; its landscape dom inated by a row of volcanoes that stand atelevations ranging from 3800 meters to 5747 meters (Bonine 1970: 7, Carmack,

75

Gasco & Gossen 1996: 13). Much of the plateau lies in a tem perate zone b u t
climate is cold in its higher portions; rivers are few although it has three m ajor
drainage systems: The Lerma-Santiago and the Balsas, flowing west to the
Pacific, and the Panuco-Moctezuma, running from the north-eastern edge into
the Gulf of Mexico.
Other m ountain chains that follow south from the Mesa Central create
the so called highlands of Oaxaca and Guerrero, often cut by m ountain peaks
and deep valleys. Separated by the Isthm us of Tehuantepec are the ChiapasGuatemala highlands, rich in m ountain forest; and to the north-east, the flat,
mainly limestone peninsula of Yucatan imm ersed in vast extensions of tropicalforest. Finally, narrow strips of lowland stretch along the coast in both the east
(Gulf of Mexico) and the west (Pacific Ocean), form ing distinct zones of h o t
climate where moisture, soil fertility and vegetation vary widely, from tropicalforest and savannah in the hum id areas to scrub and cacti in the arid ones. On
the western side the terrain is traversed by relatively short, fast flowing rivers
with small delta depositions whereas in the eastern side slow descending rivers
create offshore barrier beaches that enclose lagoons and tidal swam ps (Bonine
1970: 7; Carmack, Gasco & Gossen 1996: 9-10,14).

3.2.- The Relevance of Culture Area Classifications.
The culture area taxonomy that I chose to frame the following discussion—developed in the first half of the tw entieth century (Wissler 1938 [1917],
Kroeber 1948 [1923], 1936 & 1939, Krickeberg 1946, Kirchhoff 1943a, 1943b &1954) and variously modified ever since— is in its origins a side product of the
Boasian critique of Edward Tylor’s comparative m ethod and the sort ofevolutionary classifications of ’’society types" it engendered. As a m atter of fact,
the concept of "culture area" tackled precisely w hat Boas had considered to be
the major shortcomings of Tylor's evolutionism: the lack of historical andgeographic specificity, the notion of a unitary hum an civilisation developing

76

along uniform channels all over the globe, and the poor empirical basis fromwhich general laws of cultural evolution were abstracted (Stocking 1974).
The concept of "culture area" (Wissler 1938 [1917]) was aimed atproviding an alternative principle for the definition of distinct, coherent units ofstudy that could allow for a sufficient degree of generalisation w ithout lapsing
into the extremely loose abstractions typical of late nineteenth century systemsof hum an classification. Hence it was based on the systematic comparison oflavish am ounts of empirical evidence, generated during an intensified period of
ethnographic and archaeological research. If, on a purely linguistic basis, N orth
American peoples seemed overwhelmingly diverse,3 the results of theseinvestigations showed that a series of cultural patterns and m odes of social andpolitical organisation could be identified cutting across language boundaries. It
was in accordance with the spatial distribution of these trans-ethnic similarities
that Clark Wissler coined the term to designate a distinct geographic region inwhich a common set of traits is found shared by a num ber of individual
societies. The notion was also meant to challenge two other principles to whichm ost systems of classification current at the turn of the nineteenth century
adhered: the simple adoption of the boundaries set by geographers in
dem arcating physiographic provinces, and the

explanation of culturaldifference in term s of race and biology.4 This theoretical stance is clearly
expressed in Paul Kirchhoff's assertion (1954: 531) that individual societies
occupying contiguous geographic settings usually share "so m any cultural traits
and are organised along such similar lines that they appear as variants of one
regional culture or culture area."
Some anthropologists like Daniel G. Brinton —and Tylor himself— had
preceded Wissler in discarding race and biology as relevant categories for the
analysis of cultural diversity. Brinton’s (1891) ethnographic-based classification
3 One of the most com prehensive taxonom ies of Amerindian languages ever done (Brinton1891) registers more than 2000 languages for the moment of first European arrival.
4 For a complete and well balanced summary of early classifications of Native Am erican
peoples s e e Pericot y G arcia (1961: 161-166).

77

of N orth and South American Indians had shifted the focus aw ay from theconsideration of cranial shape, height, skin colour and complexion variability.
H ow ever, the five continental super-areas that he established (N orth Atlantic,
N orth Pacific, Central America, South Pacific and South Atlantic), thoughsubdivided according to the regional distribution of language differences andm odes of livelihood, still corresponded to basic directional indications andgeom orphology. The refinement of Wissler's ideas introduced by Alfred
Kroeber (1939) emphasised the historicity of culture area configurations,leading to the gradual replacement, in the task of area definition, of continental
shape,

bordering

oceans,andtopography

foreconomic,

artefactual,

institutional, and cosmological criteria. Although no general agreem ent exists
concerning the num ber and limits of the areas into which America should be
divided, m ost proponents today assume that these are neither changeless n o r
ever-existing; rather, they come into being through the sustained contact of thesocieties

that

constitute

them

and

their

limitsundergocontinuous

modifications.
M any area demarcations have come to light since 1946, w hen W alter
Krickeberg prom oted a binary opposition of complex or cultured societies—like the Aztec, the Maya, and the Inca— against simple ones. As a generalrule they all attribute prim ary importance to patterns of settlem ent (tem porary
encampm ents, perm anent or semi-permanent villages, and cities), forms offood production and appropriation (hunting, planting, fishing, gathering), andsocio-political orders (clans and tribes, simple or complex chiefdoms, and states)(Pericot y Garcia 1961:165-166).
A part from this basic agreement other points of consensus exist, thedefinition of Mesoamerica being perhaps the m ost im portant for the n orthern
section of the continent. This area, and the central Andes of South America
were the tw o major centres of plant domestication in the N ew W orld during
prehistoric times. In the period immediately preceding the arrival of Europeans

78

they housed num erous individual societies sharing a series of attributes
generally considered as indicative of civilisation. Alongside a well developed
agriculture capable of supporting a large population —often concentrated incompact urban settlements— an increasing specialisation of productive andnon-productive activities resulted, in both areas, in a very sophisticated social
fabric. Nevertheless, the combination of organised trade and m arkets,
centralised political structures, a highly organised religion w ith elaborate
priesthood and ritual, and the presence of a mixed system of pictographic andphonetic writing is uniquely Mesoamerican;5 for neither formal m arket
exchange nor "painted books" seem to have existed in the A ndean area before
the establishm ent of the colonial regime.6
The Spanish quest for Nuevo Mexico began in the heartland of
Mesoamerica around 1540 and ended, m ore than half a century later, in thecore of another area that Kirchhoff (1954: 550) called Oasis America, comprising
a portion of south-western United States and north-w estern Mexico. Some
problem s arise from the fact that the implicated territory goes beyond theborderpresently

separating

these

two

nations.

Unfortunatelythemethodological tools that academia develops are often bound to current
configurations of political geography. Therefore, although Mexican and N orth
American scholars occasionally extend across the border the limits of theculture areas they establish, they label them differently, even if their size and

5 For this general characterisation of Mesoamerica and the more detailed description of thefollowing pages I consulted a wide variety of specialised and non specialised literature. Most
information I include is now of common knowledge, therefore I will often omit specificreferences, but I rely essentially on the following authors: Armillas (1964a & 1 9 6 4 b ),Braniff (1994), Bernal (1977), Carmack, Gasco & Gossen (1996), C arrasco (1971a, 1971b
6 1977), Chapman (1990), Cline (1971), Kirchhoff (1943b), Lorenzo (1977), Lorenzo(1995), Matos (1994), L6pez Austin & L6pez Lujan (1996), and W est & Augelli (1 9 7 6 ).
Authors quoted to discuss certain specific issues who I do not include in this list will be fullyreferred in each particular case.
6 This is not to say that Andean cultures were less developed. They simply found d iffe ren tm eans to satisfy their needs. Although the Inca system of data recording by m eans of knottedstrings (Khipu or Quipu) was very sophisticated, and it may have served to register o th er
than m erely quantitative knowledge, the sem antic principles under which it worked are not
the sam e a s those of writing. Brief and suggesting discussions on m arket issues in p r e ­conquest Andes can be found in J. V. Murra (1995) and S. E. Rami'res (1995); for a classicaland more extended discussion see Polanyi (1957). As for the quipu system see Ascher &A scher (1981), Cummins (1994), and Urton (1997).

79

shape roughly coincide. The ensuing discussion follows the categories andterm inology that Kirchhoff proposed and which the Mexican school ofanthropology usually follows (e.g. Matos 1994, N arez 1994, Guevara 1995,
Lopez Austin & Lopez Lujan 1996).
I am aware of the fact that culture-area classifications are deliberately
artificial in the sense that they do not necessarily reflect Native American
identity formulations. This, however, is characteristic of m ost explanatorydevises aimed at providing panoramic views to facilitate the understanding ofcomplex phenom ena. On the other hand, the analytic boundaries drafted b yculture area advocates over the territory herein concerned do coincide vaguelywith certain categories applied in folk taxonomies, as we have seen for the term
Chichimeca that I shall subject to a closer examination later in this chapter.

3.3.- The concept of Mesoamerica.
The literal m eaning of the term Mesoamerica (Kirchhoff 1943b), refers to thegeographic position of a vast area roughly comprising the southern half ofpresent day Mexico from the northern edge of the Mesa Central; the complete
territory of Guatemala, Belize, and El Salvador; and some portions of
H onduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica (map 9). Rather than a fixed piece of land,
how ever, the label denotes a cultural-territorial complex. Essentially, it isunderstood as the geographic span of a som ewhat definite kind of civilisation,
based fundam entally upon a farming economy and expressed in the collectionof objects, beliefs, and practices that a num ber of peoples, organised in multiplesocio-political units of variable extension and durability, used and entertained
betw een the second millennium BC and the sixteenth century AD. In recent
years some authors have extended the scope of the term to embrace post­colonial and m odern communities of indigenous and mestizo composition
showing manifest continuities w ith the traditions established in that early phaseof history (L6pez Austin 1990; Carmack, Gasco & Gossen 1996). Nevertheless, I

80shall restrict this description to the pre-conquest and contact periods for which
the term was originally devised.
Agriculture is notably the first element quoted in all definitions of
Mesoamerica, w ith maize, beans and squash usually grown in the same plot7 as
the overall fundam ental food crops. Adapted through long domestication
processes to flourish nearly in every type of soil and weather, these products
were later introduced in various extra-Mesoamerican areas such as the Pueblocountry. Almost ninety additional species, including fruits and plants forpurposes other than food,8 were cultivated throughout Mesoamerica fostering
agricultural complementarity across regions. Some —like cotton and cacao—
could only prosper under certain environm ental conditions and therefore
constituted im portant articles for trading and tribute (Carmack, Gasco &Gossen 1996: 12). Despite the existence of advanced farm ing techniques,
including the systematic fallowing of perm anent fields, terracing and irrigation,
the m ost extended tillage system was migratory slash-and-bum cultivation andfarm ing implements were rudim entary; basically the planting stick w ith asharp, fire hardened point, and the coa —a kind of dibble w ith a copper orw ooden blade parallel to the handle. Depending on the conditions of eachparticular milieu, Indians supplemented their mainly vegetable diet by fishing,hunting small rodents or birds, and gathering insects and their larvae. Finally, adistinctive characteristic of Mesoamerican livelihood was the widespread
breeding of dogs, turkeys, and small stingless bees for honey and wax.9
While most of these elements w ere common to m any areas in thecontinent, certain traits present elsewhere, such as the use of poisoned w eapons

7 This technique continues to be applied in many locations falling within the limits of ancient
M esoam erica and has even been adopted elsew here. Tall maize stalks serve to support the
climbing bean vines, which enrich the soil with nitrogen, while the soil beneath is protectedagainst erosion by the creeping groves of squash (West & Augelli 1976: 229).
8 Cotton and agave were the main sources of vegetable fibre used for weaving cloth. Tobaccoand copal (a tree that produced an aromatic resin) were grown for ceremonial purposes, and aiant called achiote for its red dye.
In som e areas other two sem idom esticated insects were kept: the cochineal bug for ascarlet dye, and the aye bug for a special wax used a s base for paint, lacquer and fo r
burnishing pottery.

g81

and the existence of matrilineal clans, were completely absent in Mesoamerica.
Likewise, a num ber of attributes have been identified (Kirchhoff 1943b: 99-102)
as exclusive to this area:•

Advanced architectural knowledge expressed in the construction of large
ceremonial centres with truncated pyram idal temple bases, ball courts, andpalaces built of stone, lime and mortar.

•

Restricted application of metallurgy, primarily used for the production ofornam ents and other luxury, articles.

•

Com bined pictographic and hieroglyphic writing systems that, by the tim eof the Spanish conquest, had some phonetic elements although they neverturned into full alphabetic script.

•

A calendar based on the combination of two major cycles, a ritualdivinatory one m ade up by the combination of 13 num bers and 20 daynam es interm eshing to create a 260 day sequence, and a one solar-year
cycle of 365 days, divided into eighteen m onths of tw enty days plus five
additional ominous days.

•

A distinctive type of social organisation based on self-contained kinshipterritorial units, often patrilineal in descent, whose m em bers shared aresidential quarter and had a common economic activity and a com m ontutelary god. This micro-community, only comparable to the ayllu of
A ndean societies was called calpulli in Nahuatl, siqui in Mixteco, and amak in
Maya Quiche (L6pez Austin 1995c: 447-450).

In the last three decades this definition of Mesoamerica, abstracted from theconditions existing by the time of the Spanish arrival, has been significantly
enriched, as archaeology rendered more precise and abundant data and put
into diachronic perspective the score of diagnostic traits that originally served
to characterise the area. Furthermore, a parallel shift in focus from the search ofcomm on features to the analysis of local peculiarities —which is to say that theemphasis is now m ade on diversity rather than similarity— brought about the

82

usage of different theoretical models to explain how these peculiarities
interlocked.
Eduardo Matos (1982 & 1994: 56-57), for example, applied the Marxist
notion of m ode of production to re-define the area in term s of the longstanding presence of complex, stratified societies with reduced ruling classes incontrol of the labour force of masses of commoners. According to hisinterpretation this m ode of production, that established the double exploitationof one class over another w ithin the same society, and of the ruling class of one
society over other societies upon which tributary obligations w ere imposed,
appeared in the coast of the Gulf of Mexico with the consolidation of the socalled Olmec civilisation (c. 1200 and 400 BC) and it expanded gradually until
reaching the limits that Kirchhoff m arked (1943b: 94-98) for sixteenth century
Mesoamerica. Other authors (Olive 1985; Carmack, Gasco & Gossen 1996) took
up Im m anuel Wallerstein's 1974 "world system theory" to explain the same
phenom ena; claiming that since Mesoamerican societies linked by dominationdependence relations did not have a common political governing structure andw ere not even always the same, the area, like Renaissance Europe, can be
defined as a diverse but integrated stratified world.
In stressing the fact that it is difference which puts individual societies inconnection w ith each other, sometimes via pacific forms of exchange andcollaboration, sometimes through violent confrontation or forced dependence,scholars have reached the conclusion that Mesoamerica is a unit, not because all
the people within it shared a fundamental guise but because they were linked
through complex supra community webs of interaction in a comm on historical
process that might be conditioned by ecological, cultural, or political factors(Litvak 1975; L6pez Austin 1976: 199-200 & 1990: 28-29; Lopez Austin & Lopez
Lujan 1996: 62-63; Chapm an 1990; Carmack, Gasco & Gossen 1996: 5-36). Wem ust understand Mesoamerica, then, as the territorial em bodim ent of a
netw ork of inter-group relations. Its extension, as Armillas (1964a) rightly

83

pointed out, varied from time to time according to the changing scope andnature of those relations, although it had a fundam ental core that rem ained
fairly stable in size since the area first began to take shape.
By the time of Spanish contact regional dynamics had crystallised in theform ation of various sub-areas within Mesoamerica, each characterised by a
predom inant language and a distinctive cultural pattern prom oted byregionally hegemonic groups. Relations within and betw een these sub-zones
w ere determ ined by the flow of luxury goods such as cotton garm ents, jadestones, cacao beans, animal skins, feathers, and gold ornam ents that circulated
via ceremonial gift-giving, m ediated trade, outright conquest, and tributary
dem ands (Berdan 1976 & 1992). Particularly relevant to us are Central Mexico,comprising the m odem states of Hidalgo, Mexico, Tlaxcala, Morelos, Puebla
and the Federal District; and the West (Sinaloa, Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima,
Michoacan and G uerrero).10 In the sixteenth century Central Mexico wasculturally rather homogeneous, with the Otom angue linguistic family fairly
well represented by Otoiru, Mazahua and Matlatzinca speakers but mostly
dom inated by peoples who spoke Nahuatl —in term s of num bers of speakers
the m ost im portant of the Yutoazteca family that includes as well languages
from present day south-western United States and north-w estern Mexico.
Contrastingly, the West was culturally, and perhaps linguistically, the m ost
heterogeneous Mesoamerican region, with num erous unclassified languages
today extinct spoken alongside various Yutoaztecan languages, and Tarascan,seemingly unrelated to any other tongue (Bonine 1970: 54-55, Carrasco 1977:
169-170, Lorenzo 1995, Carmack, Gasco & Gossen 1996: 83-84).

10 The internal division of M esoamerica is also a m atter of much debate. Here I follow Lopez
Austin & Lopez Lujan (1996: 75)

84

3.4.- The C onstitution and History of Mesoamerica.
The domestication of maize and its succeeding general adoption were thedecisive factor for the integration of Mesoamerica since it provided thefoundation for a sustained demographic grow th and created an entirely new
form of settled village life. Recent studies have demolished the form erly
widespread assum ption that the knowledge and practice of agriculture
invariably correlates with sedentism. Indeed, archaeologists have docum ented
several examples of non-farming sedentary communities within the bounds ofpresent day Mexico, as well as some instances of hunter gathering groups
sufficiently acquainted with the process of plant germ ination as to occasionallycultivate certain species during seasonal periods of rest. Perm anent settlements
belonging to mollusc gatherers, for example, have been found in coastal areas,
and in the lake basin of the valley of Mexico an incipient developm ent ofsedentism before agriculture was practised with any regularity has also been
detected (L6pez Austin & Lopez Lujan 1996: 24). Conversely, remains ofdomestic squash dated at about 8000 years BC have appeared in shelters
occupiedbynomadic

hunter-gatherersinOaxaca(Flannery1986).

Nevertheless, neither the settlements of mollusc gatherers nor the m odest preagricultural hamlets of the valley of Mexico could achieve high population
densities, let alone the nomadic groups who practised occasional cultivation ofsquash or any other short term growing vegetables. This changed with thedomestication of maize, a plant that yields abundant, storable crops but
requires complete sedentism as its cultivation and processing dem ands regular,
intensive w ork all-year round.11
The earliest evidence of cultivated maize we have for N orth America was
uncovered at cave sites in Tehuantepec. Although it was originally dated,
11 Theories about the factors leading to the developm ent of full-time agriculture vary w idely.
For general assessm en ts see Flannery 1973 and Me Clung de Tapia & Zurita Noguera 1 9 9 4 :
2 1 1 -2 1 9 .

85

according to its archaeological context, at around 5000-3500 years BC, m ore
recent datings practised on the ears of corn themselves show their antiquity
does not go back beyond c. 2700 years BC. Similar adjustm ents have beenm ade for stored evidence from Tehuacan and Tamaulipas, originally dated ataround the year 5000 BC (L6pez Austin & Lopez Lujan 1996: 26). Despite thisshortening of the proved antiquity of existing samples, Bruce D. Smith (1995:
150-160) estimates that the process of domestication m ust have occurred in the
Balsas river area between the years 4000 and 3000 BC. He states that the wild
predecessor of maize grows abundantly in that region and tim e m ust be
calculated for the genetic changes it underw ent and the subsequent spread of
the fully developed domestic variety into both Tehuacan and Tamaulipas,
w here no trace of the wild variety has been detected.
W henever the initial domestication m ay have occurred, the fact is that theearliest evidence showing a clear association betw een maize cultivation andsedentism corresponds to three sites in the lowland regions adjacent to the
Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, which contain clay housefloors and other rem ainsof perm anent pre-ceramic settlements dated at about 3000-2500 years BC.12
Five hundred years later the village farming tradition was firmly established inm any areas, from the Mexican central plateau to the Central American Isthmus.
We can only begin speaking about Mesoamerica at this point in time because
only then perm anent settlement dwellers sought to establish perm anent form sof exchange, alliance, and domination am ong each another.
Early stages of Mesoamerican development are know n through scatteredarchaeological remains which allow only a few inferences regarding social andpolitical organisation. In some regions the so called Formative or Pre-Classic
period (2000 BC - 200 AD) saw the amalgam ation of neighbouring clusters ofvillages into more cohesive communities that, by the year 1200 BC, had grow n
in size and complexity to become distinct polities usually term ed chiefdoms.
12 Puerto Marquez, in the state of Guerrero; Tlacuachero, in Chiapas; and Palo Hueco, inVeracruz (Carmack, G asco & G ossen 1996: 47-48).

86

Evidence from the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, where the Olmecs evolved into
the m ost powerful polity of the period, and from the highland valleys of
Oaxaca and Central Mexico, shows that around this time public structures w ere
built and craft specialisation was well developed.
Scholars consider that a ruling and ceremonial elite m ust have em ergedin those areas along with a dependent class of artisans (Bernal 1977: 129-136),
and that a perm anent priesthood probably existed as well, because there arerepresentations of hum an sacrifice (Pasztory 1995: 484) and large ceremonial
centres, which implies high degrees of ritual specialisation. Furtherm ore, theelites of some am ong those polities seem to have been in contact with one
another through trade netw orks and, perhaps, personal visits, for they used acomm on system of emblems and religious symbols to proclaim their pow er(Carmack, Gasco & Gossen 1996: 52). In fact, long distant exchange increased
betw een 1200 BC and 400 AD; Olmec styles and artefacts from the Gulf coastand from the West, found as far as Guatemala and the valley of Mexico,
indicate the existence of established trade routes,13 if only used by noble
emissaries of the priesthood who had apparently full control over theaccumulation and redistribution of goods (Manzanilla 1985: 101). Although it islikely that tribute existed at this stage, it m ust have been of a very limited
scope, merely involving the surrender of surplus produce by local com m oners
to local elites. Other minor chiefdoms also appeared betw een 1200 and 1400 BC
in the lowlands of Chiapas, Belize and Guatemala. However, they do not seemto have participated in the netw ork of interacting chiefdoms that linked the
Gulf Coast, Oaxaca, and Central Mexico.
The beginning of the Classic period (AD 200 - 900/1000) is m arked by the
emergence of state societies, archaeologically noticeable in the grow th of m any
13 Artefacts from Tlatilco, El Arbolillo and Zacatenco, sites in the north-w est of the Basin of
Mexico that developed between 1500 and 400 BC show clear Olmec elem ents typical of the
Gulf co ast Olmec culture. Excavations during the 1970s dem onstrated that such Olmec
elem ents were intrusive in the Basin and that in fact there w as also elem ents from the W estof M esoamerica, particularly Colima, El Openo and Michoac6n. Thus during the Pre-Classic in
Tlatilco there w as a fusion of local, Olmec and W estern cultural elem ents (Cyphers 1981: 7 4 ,
7 7 -7 8 ).

87

villages into veritable urban centres w here public architecture, civic andceremonial, acquired unprecedented massive dimensions. Defensive walls andfortifications also appeared all over the place and irrigation systems w ere
significantly perfected and expanded. Changes that all in all reveal a m ore
centralised control over resource allocation and labour. On the other hand, theconcentration of items of regionally circumscribed production in the big cities
indicates the existence of a well organised, stable tributary system entailing far
flung structures of subordination absent in the Formative period.
Two civilisations dom inated the Classic world: Teotihuacan in the Valleyof Mexico, and the Maya in Guatemala, Yucatan and Chiapas. Nevertheless,other areas like the valley of Oaxaca and the Gulf coast also supported large
states. Although the specific nature of these political systems is obscure given
the lack of w ritten sources, it is clear that in due time a dynamic of trade, war,and m igration gave way, during the so called Epidassic period (AD 650/800900/1000) to a process of political fragm entation and considerable widening of
pre-existing spheres of cross-cultural interaction (Lopez Austin & L6pez Lujan
1996: 99-164). A num ber of small communities em erged w hen the largest
Classic polities collapsed due to causes that are still unclear to us. The ensuingsodo-political re-organisation, characterised according to L6pez Austin (1985a:
320-325 & 1990: 29) by the gradual replacement of ancient forms of leadershipbased on ethnic or lineage affiliation with territorial forms of dom ination andpolitical legitimacy, created a broadened netw ork of intensified cultural
relations extending over the coastal fringe of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mesa
Central, Yucatan, and probably present day Chiapas and Guatemala.
In contrast to former periods of Mesoamerican history, the Post-Classic(AD 900/1000 - 1519) is quite well known. Indigenous historical traditions
recorded in the sixteenth century combine well with archaeological evidence todraw a picture of deep instability and extreme population mobility which
resulted in continuous wars and frequent settlement relocation. Complex multi­

88

ethnic aggregation and desegregation within fairly centralised political units,that constituted a continuum ranging from chiefdoms to city-states, wasaccompanied bytheconstant alternationof city-states andcity-state

confederations in the position of hegemonic power.
In Central Mexico the Post-Classic began w ith the rapid grow th of Tula toa position of hegemony; this was a city state in the north of the Valley of
Mexico, composed by a mixed population that included an im portant
proportion of local groups formerly within Teotihuacan's dom ain, and various
sets of imm igrants from northerly regions. The slow dissolution of Tula's
pow er and its abandonm ent (c. 1250-1350) was accompanied by the penetrationof new m igrant groups from the North, w ho established themselves primarily
in the highland valleys of Mexico, Puebla and Haxcala, founding the city statesthat w ould dominate the final phase of pre-Hispanic history in the area. As w eshall see later on, Nahuatl speaking peoples —w ho dom inated a large portionof Mesoamerica since the late fourteenth century and exerted the m ost
significant influence in the colonial world— claimed to be Tula's cultural andethnic heirs.14 In the West, the Post-Classic was characterised by the presence ofmultiple m inor polities engaged in continuous wars; some controlled small
irrigation systems and had medium-scale m onum ental architecture. Towards
the end of the period, however, the Tarascan state developed a fairly wide
dom ination sphere that was beginning to collide, w hen the Spaniards arrived,
w ith the so called Aztec empire to the east.

3.5.- M arginal Mesoamerica: The m ovable frontier
The northern frontier of Mesoamerica that Pedro Armillas (1964a: 62-63)
outlined in detail follows roughly the course of the M octezuma and Lermarivers south-w estw ards across the Sierra M adre Oriental and the Mesa Central;
14 As we shall see in chapter six, Nahuatl speakers did not consider them selves to be one
single people. They were segm ented in several groups, each with its own identity and internalcohesion.

\

89

and, after m aking a north-westerly turn near lake Chapala, it continues along
the Sierra M adre Occidental to meet and thence follow the Sinaloa river dow n
to its drainage in the Pacific Ocean.
At the time of European arrival and during the preceding three or four
centuries m ost of the land extending north of this line into present day south­
w estern United States, where due to prevailing environm ental conditions
seasonal agriculture is not feasible and irrigation is barely possible w ithoutm odem technologies, was primarily inhabited by hunter-gatherers dwelling insmall sem i-perm anent settlements. Nevertheless, in a few reduced and slightly
m ore hum id ecological niches people did cultivate the land (Narez 1994: 75;
Guevara 1995: 329-331), albeit only since the beginning of the first millennium
BC w hen agricultural products and techniques were introduced from the South(Kirchhoff 1954:531 & 533; Wills 1989: 139-140; Hall 1989: 41; Braniff 1994: 125).
While outside these farming enclaves material culture was very basic (personal
attire, tools, dwelling, and household paraphernalia), in the socio-politicalsphere the whole area was characterised by a particularly low degree ofcentralisation, the absence of wide structures of domination, and the scarcedevelopm ent of social stratification (Gerhard 1982: 3-4). Because these societies
produced few prestige goods and their economy generated scarce accumulable
surplus, neither of the two Mesoamerican hegemonic pow ers of the late PostClassic —the Tarascan state and the so called Aztec empire— extended theirsway over the region (Nalda 1996: 256).
Cultural frontiers, however, are not solid, unchanging boundaries.
Throughout m ost of the Classic period the limit of perm anent agriculture thatm arked the northern edge of Mesoamerica stood about 250 kilometres northof the Lerma and Sinaloa rivers, cutting across the Mesa Central through thenorth-eastern extremes of present day Durango, Zacatecas and San Luis Potosf,
from the m outh of the Mayo river in Sonora to the Tamest and Panuco rivers
in Tamaulipas (Braniff 1994:120, Lopez & Lopez Lujan 1996: 125-126). Thus the90demarcation line that Kirchhoff (1943a & 1943b) and Armillas (1964a, 1964b &1969) drew for the sixteenth century, as they acknowledged themselves m erely
represents the final point in the process of contraction of an ambit that,between the first and eleventh centuries of the Christian era at least, seems tohave been also occupied by groups of Mesoamerican culture (Carrasco 1971b:
459; West & Augelli 1976:223; Hers 1989:13 & 38-39; Braniff 1994:117-120).
Precise interpretations concerning the causes and dating of this oscillation
vary. However, there are some general agreements: First, the initial spread of
agriculture-based civilisation over the desert culture that had prevailed beyond
the Lerma and Sinaloa rivers for several millennia until about the year 500 BC,
was the result of m igrant flows from the South (Kelley 1971 & 1974, W oodbury
1979: 26, Di Peso 1979a: 152-154), probably originated in such diverse regions as
the lowland coast of the Gulf of Mexico; the Teuchitlan-Etzatlan area of present
day Jalisco;15 Chupfcuaro, in southern Guanajuato; and Zacatenco, Tlatilco andCuicuilco in the Valley of Mexico (Lopez Austin & L6pez Lujan 1996: 126,
Braniff 1994: 116-117, Jaramillo Luque 1995: 173-175, Kelley 1966: 100-101).
Second, the U-shape strip of land thus overlaid w ith farming village life reached
its point of maximum expanse and efflorescence betw een the third and ninth
century. Third, the successive waves of imm igration that m arked the beginningof the Post-Classic period in Central Mexico were part of the final retreat of full­time farmers from that region, generally know n as Marginal Mesoamerica(map 9). Fourth, the cultural pattern developed there constitutes the source of

15 Several authors regard the presence of circular architecture and burial cham bers of thecrypt variety (tumbas de tiro) in south-w est Z acatecas a s fundamental evidence for the
penetration of w estern influences, and perhaps migrants, into Marginal M esoam erica(Cabrero 1986: 108). This characteristic architectural pattern was originally developed in
the w est of M esoamerica between the years 200 BC and 700 AD (Weigand 1995: 1 5 9 -1 6 0 ,Jaram illo Luque 1995: 173-176, Jim enez Betts 1995: 38-39). Hypotheses regarding theother possible sources of direct Mesoamerican diffusion mentioned here (e.g. Hers 1989: 4 8 SI) are more speculative and also more dispersed in the literature. Kelley (1966: 1 0 0 -1 0 4 )a sse rts that the Chupicuaro culture of the late Pre-Classic and early Classic periods in the
Michoacan-Guanajuato borders shows strong ties with the Pre-Classic of the Valley of
Mexico, and later som e of its features diffused north into Zacatecas-Durango to become p a rtof the cultural heritage that the Anasazi culture —considered precursor of the Pueblo
peoples— received through the intermediary Hohokam culture. This link between the W est andthe valley of Mexico has been also discussed by Cyphers (1981).

91

m any characteristic elements of the Puebloan cultures of N ew Mexico andArizona (Haury 1945, Kelley 1966: 95-97 & 100-102, W oodbury 1979: 26).
Fundam ental debates concerning the changing position of this frontier
are centred around the so called "Chalchihuites culture," a chain of related
farm ing societies m ost probably speaking Yutoaztecan languages whichdeveloped betw een the first and ninth centuries along the eastern rim of the
Sierra M adre Occidental, from w hat archaeologists identify as the Malpaso-La
Quem ada cultural complex, in northern Jalisco and Zacatecas, totheChalchihuites-Loma San Gabriel cultural complex, in Durango and Chihuahua(Kelley 1966: 99-100, Jaramillo Luque 1995: 173-176, L6pez Austin & L6pez
Lujan 1996: 27 & 125-130). This, of course, does not preclude the use of evidence
obtained elsewhere, but a paradigmatic value is indeed accorded to the"Chalchihuites culture." First because its most impressive settlement, La
Quem ada, constituted the m ost developed city of Marginal Mesoamerica;
second because the Toltec cultural pattern that became dom inant over Central
Mexico in the Post-Classic Period apparently originated there (Hers 1989 &
1995, Jimenez Betts 1995: 58-60); and third because it seems to have been the
major channel through which farming village life, ceramics and other elements
w ere introduced in the Pueblo area (Kelley 1956: 128-132, 1966: 99 & 1974,
Jaramillo Luque 1995:173-176).
Interestingly enough this "ready m ade cultural corridor" as Kelley called
it, was not only the m ain avenue "along which trade items, descriptions, ideas,
and w andering travellers moved" in the pre-conquest era (Kelley 1966: 99-100),it w as also a major passageway for the penetration of Spanish colonists into theNorth. M aria Teresa Cabrero (1986:108-109) notes, for instance, that the regionof south-w est Zacatecas and northern Jalisco was an im portant point in theroutes followed by N uno de Guzm an and his lieutenant Pedro Alm m dez
Chirinos in their conquest of Nueva Galicia, first province beyond the Aztec
dom ains to the north that fell under Spanish control.

92

Two scholarly views concerning the "Chalchihuites culture" prevailed
from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1950s. Some authors
conceived of it as a transitional zone where central Mexican and Puebloan
influences combined with local developments, but them ost popularinterpretations saw it as the product of either Tarascan or Toltec expansionism
in the early Post-Classic Period. Interdisciplinary research carried out in theearly 1960s at La Quem ada and surrounding areas under the supervision ofArmillas, however, indicated that peasant communities and stone architecture
existed there before the Tarascan and Toltec states consolidated, which could
suggest that Tula was the recipient of northerly influences rather than thecentre from which cultural patterns radiated northw ards (Hers 1989: 24-29).
To m ake sense of this evidence Armillas (1964a & 1964b) proposed thatm ajor climatic changes, roughly coinciding with the collapse of Teotihuacan(AD 500-600), and later the collapse of Tula (c. 1300), caused the successive
enlargem ent and shrinkage of Mesoamerica. A modified version of the farm ing
culture initially introduced in the N orth could have therefore easily been
im ported into the valley of Mexico m any generations later. It was his view thatafter the downfall of Teotihuacan whole groups of sedentary farmers poured
N orth into an up to then extremely arid territory that, for meteorologicalreasons, became transitorily suitable for agriculture (c. 600-1200). As a result,peasant communities were established in the area of La Quem ada under them ilitary protection of local lordships, whereas in the valley of Mexico theposition of the regional centre of pow er shifted slightly north w hen Tulaem erged as a dom inant state around AD 800-950. Between the twelfth andfourteenth centuries, however, a climatic reversal caused the index of aridity toincrease dramatically, thereby prom pting a massive exodus of full-time farm ers
from Marginal Mesoamerica, possibly followed by the readoption of form er
hunting-gathering lifestyles among the people w ho did not join the southw ard
flight (Armillas 1964a: 67-76 & 1964b).

93

Most specialists nowadays accept them ain propositions of this"oscillatory frontier thesis," even though its chronological aspects have beenadjusted to fit archaeological evidence obtained north and south of La
Quemada. Excavations by Roman Pina Chan and Beatriz Braniff in 1962
indicated, for instance, that the frontier's advance in the Mesa Central occurredearlier than Armillas had suggested. On the other hand, Charles Kelley andEllen Abbott dem onstrated that Mesoamerican features had alm ost completely
disappeared from Durango and Zacatecas by AD 950 (Hers 1989: 29-31, 35-36).
This is the case even for La Quemada, whose reputed flourishing period (AD900-1000) was originally miscalculated by mixing evidence from various
constructive phases together with the remains of later, m om entary re ­occupations occurred after the site's original dwellers had abandoned it (Hers
1989: 42-43). The current consensus is that Mesoamerican occupation in the"Chalchihuites culture" area initiated around the beginning of the Christian era,and by the early eleventh century sedentary farmers had nearly deserted thecentral and eastern portions of Marginal Mesoamerica.
W hat m atters to us here is that early Spanish missionaries and explorers
w ho came across the architectural vestiges left by the tem porary enlargem entof M esoamerican lifestyles did not hesitate to attribute their construction to theancestors of "civilised" Indians from Central Mexico during the migrations to
which

their

historical

traditions

abundantly

referred.

Friar

Juan

de

Torquem ada, for instance, wrote in his Monarquia Indiana (1975 [1615]: I, 117118) that m any years back he had found the ruins of magnificent and very old
buildings —undoubtedly La Quemada— seven leagues south of the city ofZacatecas.16 Certainly they were the fabric of the Aztecs and other Nahuatl
speaking tribes he affirmed, since according to ancient pictographic records andoral traditions they had m igrated into the valley of Mexico from a northerly

16 This is the only possible site he could have referred to. As Eduardo Noguera re m a rk s
(1970: 21-23), no other major archaeological site fitting his description exists in or aroundthe area he alluded to.

94

country. The same opinion regarding the presence of sophisticated architecture
am idst a territory mainly occupied by nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers
appears in the writings of friar Antonio Tello (1973 [1650]: 24-30) and Francisco
Javier Clavijero (1964 [1781]: xvii, 68).
In recent years M. A. Hers has dem onstrated these testimonies w ere
som ehow correct, based on new archaeological evidence and the "oscillatory
frontier thesis" as her m ain interpretative framework. N ot that w andering
Aztecs actually built La Quemada on their w ay dow n to the valley of Mexico.
Up to now and despite all efforts17 the place of origin of Nahuatl speakers has
not been unequivocally located; furthermore, the first constructive phases of La
Q uem ada antedate —various hundreds of years— the m om ent w hen the Aztec
m igration began according to the same historical traditions quoted by
Torquem ada, Tello and Clavijero. Nevertheless, excavations practised in the
N ayar sierra betw een 1974 and 1981, suggest that some of the groups who fledfrom the "Chalchihuites culture" area, together w ith the Nonoalca —a
Mesoamerican group established in Central Mexico long before— were indeed
the creators of the Toltec culture (Hers 1989:14-15).
Pivotal to Hers' argum ent is the fact that some typically Toltec elements
existed in various "Chalchihuites culture" sites at least five hundred years before
they appeared in Tula and other Post-Classic Mesoamerican sites, such as
Chichen-Itza and Mexico-Tenochtitlan. That is, specifically, the type of ceramicthat archaeologists label pseudo-cloisonne, copper and turquoise objects,
rectangular precincts with colonnades enclosed by surrounding walls; and,m ost im portantly, two particular structures associated w ith hum an sacrifice.
One corresponds to w hat the Nahuas called tzompantli, a skull rack for the
public exhibition of the severed heads of sacrificed warriors; the other is acharacteristic altar piece in the shape of a half laying hum an figure, apparently

17 For more detail se e chapter six.

95

used to place braziers with the burning hearts of sacrificial victims.18 All ofthese elements she contends, were carried along by the m igrant farmers thatpoured back into Central Mexico causing Mesoamerica to shrink (Hers 1995:
106-109 & 1989: 39-52, 106-118). Following Braniff (1994: 118-119) we candistinguish three principal waves of immigration reflected in the foreign
elements present in Tula. The first, of reduced proportions, happened after thecollapse of Teotihuacan (c. AD 650), the second took place during the early
Post-Classic, and the third coincided with the collapse of the Toltec pow eraround the year 1200.

3 . 6 Arid America and Oasis America.
While the concept of Mesoamerica enjoys an almost universal acceptanceam ong Native America specialists, the categorisation of the territory extending
N orth of it across the present-day United States-Mexico border is controversial.
N orth American scholars know the area by two labels: "Southwest" and"Greater Southwest," the first encompassed in the second as a sub-area w hereprimitive part-tim e farmers and late-coming tribes of hunter gatherers coexist
with unstable horticulturist societies of a segm entary kind, settled from about
500 BC in the proximity of natural wells and rivers. Mexican scholars, following
Kirchhoff, usually prefer the term "Oasis America" for the farm ing culturaleconomic complex developed in the "Southwest," and "Arid America" for the
hunter-gatherer one that continued to prevail in the rem aining portion of the"Greater Southwest" until the late colonial period.
Rather than two different sets of terminologies referring to one and thesame empirical object, these are two analytic models w ith

divergentassum ptions and implications that do not even apply to the same geographic
space. Both, it is true, refer at least to the dry-lands that cover m ost of Sonora,
18 This type of sculptural piece is commonly known as chacmool. The Chalchihuites C ulture
example to which Hers refers is an earlier prototype bearing the essential characteristics ofthe classical form but not yet fully developed.

96

Chihuahua, Durango, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas, on the Mexican
side of the border; and nearly all of Arizona and N ew Mexico, the southern andwestern extremes of Texas, and southern California, in the United States. Yet
only the Arid/Oasis model is systematically inclusive of the peninsula of Baja
California and the m iddle part of the Mexican Mesa Central that comprises thestates of Zacatecas, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosf and Queretaro (Narez 1994: 7781 & 92-93; Lopez Austin & Lopez Lujan 1996:19-54).19
In my opinion the Arid/Oasis model has several advantages over theSouthw est/G reater Southwest model. The most obvious is that rather thanusing positional term s defined in relation to m odem national units —nam ely
the United States of America— it rests on the contrast manifest betw een local
forms of livelihood, as well as the evaluation of environm ental constraints thathave conditioned regional historical processes.20 A brief comparison of theprinciples and intellectual history articulating each of these models will
demonstrate m y point better. Simultaneously it will bring into the picture theprincipal indigenous groups that sixteenth century Spaniards came across as
they ventured North.
The concept of the "Southwest" as a native culture area was initially basedon evidence draw n only from peoples north of the international frontier

19 Volume 9 of the Handbook of North American Indians includes an article by Charles Di Peso
(1979a) on the Southern Periphery of the "Southwest", which covers the Mexican a re a sherein outlined down to Zacatecas, Guanajuato and San Luis Potosi. In the sam e volum e,
however, the general introductory articles by Ortiz (1979) and Woodbury (1979) are muchless inclusive. Usually when scholars speak of the Southwest, or even the G reater S outhw est,
they imply the south-western fringe of the United S tates of America and an indeterm inate but
rather small portion of the adjoining Mexican regions (e.g. Kroeber 1928 & 1939, S picer
1981 [1962], Lipe 1978, Dutton 1983, Hall 1989, Minnis & Redman 1990, Cordell & Smith
19 9 6 ).
20 My argument about the fitness of this model rests on the definitions Kirchhoff provided in
his seminal articles of 1943 and 1954, a s well as the way in which recent literature uses theterminology, but few authors elaborate on the model a s such. Therefore I might be adding
meanings that particular authors do not subscribe. From the Mexican school I also used thefollowing literature: Martinez C araza 1983; Guevara 1985 & 1995; Narez 1994; Lopez
Austin & Lopez Lujan 1996. Most of these authors circum scribe their investigation to the
Mexican territory, where archetypal Oasis American societies had disappeared long before
written records were done in the area; therefore their accounts only include p re -h isto ric
developm ents that left archaeological traces —usually stopping around the year 1500 AD.
Since the scope of my interest here goes beyond the international border I supplem ent myreview of Oasisam erican societies with North American authors who look ahead into thehistorical period, even when they rather speak about “the Southwest". I also rely on someauthors like Braniff (1975, 1989 & 1994) who reject both taxonom ies herein discussed.

97

betw een Mexico and the United States of America. In fact, it w as only until
present-day Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and upper California became part of
the United States, as a result of the 1846-1848 w ar w ith Mexico, that the region
became the subject of m odern ethnographic and archaeological interest. All ofthese lands underw ent extensive governm ental inspections as they w ere
incorporated into the N orth American Union. Military team s accompanied bytechnicians w ent around measuring, m apping, and recording the resources
they had and classifying the people they sheltered; a research aimed am ong
other things at instrumentalising the Indian Reservation policy that federal
authorities were already enforcing elsewhere in the national territory. Thus in avery literal sense the anthropological knowledge of the area was in its origins a
by-product of Anglo-American colonialism.21
But if the comprehensive swing of this official survey tried to cover m ostof the new ly acquired territory so as to furnish policy-makers w ith sufficient
information, the focus was certainly narrow er in academic circles. N orth
American scholars in the late nineteenth and early tw entieth century paid
particular attention to the more or less tightly organised groupsofhorticulturists living in w hat T. O. Mason (1907: 427-430) and Pliny E. Goddard(1913, quoted by Kirchhoff 1954: 535) called the Pueblo Indian C ountry,
roughly comprising southern Utah and Colorado and m ost of Arizona andN ew Mexico.22 Actually, as a scholarly category, "the Southwest" was initiallyrestricted to this reduced area; the only spot within present-day United States
w here compact m asonry settlements of non-European m anufacture ever21 This is a clear example of the link between colonialism and anthropology to which c ritic s
like Talal Asad (1973) and Jam es Clifford (1988) have referred. The policy of isolating
Indians in governm ent reservations that gave rise to a great deal of early ethnographic
research had one main purpose: to insure that Anglo expansion could proceed unimpaired in
the remaining areas.
22 As Keith H. Basso com m ents (1979: 14) research conditions regarding Native Am erican
culture were privileged in this region. Unlike many other areas in the United S tates w here
Indian populations had been destroyed or forcibly removed from their original hom elands,
south-w estern societies had persisted in situ relatively untouched since pre-colonial tim es.
People like Frank H. Cushing, John W. Powell, Adolph F. Bandelier, J e s s e W. Fewkes, Cosmos
Mindeleff, and Alfred V. Kidder em braced this restricted notion of the Southw est. Their w ork
undoubtedly set the foundation for the modern study of Pueblo peoples and other neighbouringgroups (S chroeder 1979).

98

existed. Spanish colonists had called these settlements "pueblos" because, unlike
the rather diffuse and mobile "rancherias" of hunter-gatherers and part-tim e
farmers w ho lived in the neighbouring regions, they resembled the tow ns that
Spaniards inhabited themselves back in the m otherland and in N ew Spain.
W hence the m isinterpretation that Mason and G oddard incurred in using thew ord "Pueblo" as an ethnic name.
W hen the Spaniards first arrived in the area (1539/1540) they foundaround seventy inhabited towns, as well as the ruins of several others.23 Each
was a self-contained autonom ous community, governed by its own elected
chiefs and w ith its own internal organisation. Although they maintained fairly
regular trade relations,24 they were linguistically diverse and m ade no politicalalliances am ong each other except tem porarily and for exceptional defence
reasons. Nevertheless, it has been recently suggested that formal systems ofpolitical and economic alliance, possibly involving managerial elites, did exist
am ong some pueblos but were destroyed with the massive depopulation that
European disease and violent conquest provoked (Cordell & Smith 1996: 204).
23 M. Junquera (1989: 10) a sse rts that there w as between seventy and eighty inhabited
towns in the Southwest at the moment of European intrusion but D. J. W eber (1992: 18) andF. Eggan (1979: 230) say they were ninety or more. Documentary sources from the period
provide different figures. C astaneda Najera (1992 [1560-1565]: 123-124) says that all thetowns in the provinces visited by Vazquez de Coronado and his army (1540-1542) sum up
sixty six, but those included in the itemised list he provides are seventy one. The 1541
anonym ous Relacion Postrera de Sibola (in Mora 1992: 177-178), also referring to the sam e
expedition, m entions twenty four towns that the author personally saw but m akes no generalstatem en t on the total number of towns found in the province. A pair of w itnesses from
Francisco Sanchez Cham uscado's 1581 expedition reported thatthe party saw sixty one"pueblos" housing altogether about 130,000 inhabitants (Philippe d'Escalante & Hernando
Barrando "Relacion breve y berdadera del descubrimiento del Nuevo Mexico...", c. October
1583. In Cartas de Indias 1974: I, 230-233). Baltasar de Obregon (1924 [1584]: 2 8 1 )repeats this information but a sse rts that it refers only to the towns along the Rio Grande,
while excluding the towns that Vazquez de Coronado, Francisco de Ibarra and Antonio deEspejo visited to the West, North and South. At the end of his book Obregon (1924 [1 5 8 4 ]:303-304) lists the provinces visited by Espejo in 1582, counting a total of seventy eight"towns". Although Pueblo demography in the pre-conquest period is difficult to establish it
seem s that the figure of 60,000 individuals provided by Onate in 1598 is consistent w itharchaeologically based studies of the human carrying capacity of the region (Palkovich 1 9 8 5 :
4 0 8 ).
24 The wide distribution of marine shells in south-western archaeological sites, the ex ten siv e
network of salt exchange that Spanish settlers took over (Woodbury 1979: 25), and the
distribution of particular types of ceram ics in northern Chihuahua, New Mexico and A rizona
for the period between c. 800-1600 AD (Di Peso 1979b: 93-94, Cordell 1979: 146) suggestthat in pre-conquest times Pueblo villages maintained interlocking networks of economic
relationships, usually interpreted a s trade (Cordell & Smith 1996: 202). Regular com m ercial
routes along well established trails have been identified, som e extending beyond the limits of
the Pueblo region into M esoamerica, coastal California and the Great Plains (Ferguson 1 9 9 0 :5 3 -5 5 ).

99This proposition coheres w ith the fact that in the Spanish perception all Pueblo
Indians seemed to be one people w ith "the same ceremonies and customs, evenw hen certain particular things existed in some towns and not in others."25 They
all grew maize, beans, chilli, squash, cotton and tobacco in irrigated fields, andkept domesticated turkeys and dogs; they dressed in cotton blankets andanimal skins; they resided in compact stone and adobe houses clustered
together in hive-like com pounds which rose for several stories and w ere
centred around open plazas; they were m onogam ous and had no governing
lords (senores), although they did have priests and by w ay of law they followed
the elders' advise (Castaneda Najera 1992 [1560-1565]: 118-119, Gallego’s
Journal, c. 1581, in H am m ond & Rey 1966: 82-86).
M odern scholars also consider that Pueblo Indians "form a unit incomparison w ith neighbouring groups," since their culture is highly distinctive
and fairly uniform "in its externals" (Eggan 1979: 224). Closer observation,
however, reveals im portant differences regarding ecology, language, and socialorganisation. Thus a basic division is generally recognised today betw een theeastern pueblos of the Rfo Grande and its tributaries, and the w estern pueblos
of west N ew Mexico and Arizona (Eggan 1979: 226, Dutton 1983:14-15).
Linguistically, Pueblo peoples represent four different stocks, three of
which correspond to w estern groups: The Hopi (or Moqui) of the Tusayan
province in north-east Arizona, between the River San Juan and the Little
Colorado, speak a language of the Shoshdn family closely linked withlanguages spoken in the Great Basin; the language of the Zuni people (provinceof Cibola in w estern N ew Mexico) was considered until recently an isolate but
is now thought to be distantly related to Penutian languages of California;
finally the Keres (or Queres), partly living in the west and partly in the Rio
Grande valley, have no known linguistic affiliations. The fourth linguistic stock

25 "Todos esto s pueblos en general tienen unos ritos y costum bres, aunque tienen algunas
co sas en particulares que no las tienen los otros" (C astaneda N&jera 1992 [1 5 6 0 -1 5 6 5 ]:1 1 9 -1 2 0 ).

100

am ong Pueblo Indians, the Kiowa-Tanoan, is represented in the Rio Grande by
three subgroups, Tiwa Tewa and Towa, each comprising several dialects, som e
extinct today. Both the Shoshon and the Tanoan languages, together with
Nahuatl from Central Mexico, belong to the Yutoaztecan family (Pericot y
Garcia 1961: 666-669, Eggan 1979: 226-227, Dutton 1983: 14-16, Junquera 1989:
11, Hall 1989: 37-39, Weber 1992: 18-19, Lamar & Truett 1997: 63, Cordell &Smith 1996:202-203).
The m ost conspicuous contrast betw een eastern and w estern pueblos
concerns their kinship systems and attendant social structures. All w estern
pueblos, based upon matrilineal exogamous clans and matrilocal households,
follow a Crow kinship system that treats a wom an's brother and her son as
equivalent in reckoning kinship. The eastern pueblos of the Rio Grande arem ore heterogeneous. Most have essentially patrilineal non-exogamous dualorganisations, each moiety respectively associated w ith sum m er and w inter (orN orth and South). The Keres and the Towa, however, also have matrilineal
exogamous clans, while instead of clans, the Tewa and the northern Tiwa havebilateral extended family structures and an Eskimo kinship system thatemphasises seniority and reciprocal relations (Eggan 1979: 227, D utton 1983: 18,
32-34).
Pueblo Indians were not the exclusive inhabitants of the so called"Southwest" at the time of the Spanish contact. Athabascan speaking groups ofhunter-gatherers, generally know n as Apaches, also lived in Colorado, Texas,
Arizona and N ew Mexico. They had m igrated south from the basin of theMakenzie river in Canada following the slopes of the Rocky m ountains andhad arrived in the "Southwest" around AD 1400.26 Early in the tw entieth
26 It is not clear when did Athabascan groups began to migrate but there is evidence that by
the first half of the sixteenth century they were already in Colorado and northern New
Mexico. Once established in their southern locations they divided them selves in seven trib e s :Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Kiowa, Mezcalero, W estern Apache, Lipan and Navaho. While m ost ofthem continued to be specialised hunter-gatherers well into the colonial era the Navaho
quickly adopted agriculture and a sem i-sedentary residence pattern of a Puebloan style. The
chronicles of the first Spanish expeditions in the area (1540-1542) make little reference topeople who may be identified a s such but by the 1580's and 1590's Spanish reports dofrequently mention nomadic hunter-gatherers, som etim es identified a s Querechos and101century they too received much scholarly attention, completing the image ofthe "Southwest" as a com pound of sedentary farmers and roam ing huntergatherers living close to each other in a semi-arid environment.
The national bias of the "Southwest"/"Greater Southwest" m odel isnoticeable in that groups of simple farmers similar to the Pueblo w ho lived
south of theinternational frontier, like theCahita, Pima-Opata andTarahum ara, w ere either totally disregarded or placed together w ith N orth
Mexican hunter-gatherers and Mesoamerican peoples in a different area also
comprising Central America. As the native peoples and archaeological remainsof north-w estern Mexico began to be studied in the early tw entieth century, are-definition of the original "Southwest" seemed imperative. Subsequent
reform ulations included portions of the Mexican states of Sonora, Durango,
Sinaloa and Chihuahua. A region where a pre-conquest Puebloan culture
developed leaving impressive remains in the archaeological site of Paquime: alarge city —also known as Casas Grandes— with planned, multistoried, adobewalled buildings, ball courts, streets and plazas that flourished as a regional
trading centre betw een AD 1200 and 1490 (Radding 1997: 28-29, Cordell &Smith 1996: 228). Specialists think that simple farmers such as the Cahita andTarahum ara are the rem nants of that culture (L6pez Austin & L6pez Lujan
1996: 53).
During the time that N orth American scholars centred their attention on
the Pueblo Indians, intensive agriculture was their param ount criterion for
defining the "Southwest" as a culture area. Wissler (1938 [1917]: 241) andKroeber (1928 & 1939) had argued that farming was the predom inant form of
livelihood in the region, and that the presence of a few hunter gatherers of late
som etim es a s Apaches. In the late seventeenth century other band societies, the Ute and the
Comanche, entered the region from the North (Martin, Quimby & Collier 1947: 1 5 7 -1 5 8 ,Dutton 1983: 63-66, 105-120, L6pez Austin & Lopez Lujan 1996: 36, Hall 1989: 3 8 -3 9 ).
Lamar & Truett (1997: 63-64) affirm that the first A thabascans migrated between AD 8 0 0
and 1500, being the ones we presently call w estern Apaches (Mezcalero and Navaho), while
those we know a s eastern Apaches (Jicarilla, Kiowa and Lipan) arrived in the Southw est by
1700. The best known by the Spaniards were the Apache de Navahu (Navaho) who raided andtraded with the Spanish and the Pueblo. They called them selves Dine, meaning the people. The
word Apache is Pueblo and m eans enemy (Lamar & Truett 1997: 73)

102arrival did not change its general outlook. Nevertheless, once the category of
the Southwest was extended to include Sonora, Durango and Chihuahua, theagriculture/non agriculture division ceased to be pertinent (Kirchhoff 1954: 536,
537-539). The hunting-gathering societies of the area shared im portant
attributes w ith the farmers, such as pottery styles, weaving techniques, andintense ritualism. At the same time m any gatherers and hunter-gatherers living
elsewhere in northern Mexico showed striking similarities w ith simple farm ers
from Sonora and Chihuahua —like the Huichol (Kelley 1966: 97)— upon w hom
the extended notion of the "Southwest" had been predicated. In response Ralph
L. Beals (1943) came up with the concept of the "Greater Southwest" thatincorporated north-central and north-east Mexico, southern California andm ost of Texas alongside the N orth American states of Nevada, Utah, Colorado,
Arizona and N ew Mexico, traditionally included in the "Southwest" (Kirchhoff
1954: 536,542). In this m anner, N orth American scholarship ended up w ith the
problem atic model of a super-area, the "Greater Southwest", composed offarmers, part-tim e farmers, and hunter gatherers w ho practised no agriculture
at all. A circumstance that could only be accounted for in term s of anencom passed area, the "Southwest", and by an overall definition as vague as
the one Beals provided:[The Greater Southwest is] a region in which similar [environmental] conditions
exist, and over which at one time in the past there spread a relatively homogeneous
culture or succession of cultures upon a pre-farming level, with the fanningcultures [of the Southwest] forming a later overlay, (quoted by Kirchhoff 1954:
542).
This patchy concept of the Southwest is still widely used by the American
Anthropological establishment, progressively challenged by the Arid/Oasis
America m odel which I consistently use throughout this study.
A m ong other things, this model acknowledges the hom ogeneity that,
according to Beals, is likely to have prevailed in the area prior to the complete
establishm ent of agriculture. At the same time, it accords a greater analytic
im portance to the fact that for nearly tw o thousand years before European

>

103

penetration, the social structures, pattern of settlement, and daily customs of
one portion of its inhabitants "grew out of, or developed around, farm ing as
the principal basis of subsistence" thus giving w ay to the emergence of aseparate culture —"Oasis America"— at certain enclaves within the territory
occupied by the "Arid America" culture (Kirchhoff 1954: 543 & 546; Guevara
1995: 329-331).
In spite of the vague geographic correspondence existing betw een "Oasis
America" and the first rendition of the "Southwest", the form er is notfundamentally a spatial category; it rather denotes a cultural form i.e., aparticular combination of social and material structures scattered in a series ofgeographically disconnected spots throughout present day Utah, Colorado,
Arizona, and N ew Mexico in the USA; and Chihuahua, Sonora, Durango, andZacatecas in Mexico (Narez 1994: 92). Similarly "Arid America" comprises thosegroups of people evolved from prehistoric cultures of "desert tradition", w ho
lived in the draughty area herein discussed, both sides of the current
international border. Until the European arrival they did not practiceagriculture, nor did they build perm anent settlements (Braniff 1975: 218-220;
N arez 1994: 80). Once geographic boundaries are blurred a m ore flexible
approach to the land is possible, and it is easy to think of places w here Arid andOasis American cultures overlap w ithout having to circumscribe them within
one or the other fixed areas (map 4).
Oasis America's m ain features aresedentism; dry-land intensive

agriculture as a principal food source, characterised by the use of irrigation
through simple stream diversion and floodwater control (Gutierrez 1991: xxi;
Hall 1989: 39-40; Ndrez 1994: 92, 94, 97, 98, 107); compact villages consisting ofstone and sun-baked brick houses clustered together, wall to wall, form ing
unitary, hive-like com pounds (Gutierrez 1991:14; Narez 1994:102-107; Guevara
1995: 334-335); and a kin based social structure of segm entary lineages uponwhich, in some places, a network of cross-cutting esoteric associations and task

104

groups w as superim posed as a means to foster tow n wide integration (Keesing
1975: 64-66; Gutierrez 1991: xxii-xxiii & 24-25; Whiteley 1985:364-367).
Indeed, Pueblo societies have been characterised as consisting ofdispersed segm entary lineages with high tendency to fission, held together
through higher units that cut across the prim ary segments integrating eachtow n as a whole, such as work groups, esoteric societies or all encompassing
cults that prom ote ritualised reciprocal exchanges across segm entary units(Gutierrez 1991: xxii-xxv). Individual Pueblos (towns), then, w ere collections of
exogam ous matrilineal clans, each being a land holding corporation w ith acentral role in the ceremonial life of the community. As no hereditaryleadership along the lines of household or lineage existed, relations ofsuperordination andsubordination were

based

on

age

and personal

characteristics (Gutierrez 1991: 12-16). These features, according to Keesing(1975: 64-66), are typically found in predom inantly agricultural societies of highproductivity based on matrilineal descent systems, where w om en perform key
agricultural tasks.
Remote antecedents of Oasisamerica can be traced back to various sitesthat show vestiges of groups mainly living from gathering, whose prototype isthe so called Cochise culture. By the year 700 of the Christian era m any had
developed agriculture and lived in semi perm anent villages. From this point on
they began to diversify. Some became fully sedentary and, during som e
periods, organised chiefdom confederations. Three regionally distinct culturesderive from this root. They began to differentiate from each other around AD
200 w ith the appearance of the first ceramics, slowly developed in the previous
century as a solution to the demands imposed by the adoption of agriculture.
To the south-east, in the so called Mogollon area, sedentary farmers created thePaquim e culture, which had its developmental peak betw een AD 1060 and
1340. Its major settlement was Casas Grandes. To the west the H ohokam
region was m arked by the appearance of pit-houses and the later presence of

105

ball-courts (c. AD 500), suggesting contacts with Mesoamerica. Finally, in theregion known as The Four Corners, where Utah, Colorado, N ew Mexico andArizona meet, the Anasazi culture eventually evolved into the commonly called
Pueblo culture (Guevara 1995: 329-341; Martin, Quimby & Collier 1947: 100-130& 168-216).
Despite the disappearance of the southernm ost advanced societies ofOasis America by the sixteenth century, groups of rudim entary farm ers
practising migratory slash and b u m cultivation continued to live contiguous to
Mesoamerica until the Spaniards arrived, from the coast of the Pacific Ocean tothe edge of the Mexican Central Plateau (Armillas 1964a: 63-64). In the Sierra
M adre Occidental the Tarahumar and the Tepehuan were the largest groups ofsimple farmers, but they lived in scattered seasonal dwellings and relied m ostly
on hunting and fishing, whereas the Cahita, the Yaqui, and the Papago lived insmall perm anent villages on the coast. Outside the Pueblo area irrigated fields
and terraces only survived in Oasis America among the Pima and the Opata, inSonora (West & Augelli 1976: 241). Confusion m ight arise from the fact that
agriculture and sedentism have also been posited as key attributes of
Mesoamerica. The division that sets Oasis America apart, however, becom es
clear w hen we consider that social organisation was m uch simpler there, for it
was based on kinship and it completely lacked social classes, large cities, andstate institutions, typical of Mesoamerica (Kirchhoff 1954:548).
Contrastingly, in the Mesoamerican N orth and Northeast, sedentary
farm ers were directly confronted with the nomadic and semi-nomadic, tribal
peoples of Arid America (Armillas 1964a: 63-64). Unlike Prairie Indians w ho
lived primarily on hunting, most Arid American groups like the Seri, Zacateco,
Pame, Huachichil and some Apache were specialised gatherers (Kirchhoff 1943a& 1954), although im portant fishing communities also lived in California andBaja California. In Sonora, Chihuahua and Coahuila groups of primitive

106

farmers like the Conchos lived side by side w ith other Apache groups w hohunted deer and other animals (Lopez Austin & L6pez Lujan 1996: 28-37).

3.7.- Settled M esoamericans vs. unsettled Chichimecas.
Historical sources since colonial times subsum e under the general label of
Chichimeca most of the groups from Arid America. The term w as of current
use in Central Mexico w hen the Spaniards arrived but its original m eaning is
now obscure. This is partly due to the semantic layers it acquired in the colonial
context, b u t also to the ambiguous character it already had in the pre-conquest
era. Nahuatl speaking Indians often used the w ord Chichimeca w ith reference
to their ow n ancestors, w hom they proudly defined as im m igrants from theN orth that lived primarily on hunting but knew how to cultivate the land andw ere ruled by sovereigns called tlatoque (sing, tlatoani) (Martmez M ann 1971:
250-252; Castillo Farreras 1972: 33; Reyes Garcia & Guemes 1995: 243), w hereas
the Spaniards always spoke about Chichimecas with a derogatory accent,m eaning those resisting tribes of "primitive” and unsettled hunter-gatherers
that ham pered their northw ard advance.
As early as 1525, for example, a Spanish soldier reported to have heard
from Indians in Aguacatlan that peoples living further north w ere Otomfs, oreven "Teules Chichimecas, w ho are like beasts."27 Much later (1574) a colonist in
the m ining tow n of Llerena, in Nueva Galicia, used the expression likewise in apetition addressed to the King:I Melchor de Alava neighbour of the village of Llerena and mines of Sombrerete[...] declare that I have been in the service of Your Majesty for a long time
conquering and subduing the road-robber Chichimeca Indians that roam thesurroundings of the said village [...] and many other places and royal roads,
causing plenty of damages [...], and since there is no captain or any other person
entitled by Your Majesty to take on the defence against those Chichimecas they
get whatever they like without confronting any resistance 28

27 "Son otomfs y aun dicen que son teules chichim ecas, que son como bestias" (quoted by
BI6zquez & Calvo 1992: 205n).
28 "Melchor de Alava vezino de la villa de Llerena y minas del Som brerete [...] digo que yo e
andado mucho tiempo en servicio de Su M ajestad conquistando y sugetando los yndios
chichimecas salteadores que andan en la comarca de la dicha villa [...] y otras m uchas p a rte s107

Finally, viceroy M artin Enriquez wrote a similar complaint in 1580:
some Indians they call Chichimecas around here together with others fromdifferent nations whom are all still to be conquered [...] have been a plague thathas given a good deal of trouble to these kingdoms, because they live in its widest
and roughest lands, and not even the joint efforts of all the Spaniards living here
would be enough to punish them, because they neither settle down, nor have afixed place to be found, rather with bows and arrows (which is the weaponry theyuse) they constantly wonder from one place to another, living like deer only on
herbs and roots and animal powders they keep in gourds.29
Several tribal groups that spoke different languages fall within the Spanish
usage of the category Chichimeca as exemplified in these quotations;particularly the Guachichiles (Huachichil), the Guamares, the Zacatecos, and thePames, against w hom the Spaniards w aged a prolonged series of w ars in them iddle of the sixteenth century (Driver 1963:4-5; Hall 1989: 63-65; Reyes Garcia& Guemes 1995: 227). But using the term in this m anner to signify all thenomadic, hunter- gatherers of Arid America as opposed to the sedentary
agriculturists of Mesoamerica was not a m ere w him of Spanish conquerors;
actually, they were only applying one of several m eanings attributed to thew ord by Indian discourse at the time they arrived.
In his Historia de los Indios de Nueva Espafia friar Toribio de Benavente(1969 [1565]), also know n as Motolinfa,

noted that

before theconquest

Indians from Mexico-Tenochtitlan kept the record of their history in a
pictographic book they called the "Year Count Book" (Libro de la cuenta de losanos), according to which the Chichimeca were the first and m ost ancient of
three kinds of people to inhabit Central Mexico. Unlike the Colhua and the
Mexican themselves —the other two sorts of people that pictographs referredy caminos reales los quales han echo y hazen muy grandes danos [...] y por no aver capitan ni
persona que con titulo de vuestra Alteza ande en la defensa de los dichos chichimecas salen
con lo que quieren sin tener resistencia en ello..." ( Peticidn de Melchor de Alava para
descubrir y poblar Quivira. AGI, Indiferente General, 1384).
29 "Unos indios que ac& llaman chichimecas a los que les juntan otros de otras naciones que
todos quedaron por conquistar [...] han sido una plaga que ha dado bien en que entender a e sto s
reinos, porque estos avitan en la tierra m£s larga y fragosa que hay en 61, por lo qua)entendiendo que si para castigarlos se juntasen todos los espaholes que hay aca no bastarian
porque [...] ellos nunca tienen asiento, ni lugar cierto donde los pueden hallar, sino que con sus
arcos y flechas que son las arm as que huzan andan de una parte a otra, y como venados,sustent£ndose de s6lo yervas y raizes, y polvos de animates que tienen en unas calabazas..."( Ynstruccion que por mandado de SM hizo el virrey Martin de Enriquez para el conde deCoruna, su sucesor. 25 / 09/ 1580. Varios papeles tocantes a Yndias. BNM, signatura 8 5 5 3 ,f. 29).

108

to— Chichimecas "had no w ay of writing or figuring because they w ere
barbarous and lived like savages," although they recognised one leader tow hom they rendered complete obedience. In fact, they were "not know n tohave built houses or towns, to have w orn clothes, to have had corn or any kindof bread or other cereals. [Rather], they lived in caves and mountains, [and]they subsisted on wild roots, and on deer, hares, rabbits, and snakes."
Interestingly enough the friar also mentioned as m arker of a state of primitive
simplicity the fact that they "did not perform bloody sacrifice and had no idols,"
worshipping only the sun w hom they considered their god.30
If we compare this passage with chapter 29, book X of Codex Florentino 31
where friar Bernardino de Sahagun (1989 [1588-1577]: 2, 650-676) described the
population of New Spain, serious ambiguities appear m aking of the
Chichimeca issue a very complex one.
For Benavente the distinction betw een Chichimeca, Colhua and Mexican
was clearly of an ethnic and historical character; it implied a differentiation
between three groups that, having achieved different states of development,
successively m igrated to Central Mexico (this land/esta tierra). Furtherm ore,
contem porary Chichimeca appear in Benavente's text via his ow n comparison
between the ancient Chichimeca depicted in the Indian documents he saw andcertain groups "known by the same name" during his ow n days. Contrastingly,
30 "...y por lo que de este libro se ha podido colegir de los que esta tierra poblaron, fueron
tres m aneras de gentes, que aun ahora hay algunos de aquellos nombres. A los unos llam aron
Chichimecas, los cuales fueron los primeros senores de esta tierra [...] No tem an m anera de
escribir ni figurar, por ser gente b£rbara y que vivian como salvajes [...] Estos chichim ecas
no se halla que tuviesen casa, ni lugar, ni vestidos, ni mai'z, ni otro genero de pan, ni o tra s
semillas. Habitaban en cuevas y en los montes; m antem anse de rafces del campo, y de venados
y liebres, y conejos y culebras. Comi'anlo todo crudo o puesto a secar al sol; y aun hoy dia hay
gente que vive de esta m anera [...] Tenian y reconocfan estos chichimecas a uno por mayor, al
cual suprem am ente obedecian. Tomaban una sola por mujer y no habfa de ser parienta. No
tenian sacrificios de sangre, ni idolos; m as adoraban al sol y tenianle por dios..." (Benavente
1969 [1565]: 2-3). A very similar passage is contained at the beginning of the Memoriales(B enavente 1996 [1541]: 122-123).
31 Bilingual encyclopaedic compilation of indigenous history, beliefs and custom s made by
Sahagun in close collaboration with native Nahuatl speakers. The Spanish fraction of the
document, taken from a sixteenth century copy found in the convent of Tolosa, Spain, w as
published under the title of Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espafia in the e a rly
nineteenth century. Although the origin of this manuscript is not clear it is the one from which
nearly every modern edition of the Historia... derives. The complete palaeography of the
Spanish text written by Sahagun in the Codex was not published until the 1989 edition by
Garcia Quintana and Lopez Austin —which is the one I am using here (Sahagun 1989 [15581577])— appeared.

109

Sahagun organised his account around the distinction betw een nine groups ofpeople, described in different sections in such a w ay that no clear cut ethnolinguistic principle of classification can be discerned, which suggests that he wasfaithfully reporting his informants' classification rather than trying to m ake
sense of the people he observed. Thus the Toltecs, w ho occupy the firstparagraph, are characterised as highly cultured peoples that spoke Nahuatl andwere the first to arrive in N ew Spain, founding the city of Tula that wasabandoned in a later period. Paragraphs two to four are dedicated to the
Chichimeca, which Sahagun's informants divided into three m ain types: theOtorrn, farm ers of a relatively low cultural development; the Tamime, m eaning"arrow shooters", mainly hunters who built no tow ns but occasionallycultivated the land and had some sort of organised rulership; and theTeuchichimecas, or "authentic Chichimecas", described as completely wild anduncultivated peoples who practised no agriculture at all, lived on hunting andhad no fixed places of residence. Ensuing paragraphs are devoted to otherpeoples. However, the Nahuatl speaking groups (paragraphs 5, 11 & 14), theM azahuaque(paragraph 9), and the Micchuaque(paragraph

13),

all

characterised as advanced farmers with complex forms of social organisation,
are also said to have been Chichimeca.
W ithout going into thorough detail, we can sum m arise the conclusions
that scholars have draw n from these and other testimonies as follows: In a very
general sense, Chichimeca, which is a Nahuatl word, w orked as a broad
cultural characterisation frequently used to denote unsettled, hunting-gathering
lifestyles that stood in opposition to archetypal formsof civilisation,

represented by the Toltec society of bygone times and understood as the sumof arts, urbanism , institutionalised rulership and ritual —including hum ansacrifice (Sodi 1962: 55; Noguez 1995: 197-198; Reyes Garcia & Guemes 1995:
226-227). This application seems to cover the ancient Chichimeca m entioned by
Benavente, and also Sahagun's Teuchichimeca and Tamime. In a m ore specific110

sense, the term was applied to the descendants of those farm ing groups thatm oved tem porarily to Chichimeca lands during the period of enlargem ent of
Mesoamerica, and who migrated back south at the beginning of the PostClassic. This usage includes the Otomf, the M azahuaque, and the Micchuaque,as well as all the Nahuatl speaking peoples, including the Toltecs (or at least oneof their constitutive branches) and the Mexicans (Driver 1963: 4-5; Carrasco
1971b: 462 & 1977: 173; Guemes 1990: 453-458; Reyes Garcia & Guemes 1995:
241-244). As Hers has demonstrated, being farmers of a well establishedMesoamerican tradition, the forefathers of some of these peoples lived forgenerations under constant threat, struggling to defend their settlements fromthe attacks

of groups

of hunter-gatherers

w hom

they

displaced. In

consequence they developed a w ar centred culture that became generalised in
the Mesoamerican heartland w hen their descendants returned. Contrastingwith both types of Chichimeca were the Olmec, the Huixtotin, and theNonoalca that, according to Sahagun’s informants (paragraph 12), neverreceived that name.
M easured against the documents hitherto referred, this interpretation
seems correct. As is confirmed by the expression "Teules Chichimecas " that early
Spanish expeditionaries distortedly recorded in Aguacatlan in 1525 (vid supra),
Sahagun's category of Teuchichimeca comprised all northern hunter-gatherers
living beyond Mesoamerica during the Post-Classic period, totally uninfluenced
by the farm ing culture prevailing South of their territory up to the verym om ent of the Spaniards arrival.32 Contrastingly,

Benavente's

ancient

Chichimeca can be identified with a particular invading group from the N orth,m entioned in other sources,33 that swept dow n into the valley of Mexico led by
32 Paradoxically later indigenous sources like Alvarado Tezozomoc (1992 [c. 1 6 0 0 -1 6 1 0 ]:3) and Chimalpahin (1998) apply the term teuchichimeca to the Aztec or Mexica, w hich,according to the hypothesis herein suggested, were not considered "authentic Chichimeca."
This poses a problem of interpretation I will not discuss. N evertheless I think the an sw e r
should be sought in the type of reelaboration that Indian historical discourse underwent in thecolonial situation, and which has been studied in detail by L6pez Austin (1985a & 1994a: 4 6 7 1 ).
33 Several codices painted in the mid sixteenth century like Codex Xolotl and the so called
Tlotzin and Quinatzin maps. Also written histories like the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca, andI lla chief called Xolotl in the early thirteenth century. These indeed were the firstm igrants to reach the area w hen the frontier of perm anent agriculture
dramatically shrank, shortly after the collapse of Tula, preceding all Nahuatl
speakers except the Toltecs. Unlike Otomfs, Mexicans or Micchuaques, theChichimecas of Xolotl were not retreating Mesoamericans, they were hunter
gatherers w ho spoke a language other than Nahuatl and Otom f (Jimenez
Moreno 1943 & 1944: 6; Carrasco 1976 [1950]: 244). By the sixteenth century,
how ever, their descendants had adopted a Mesoamerican farm ing culture andalready mixed, via m arriage exchange, with the local population they had evendropped their own language taking up Nahuatl instead (Le6n Portilla 1967;
Carrasco 1971b: 465). Like them, the Tamime were im m igrated huntergatherers, b ut they arrived much later and had not yet completely adapted to
the M esoamerican w ay of life. The same goes for the Otonchichimeca, theNahuachichimeca and the Cuextecachichimeca, briefly m entioned in the fourthparagraph of Sahagun’s text as acculturated hunter-gatherers w ho spoke theirow n Chichimeca language but had learnt their neighbour's: Otomf, Nahuatland Huasteco respectively.34
Some authors like Charles di Peso, and Beatriz Braniff after him, use theterm "Gran Chichimeca" to identify the extra-Mesoamerican area generally
described as Oasis and Arid America. They argue that both during the period
w hen sedentary Mesoamerican farmers pushed its original dwellers north of
the Tropic of Cancer and after they finally retreated south of the river Lerma, it
was inhabited by cultures so different that they cannot be incorporated in one
single area, the "Greater Southwest", nor can the territory be split in tw o "like
Kirchhoff suggested" (Braniff 1994: 114). Others, like Phil W eigand haveproposed to include Oasis American peoples within an extended notion of
the works by Chimalpahin and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxdchitl. I will discuss them in ch a p te rsix .
34 I think that R eyes Garcia & Guem es (1995: 226) make a wrong interpretation of Sahagun's
text when they take this a s an overall linguistic classification of Chichimeca groups
corresponding to the cultural classification that divides them in three types: Tamime, Otomf
and Teochichimeca.

/

112

Mesoamerica (map 5), given the fact that the Pueblo Indians had intensive
contact w ith Mesoamerica through a trading corridor stretching along the slopeof the Sierra M adre Occidental (Weigand 1978: 212). Despite their internal
diversity, and notwithstanding the channels that connected them in one or
another sort of relation, I prefer to keep the treble distinction betw een Arid,
Oasis, and Mesoamerica. I think the partition holds true for the pre-conquest
era, as long as we do not stick to rigid geographic boundaries or historicallyundifferentiated lists of attributes. I am particularly interested in this m odel
because the Spaniards clearly distinguished betw een the peoples that each ofthese "culture areas" comprised, granting them different statuses and treatingthem differently. Furtherm ore, from the Spanish perspective the Pueblo
Indians were indeed an Oasis amidst "barbarians", and in a sense this was an
im portant reason to call the place Nuevo Mexico.
These rem arks bring us back to the discussion on classifications as
theoretical constructs that opened this chapter. Boundaries draw n by culturearea taxonomies that have a significant value for the scholar sometimes find noequivalent bearing among the societies they help to study. But in som e
instances regional historical processes and local forms of categorical discourse
fully endorse academic frontiers. Thus the limit betw een Mesoamerica andA rid/O asis America had actual meaning for the sedentary peoples of southern
Mexico in pre-conquest times, vaguely coinciding at least during the late PostClassic w ith the geographic scope of such categories as "Chihimeca", which
despite its elusive meaning appears to have had some relation to the changing
span of perm anent agriculture. Furtherm ore, it also kept

rem arkable

im portance throughout the colonial regime, and is still perceptible today as atransition zone betw een the predom inantly Mestizo-European w ay of life,
characteristic of northern Mexico, and the Indian and Mestizo culture, pervasivein the south of the country. This is partly due to the fact that in Arid America
the process of European colonisation, w ith its frequent policy of Indian

113

extermination, accentuated the already extant pattern of dem ographic dispersal
and relatively low population density.
On one level of the analysis, the contrast distinguishing Mesoamerica
from Arid and Oasis America determined both the pace of the Spaniard's
advance in the N orth, and the general direction of the routes followed by
exploring and conquering parties. Not only did particular forms of indigenous
civilisation require the conquerors to practice different types of warfare. As it iswell known, in areas w here indigenous forms of hegem ony had developed,
and certain groups had m anaged to impose their pow er over a class ofcom m oners mainly dedicated to cultivate the land, Indians w ere som ehow
easily subjected to the Spanish domination. Conversely, those groups living
outside the areas controlled by the aboriginal "high cultures", be they regular or
seasonal nom ads or primitive agriculturists that periodically relocated theirsettlements, were m uch more difficult to subdue as they had a flexible relation
w ith the territory they occupied and the loose political structures that boundthem together were not based in perm anent subservience (Benedict 1943).
On the other hand, and closer to the point pursued by the generalargum ent of this thesis, the Spaniards anchored their northw ard expansion on
both the m an-pow er and the local knowledge of already conquered Indiansfrom Central Mexico. From a very early point in time, Nahuas from different
cities and villages in the central highlands were massively incorporated intosome expeditions as "auxiliary" troops and almost w ithout fail, one or two ofthem w ere taken as guides, scouts and interpreters. Indigenous perspectives,
therefore, w ere inevitably adopted w hen strategic decisions were to be made.
Consider the revealing statement that N uno de Guzm an, one of the first
captains to test his luck in the northern provinces, m ade in a letter he w rote to
the King in July of 1530:
From Michoacan I wrote to Your Majesty [...] that I had come with one hundredand fifty horsemen and a similar quantity of foot soldiers [...] and also seven or

114

eight thousand allied Indians to discover and conquer the province of the teuleschichimecas that is contiguous with New Spain.35
This is just one am ong m any examples of the recruitm ent of native warriors.
The decisive collaboration of Tlaxcalan allies to topple M octezuma in 1521 had
set a very convenient precedent for such a practice, which continued
throughout the sixteenth century. Beyond the indisputable practicalities
entailed in this immediate level of co-participation, Spanish expectations
regarding further lands to be conquered were significantly shaped after Indian
notions, including empirical information on land and people, cosmologicalconceptions about the w orld at large and local historical traditions. In the letter
quoted above Guzm an adopts, however distorted, the term provided by his
M esoamerican w arriors to identify the local groups he fought against: "teuleschichimecas. " The operation reveals deep levels of communication betw een the
Spanish captain and his Indian auxiliary troops and points to the possibility that,along w ith ethnic taxonomies, the Spaniards absorbed other indigenous views
and customs through their tireless ventures in the North.

35 "Desde Mechoac6n screvf a Vuestra Majestad [...] como venia con ciento y cincuenta de acavallo y otros tantos peones [...] y con siete u ocho mil yndios am igos a descubrir la tierra yconquistar la provincia de los tebles chichimecas que confina con la Nueba Espafia..." (Nuno de
Guzm&n, letter to the king, Omitl&n, July 8th, 1530. In Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 205).

115

CHAPTER FOUR
THE CONQUEST AND EXPLORATION OF THE NORTH AND THE
ESTABLISHMENT OF THE PROVINCE OF NUEVO MEXICO
Since the rise of the nation-state, political geography has become the dom inantm ode in which history is imagined; scholars have become so accustomed to thepow er of the m ap, indeed, that the artificial frontiers im posed by m odern
politics are often mistakenly projected back onto the past. It is as a result of thiskind of misconception that historians and anthropologists specialising in the socalled "American Southwest" have created a coherent narrative for the history
of N ew Mexico, organised around the institutional and military events occurred
w ithin its boundaries as they stand today (Bancroft 1889, Hodge & Lewis 1907,
Bolton 1916 & 1921, Beck 1969, Weber 1979,1987 & 1992, Gutierrez 1991, C utter
1992, Lamar & Truett 1997).1
For the period of conquest and initial settlem ent this well-establishednarrative considers only the scores of Spanish prospectors who, since 1539,
penetrated (or attem pted to penetrate) the region inhabited by the Pueblo
Indians; as it was there that Juan de Onate founded the colonial kingdom of
Nuevo Mexico in April 1598. Sixteenth century sources that talk about Nuevo
Mexico, however, do not necessarily refer to the territory comprised within the
nebulous limits of this province. Initially called Cibola in accordance to thereport of its first Spanish visitor, Marcos de Niza (in M ora 1992: 150),2 the area
only came to be know n as Nuevo Mexico in the decade of 1580; yet the nam e
already appears in earlier documents applied to other well populated places as
the colonial expansion progressed, each in its turn m isinterpreted as the Aztec
1 Early historical writing about the American Southwest created an epic image of the Spanish
colonisation, based on hundreds of journals, diaries and other docum ents reviewed and edited
between 1900 and 1950. D. J. Weber (1979 & 1987) and later works, including the
docum entary collections by Hammond & Rey (1940, 1953 & 1966) contributed to a m ore
critical vision.
2 Relacidn del descubrimiento de las Siete Ciudades, Septem ber 2, 1539.

116

ancestral hom eland of N ahua origin myths. Thus in accordance with the
docum entary evidence, I propose an alternative approach that does not dependon any frontier, either past or present. Rather than a politico-geographic entity
we m ust understand Nuevo Mexico as a "transcultural imaginary world" that,
until 1580, was not clearly identified with any concrete place, although it
sometimes comprised the region onto which this toponym was finallyimposed.
Under this perspective we ought to revise the facts that traditional
historiography considers part of early Nuevo Mexico's history. As w e shall see
below, several conquering expeditions that never trod upon the confines of the
Pueblo Indian country, or even aimed at reaching it, w ere neverthelessfundam ental to the creation of the "imaginary world" that Onate's foundational
act turned into the northernm ost Spanish possession in N orth America.
Most authors since the nineteenth century begin their historical review
quoting the famous odyssey of Alvar N unez Cabeza de Vaca and three othersurvivors of the expedition that Panfilo de Narvaez led to Florida in 1528. After
their ships w ent dow n off the coast of Texas, these m en spent almost a decadew andering across the continent in the search for Spanish settlements.
According to several witnesses, upon reuniting with their compatriots theyasserted to have heard tell of a supposed group of large cities at some point
along the route they were following in their intent to find other Spaniards, butthey dared not attem pt to verify these reports as they dreaded to loose theirway (Bancroft 1889: 15-19, Ocaranza 1934: 15-17). W hether the Pueblo
settlements are the cities that the lost excursionists referred to, as it is generally
sustained, their amazing stories did entice the general belief that a prom isingurban w orld lay hidden north of New Spain.
The episodes that traditional historiography calls upon next are thescouting journey that Marcos de Niza conducted along the coastal rim of the
Sierra M adre Occidental until reaching the vicinity of Zuni (1539), and the

117conquering expedition that Francisco Vazquez de Coronado com m anded over
the whole Pueblo area between 1540 and 1542. It is clear that viceroy Antonio
de M endoza commissioned Niza's excursion to verify the rum ours spread by
the survivors of the Narvaez shipwreck, thereby anticipating the intrusion ofother possible claimants such as Hernan Cortes. The phrasing that the friarused to describe his findings —an urban settlement "bigger then Mexico City"
am idst a province that was "the greatest and best am ong all the lands hitherto
discovered"3— prom pted a colonising frenzy that has few parallels. As apersonal letter by bishop Juan de Zum arraga testifies,4 num erous people
volunteered to push on Niza's discovery, enthusiastically enrolling in the arm ythat M endoza entrusted to the command of Vazquez de Coronado. Much totheir dismay, however, Pueblo villages were insignificant com pared to ancient
Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Therefore,

they

deserted

the

place

after

havingunsuccessfully explored the Great Prairies in the search of Quivira, a marvellous
kingdom that Tewa prisoners described.
Despite the forty years oblivion that surrounded Cibola after Vazquezde Coronado, the dream of discovering another Mexico did not extinguish.
Rather, it became more complex as it became entangled with indigenous
traditions of ancestral origin. Indeed, by the decade of 1560 Spanish explorers
did not simply aspire to find a place that equalled the abundance, population
density, and sophistication of ancient Mexico. Francisco de Ibarra and his cousin
Diego, for example, searched for the very "original hom eland of the Culgua
Mexico" throughout the region they nam ed Nueva Vizcaya, and at least once
they thought to be at the door of this other Nuevo Mexico.5 Historians
3 "...la mayor y mejor de todas las [tierras] descubiertas" (Niza [1539], in Mora 1 9 9 2 :
1 5 8 ).
4 Letter from Juan de Zumarraga to his nephew, Mexico, August 23, 1539 (G arcia
Icazbalceta 1889: II, 281-283).
5 A soldier in Francisco de Ibarra's army, Baltasar de Obregon, wrote a chronicle on th isexpedition. There he a sse rts (1924 [1584]: 39-41) that at least Diego de Ibarra w asdeterm ined to "discover the New Mexico, then known a s Copala" (descubrir el Nuevo M exico,que por entonces llamaban Copala) from where people generally suspected that "the ancient
Culgua Mexica came" (habrian venido los antiguos culguas mexicanos). The Relacion de lo que

118

frequently dismiss this episode, leaping directly from the discoveries of mines
during the 1540s and 1550s in N ueva Galicia, to the three or four non­authorised excursions into the Pueblo area that religious and secularadventurers carried out during the decade of 1580.6 Usually they attributeparticular importancetofriar Agustin

Rodriguez

and

Juan

Sanchez

Chamuscado's 1581 expedition, perhaps because they were apparently the first
Spaniards to visit Cibola since 1542, but also because it was they w ho applied
the nam e of Nuevo Mexico to that region for the first time (Beck 1969: 49-50,
Lamar & Truett 1997: 68). Thus, for traditional historiography Vazquez deC oronado represents a transitional figure between the fantasising ventures of
early times and the supposedly more realistic endeavours of the 1580s and1590s. To p u t it differently, he is presented as the demystifying hero w ho "dis­covered" the real character of the land that Sanchez Chamuscado later
renam ed.
Such a distinction between a fantasy-dominated period and a realityoriented one is misleading. As we shall see in chapter seven the toponym Nuevo
Mexico, actually formulated after Vazquez de Coronado abandoned Cibola andbefore Rodriguez and Sanchez Chamuscado re-visited it, is charged w ith
mythic overtones that lasted for more than a hundred years after Onate
completed its conquest early in the seventeenth century.
This chapter is a sum m arised review of the series of colonising venturesthat contributed somehow to the moulding and reification of imaginary Nuevo
Mexico. The information herein displayed has no other purpose than fram ing
further interpretation. Therefore m y text will assume the shape of achronological narrative, starting from the early conquests that C ortes
accomplished and ending with the expedition whereby Juan de Onate took
descubrio Diego de Ibarra en la provincia de Copala llamada Topiame (CODOINAO: XV, 5 5 3 s s )says that since Topiame had the looks of another Mexico, Francisco de Ibarra often said th a t
he had discovered Nueva Vizcaya and Nuevo Mexico.
6 There are few exceptions. Forbes (1960: 42-43), for example, a s se rts that Ibarra se t out
to discover New Mexico.

119

over the region that constituted, thereafter, the province of Nuevo Mexico (15951598). The political, administrative and military issues I refer to have been
extensively researched so I will essentially base my narrative on already extant
historiography, reserving the detailed analysis of docum entary evidence forlater chapters.

4.1.- The key to older Mexico: Early settlem ent and exploration of N ew
Spain.
Central and southern Mesoamerica were an easy prey for the Spanish
conquerors due to the existence of long-established and densely settled senonos,
ruled over by noble lineages often supported by the exaction of tribute in kindand labour (Radding 1997: 11, Gerhard 1972: 5 & 1982: 8-10). Between C ortes'
landfall at Veracruz in April 1519, and 1524, most of N ew Spain below the
Chichimec frontier was thoroughly explored. M oreover, nearly all the states
tributary to the Aztecs and some im portant independent ones such as Haxcala
and Michoacan had accepted the Spaniards as their new rulers, althoughsubsequent uprisings sometimes occurred forcing a second, or even third
cam paign of consolidation (Gerhard 1972: 8).
To a large extent the invaders owed the rapidity of this expeditious
assault on the Indian w orld to the information and support that the Aztec
em peror provided, as is m ade clear by questions 97 to 99 of the 1534
questionnaire that Cortes formulated for the defence witnesses he presented in
his residencia trial.7 Could the respondents confirm that Cortes cordially sought
Moctezuma's advise regarding the best way to secure the submission of his
subject states? W ould they testify that Moctezuma sum m oned the local rulers
to request their acceptance of the Spanish overlordship, and that his
messengers then departed in all directions, taking five or six Spaniards along to

7 Interrogatorio general presentado por Hernando Cortes para el examen de los testigos de su
descargo. (Martinez 1990-1992: II, 221-290).

120

spread the news and view the resources of the land? (Martinez 1990-1992: II,
240-241). According to the answers of some witnesses who, like Andres deTapia, had participated in one of such excursions, the Spanish captains
personally collected the gold that local people gave as a present for the
newcomers, while Moctezuma's messengers negotiated a peaceful surrender(Martinez 1990-1992: II, 351).8 The particular interest that Cortes and his m en
show ed from the beginning in visiting the gold-bearing districts —which
existence they partly figured out through the "books of revenue" w here
M octezuma kept record of the tributes he collected9— was almost immediately
satisfied, just as their need to locate ports other than Veracruz along theAtlantic shoreline. Thus in his second letter to the king (October 30, 1520)
Cortes reports that the Aztec em peror not only ordered his officers to draw am ap of the eastern coast for him but also offered several escorts to show the
Spaniards the gold mines and districts of the southern provinces (M artinez
1990: 251-252, Cortes 1960: 56-57).
As is well know n the massacre that Pedro de Alvarado executed in the
Great Temple of Mexico-Tenochtitlan (May 1520) and Moctezuma's subsequent
death (June 1520) brought the Indian collaboration that Cortes initially enjoyed
to a violent end. Forced into a precipitous flight from the Aztec capital, thesurveys he had initiated to determine the population and resources of the landin areas today comprised within the Mexican states of Veracruz (Panuco andCoatzacoalcos)10 and Oaxaca (Tuxtepec, Malinaltepec, and the Mixteca) w ere
interrupted. Nevertheless, by the time the Spaniards recaptured MexicoTenochtitlan, in August 1521, the scope of their dom ination was considerably

8 Tapia visited the province of Tuxpa in the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. See also the a n sw e rs
by Martin Vazquez (Martinez 1990-1992: II, 337) who declares to have w itnessed th a t
Cortes sent small parties accom panied by Moctezuma's m essengers all over the land.
9 Both Cortes (1960: 66) and Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1982 [1555]) describe this docum ent,a pictographic codex today known a s the Matricula de Tributos.
10 In June 1520, just after defeating P&nfilo de Narvaez in Veracruz, Cort6s sen t Juan
Velazquez de Leon to Panuco and Diego de Ordaz to Coatzacoalcos, but when he knew about therevolt in Mexico-Tenochtitlan he ordered them to return (Martinez 1990: 262).

121

larger. A part from preserving their first allegiances (Zempoala, Tlaxcala,
Huexotzinco, and Cholula) they also gained control over such im portant areas
as Tepeaca —key to the roads leading to the Gulf of Mexico; Cuauhnahuac andother m inor city-states in the valley of Morelos; and the independent senorios of
Tututepec and Meztitlan, north of valley of Mexico, that pled allegiance to the
Spanish m onarch voluntarily.
Once he controlled the heart of the ancient Aztec empire, Cortes resum ed
exploration in more distant areas that fell one after the other before theconquerors’ sweeping campaigns.
To the South Cortes sent different simultaneous expeditions that
achieved, by 1524, the effective control of the provinces of Coatzacoalcos,
Tuxtepec, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Soconusco and Guatemala. Then, between that year
and 1526, Cortes himself commanded a fruitless expedition to present day
H onduras (Hibueras).
On the w estern front Cortes' captains explored the coast of the Pacific
Ocean (Mar del Sur) between 1521 and 1522. Later on he would plan to engage
in m aritim e exploration from two ports, Zacatula and Tehuantepec, that his
captains located in that period (Martinez 1990: 340, 662-663). In 1521
Tzintzuntzan, capital of the Tarascan state of Michoacan, received w ith Antonio
Caicedo its first Spanish visitor. His friendly encounter with the local ruler, theCazonci, encouraged Cortes to dispatch, in the sum m er of 1522, a m uch larger
expedition under the command of Cristobal de Olid (M artinez 1990: 351-356,
W arren 1979: 34). Through the Relation de Michoacan (Acuna 1987) and C ortes'
fourth letter to the king (15 October 1524, in Cortes 1960: 175-176) we knowthat despite the Cazonci's rapid submission, plans for a Spanish settlem ent in
Patzcuaro died out w hen Olid learnt that not a gram of the gold he confiscatedw as locally produced.11 Thus while some of his m en returned to Mexico,
11 Later on, gold and silver mines were discovered within the Tarascan territory but th ey
yielded so little produce that by 1580 no gold mine w as left in exploitation in the region,
while silver mining activities had been mostly transferred to Zacatecas and other n o rth erlysites (Lecoin 1988: 130, Bakewell 1971).

122captain Juan Rodriguez Villafuerte, who had been instructed to proceed w ith
his company to Zacatula, m ade an unauthorised detour, venturing an assault
on the autonom ous province of Colima early in 1523.12 Later that year, Cortes
commissioned Gonzalo de Sandoval to consolidate the conquest of thisbountiful and densely populated region. N orth of Colima Juan de Avalos,
H ernando de Sayavedra and Francisco Cortes conducted the first incursions
into present day Jalisco and Nayarit (1523-1525), a region that only thefollowing decade was effectively occupied, when N uno de Guzm an ravaged
the rich peasant communities that beyond the Tarascan em pire thereby
establishing the province of N ueva Galicia (Martinez 1990: 356-357, G erhard
1982:10).
While the north and north-w estern limits of N ew Spain expanded
periodically throughout the sixteenth century the north-eastern frontier was
fixed early on at the province of Panuco, although some dispute over thisterritory arose betw een H ernan Cortes and Francisco de Garay —a rich island
settler appointed lieutenant governor of Jamaica in 1521. N orth from Panuco
lied the peninsula of Florida, from the tip of which (Punta de Santa Elena) the
coast ran up to the land of the Bacallaos (Cape Breton). Many thought thisshoreline hid the m outh of the Strait of Anian that was presum ed to connect
the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. The area became the object of m uch imperial
competition partly due to this reason, but also because, as Marfa del C arm en
Velazquez rem arks (1974: 31), the Bahama Channel, that separates Punta deSanta Elena from the Caribbean islands, was unavoidable for every vessel on
its w ay back to Europe. Reason w hy the Spaniards very early tried to secure its
control against any possible European rival.13 Isolation, fierce indigenous
12 From the reports concerning th ese events contained in primary sources it is not clear who
w as the captain responsible for this disobedience. N evertheless after a detailed so u rce
analysis Carl O. S auer (1948: 11-17) and J. Benedict
Warren (1979: 73-75) concluded th a t
Villafuerte w as a much likelier candidate than Olid.
13 Juan Ponce de Leon, governor of Puerto Rico, discovered Florida in 1512 or 1513 but hebelieved it was an island. In the following years, Diego de Miruelo (1516) and Francisco
Hernandez de Cdrdoba (1517) tried to conquer it but
were expelled by the Indians. A new123resistance and harsh natural conditions, thw arted all colonising efforts in
Florida and sheltered, at the same time, the looting activities of English andFrench pirates. Whence the strategic importance of Panuco, which constituted
for decades to come the m ain barrier against French prospective colonists, evenw hen the authorities continued trying to settle Florida or keep at least afrontier outpost there.14
Cortes' victory over the control of Panuco m arks the closure of the firststage in the creation of N ew Spain, a colony that conquerors assumed, from1520 on, to comprise all continental N orth America w hatever its extension.
Since 1519, Francisco de Garay had commissioned several expeditions toPanuco, hoping to found a colony under his own independent governm ent but
as none was successful he personally led a military campaign in 1523, backed bya 1521 royal charter that authorised him to settle the province of Amichel, near
Florida. Yet when he reached Panuco's vicinity Cortes had already established amunicipal council at Santiesteban del Puerto, the authority of which a new royalcharter soon endorsed forcing Garay to w ithdraw (Martinez 1990: 365-368;
G erhard 1982: 5,10).
By 1524 New Spain's effective boundaries reached southw ard to El
Salvador and H onduras, north-east to the Huaxteca and west to Colima,
though further conquests and administrative am endm ents would successively
failed attem pt at settling the region was m ade by Ponce de Leon in 1521, the sam e year th a t
Francisco de Garay dem onstrated it was not an island but a peninsula. In 1526 Lucas Vazquezde Ayllon, judge of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo made his own try and in 1539 Hernando deSoto, after reaching perhaps what today is A rkansas, joined the list of failed conquerors of
Florida (Bernard & Gruzinski 1999: 337 & 341-344, Gerhard 1982: 5).
14 The exclusive rights that the Pope had granted to Spain and Portugal over the colonisationof America gave rise to a long-lasting conflict between the French and the Spanish
m onarchies. France promoted piracy. Spain prohibited all French commercial activity in h er
overseas domains and forbade the entrance of French nationals to Spanish colonies. Although
this rivalry reached a point of compromise with the Treaty of Cateau-C am br6sis that put an
end to the 1552-1559 war between both countries, the document included no explicit a rtic le son the New World. Therefore competition over settling Florida continued. After Trist&n Luna yArellano, whom the viceroy of New Spain sent to Florida (1559-1561), failed to colonise
Punta de S anta Elena the French took the lead. In 1562 Jean Ribault took possession of the landand began to build a fort. In 1564 a Huguenot colony was established but Pedro Menendez deAviles, governor of Cuba and Florida since 1560, destroyed it the following year. Despite theFrench tem porary withdrawal and the establishm ent of a Spanish garrison, the conflictpersisted and w as only resolved the following century (Velazquez 1974: 29-34).

124change its jurisdictional physiognomy (Gerhard 1972: 10). The irregular patternthat characterised the grow th of sixteenth century N ew Spain was not only am atter of administrative decision. The conquest and effective occupation of
new territories, w hether they were alternately placed under N ew Spain's
jurisdiction or detached from it, were determined by a combination of theconqueror's ambition and the local population's condition.
At the beginning, the conquerors adjusted their explorations to the sole
objective of discovering gold and silver mines, a port suitable for transpacificnavigation, and the Strait of Anian. Nevertheless, as it became clear thatprecious metals were not of immediate appropriation and the transcontinental
strait proved an elusive target, they gave more importance to the foundationof Spanish villages in well-off agricultural districts that offered the possibility to
exploit w hat turned out to be the m ost precious booty: indigenous labour(Velazquez 1974: 26-27, Helms 1975: 129, Elliott 1984a: 165-166). By 1570 nearly
57000 Spaniards lived in the central highlands and the West, according to
W oodrow Borah (1975: 55). Both areas were highly productive and had an
extremely dense Indian population who was used to a dominance system
based on the exaction of tribute and personal service (Ortega Noriega 1993: 3738). Colima (Sauer 1948: 59) and the Tarascan Plateau (Lecoin 1988: 124-125)
were also intensively settled by Spanish colonists due to their abundantresources and large population,15 even though Cristobal de Olid and m ost of
his m en had initially refused to become established in the gold-lacking core of
the Tarascan domains. But the Spaniards could not expand in every direction at
the same pace, as the hostile population in m any areas w here no political

15 According to Sauer (1948: 60) Colima's indigenous population w as so large that by mid
century 112 Indian towns still existed in the area of initial Spanish occupation. Lecoin (1 9 8 8 :124-125, 129) notes that according to the Relaciones Geograficas the Tarascan peasantcommunities of Michoac£n, that were used to pay tribute to the Cazonci, accepted to give it to
the Spaniards instead. Furtherm ore, until the decade of 1560 this tribute included w o rk e rs
for the silver mines of Taxco and Sultepeque and, until 1575-1576, the obligation to provide
personal service in the Spanish villages.

125

structures of subservience existed proved a much more difficult enemy todefeat.

4.2.- G uzm an vs. Cortes: The conquest of Nueva Galicia.
Towards the end of 1525 the Crown adopted the first of a series ofadministrative m easures aimed at achieving control over her newly acquiredcolonies in m ainland N orth America, thereby arresting the hegemonic position
that Cortes hitherto occupied in N ew Spain. On the one hand, she appointed
Luis Ponce de Leon visiting judge to inquire about Cortes’ administration, on
the other she granted N uno de Guzm an an independent comm and at Panuco(Gerhard 1982: 10, Bl&zquez & Calvo 1992: 18). Although Ponce de Leon's
unexpected death in July 1526 delayed the legal proceedings against Cortes, he
had to renounce to the office of governor of N ew Spain, preserving only —and
not for long— his assignment as Captain General and Adm inistrator of the
Indians (Martinez 1990: 460-462). Nearly two years later, on 5 April 1528,
Guzm&n acquired jurisdiction over the whole of N ew Spain as president of thefirst Audiencia of Mexico (Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 23), a post that would bereserved from 1535 on to the newly created office of viceroy.
From the m om ent Guzm an disembarked in Panuco in May 152716 heconfronted the enmity of Mexico City's municipal council (cabildo), theadm inistrative head of N ew Spain still controlled by Cortes' partisans, which
was not willing to recognise the autonom y of Panuco's governm ent (Blazquez& Calvo 1992: 19). Guzm an was an ambitious character though, so taking noheed of this hostility, he ruled the province at will until he left for Mexico Cityin December 1528 to take possession of his new post as president of the
Audiencia. By this time Cortes had already left for Spain to confront his
residencia trial, an absence that Guzman took advantage of, sequestering m any

16 In his 1538-1539 memoir Guzman made an error saying this occurred one year e a rlie r(Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 53).

126

of Cortes' properties and encomiendas, as well as some belonging to thosesoldiers w ho had served in the conquest of Mexico (Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 24).
Later on, Guzm an was accused of illegitimate enrichment, despotism,m isdem eanour and cruelty against the Indians, charges that in the long run
caused his dismissal, both from the presidency of N ew Spain (1531) and fromthe governm ent of Panuco (1533). In the meantime, however, he conducted thefirst wide-ranging conquests attained by the Spaniards beyond the north­w estern limits of the bygone Aztec empire. Espiritu Santo de la Mayor Espafia
was the nam e Guzm an chose for the territory he then subdued, but in 1531
w hen the Crown appointed him governor of this now independent province
she also prescribed that it should rather be called N ueva Galicia.
Prim ary sources concerning this comprehensive enterprise are relatively
abundant: Besides a couple of report-letters that Guzm an addressed to them onarchs17 and a memoir that he prepared in 1538 or 1539 to base his defence
before the judges presiding at his residencia trial,18 some captains under his
com m and wrote accounts relating their own actions.19 A useful supplem ent tothese reports, including several ordinances that Guzm an dictated and otherdocum ents derived from the legal suits he was subm itted to, has been recently
compiled by Adrian Blazquez and Thomas Calvo (1992), while ten of the 168
Relaciones Geograficas existing for New Spain, compiled in the second half of thesixteenth century from the memories of locally resident witnesses, provide
independent information on the subject.20 Finally we have friar Antonio Tello's

17 "Letter from Omitlan, July 8, 1530" (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 25-59, Blazquez & Calvo
1992: 205-225) and "letter to the em press, June 12, 1532" (Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 2 3 9 2 6 2 ).
18 Memoria de los servicios que habia hecho Nuno de Guzman desde que fue nombrado
gobernador de Panuco en 1525 (Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 53-73).
19 All contained in a volume edited by Jo se Luis Razo Zaragoza (1963): Gonzalo Lopez(1532), Juan de Samano (1531), Pedro de Carranza (1532), Cristobal Flores (undated)
Garcia del Pilar (1531) Francisco de Arceo (undated), Pedro de Guzman (undated), th re eanonym ous and undated relaciones.
20 One of th ese reports corresponds to Patzcuaro, in the T arascan Plateau (Acuna 1987), andnine to principal towns in the province of Nueva Galicia and their subjects (Acuna 1988).

127

Cronica misceldnea de la santca provincia de Xalisco (1891 [c. 1651]), the first history
on the conquest of N ueva Galicia ever written.21
According to Garcia del Pilar (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 217), N uno deGuzm an set out from Mexico City on 21 December 1529 leading an expedition
tow ards the West, composed of a few Spaniards and plenty auxiliary Indians,
mainly Tlaxcalans.22 Donald Chipman (1967: 231) argues that he was thus
trying to avoid facing the residencia trial concerning Panuco. But Pedro deCastaneda Najera (1992 [1560-1565]: 63-65) attributes this undertaking tocertain reports about seven towns "paved in silver" —similar in size to Mexico
City— that Guzm an received in 1529 from an "Oxitipar" Indian. Castaneda
Najera was a soldier in the army that Vazquez de Coronado later led to Cibola.
His chronicle, written m ore than tw enty years after this expedition took place,
aimed to prove that Cibola was w orth conquering because rum ours about its
grandeur had reached the Spaniards from early times, draw ing their steps
tow ards the N orth but eluding them repeatedly.
None of N uno de Guzman's testimonies m ention

an"Oxitipar"

informant, though Pedro de Guzman and the second anonim ous Relacion assertthat the expeditionaries did search for the "Seven Cities," of which they knew
before leaving Mexico (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 280, 321-322). On the other hand,
Guzm an does affirm in his 1538-1539 memoir (Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 68) that
before leaving Panuco he commissioned the conquest of the valleys "they callOgitipa."23 Located in the Huasteca Potosina, Oxitipa was indeed one of the
21 This is one of the most important sources concerning Guzman's activities, although thefirst of its three original volumes is lost. Other colonial works on Nueva Galicia exist (e.g.
Mota y Escobar 1966 [1605], Arregui 1980 [1621], Mota y Padilla 1870 [1742]) but th ey
contain much less first hand information on this early period.
22 Guzman provides no date for his departure but he specifies that he took 150 Spanish
horsem en, 150 Spanish foot soldiers and seven or eight thousand Indian friends (Razo
Zaragoza 1963: 25 ). Arceo counts 150 horsemen, 200 foot soldiers and only 1500 Indian
allies (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 241-2); similar but even smaller figures are provided by one of
the three anonymous accounts regarding these events ("anonima prim era," in Razo Zaragoza
1963: 288).
23 Huxitipa, according to the Relacidn by Pedro de Guzman (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 283) andthe second anonymous Relacidn (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 324, 3 2 6 -3 2 7 ). Oxitipan according toplate 55r of Codex Mendoza (Berdan 1997:141).

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m ost populous and lucrative towns in Panuco (Lopez Austin & Lopez Lujan
1996: 245, Chipman 1967: 92, 168, 196), appearing in Codex Mendoza among thecommunities paying the richest tribute to Moctezuma (Berdan 1997: 140-141).
According to Gerhard (1972: 354-358) and Chipm an (1967: 200), in 1527
Guzm an actually took it away from Cortes —who had reserved it for himself
in encomienda— on the grounds that it belonged to the governor’s office rather
than to any particular individual.
It is certainly quite possible that Guzman wished to escape his residencia
trial by engaging in a broad expedition that w ould outdo Cortes' achievements.
His faith that towards the N orth he would accomplish fruitful conquests m ay
have been partly derived from the talk of an "Oxitipar" informant, as Castaneda
Najera asserts, but it rested on other, more trustw orthy sources as well. On the
one hand, he could have well seen in Mexico the reports of the expedition that
Francisco Cortes had led to Aguacatlan and Xalisco (1524), which described aseries of rich and densely settled territories (Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 29). On theother hand, he no doubt obtained valuable information about Michoacan andthe land beyond from the Cazonci, w hom he captured in Mexico City to
procure, though unsuccessfully, his purported knowledge about gold and silver
mines (Relacidn de la ciudad de Patzcuaro, in Acuna 1987: 199, Cristobal Flores'
Relacidn, in Razo Zaragoza 1963:185).
N uno de Guzm an spent the first m onths of his journey gathering
supplies and additional Indian recruits in Tzintzuntzan, the Tarascan capital.
Before heading N orth in February 1530 he torm ented the Cazonci andorganised a sum m ary trial against him after crossing the Lerma river (Nuestra
Senora de la Purificacion de Santa Marta). For some soldiers like Pedro de
Carranza (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 157) the death sentence that the Indianm onarch received was completely undeserved as the am bush he was
supposedly preparing proved to be non-existing.24 After the execution Guzm&n
24 In his letter to the king from Omitl£n Guzman only mentions briefly the trial and slau g h terof the Cazonci (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 26) but his 1538-1539 memoir, which omits the to rtu re129sent Peralm m dez Chirino and Cristobal de Onate ahead in different directions(Tello 1891 [c. 1651]: 107, Razo Zaragoza 1963: 31) and then led his arm y to
Cuitzeo.25
By July 1530 Guzm an had taken over the territory today occupied by thestate of Guanajuato and the southern part of Jalisco. A few Spaniards from the
expeditions formerly led by Alonso de Avalos and Francisco Cortes had
already settled in the vicinity of lake Chapala (Chapetela) and Tonala—agriculturally the richest places in the whole region. Nevertheless, as
Guzm an believed that gold abounded in this area and in the neighbouring
districts of Contla and Nochistlan (Michitlan),26 he acted as if it was still a non­subjected Indian province, ravaged it and then claimed its jurisdiction. At thetime, irrigation, rather than precious metals, was the real wealth in thoselocations, since the silver veins extending through the Sierra M adre to Sinaloa,
and from San Luis through Zacatecas to Chihuahua rem ained hidden forseveral years and were not fully exploited before the eighteenth century(Berdan 1992, Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 29). Promising signs, however, appeared
elsewhere, nourishing the golden dreams of Guzm an and his soldiers. At La
Q uem ada and El Teul27 they came across the ruins of magnificent cities (letterfrom Omitlan, in Razo Zaragoza 1963: 47) and later on they saw people
w earing gold ornam ents in Tepic and Centicpac (Centiquipaque), a couple ofprovinces that the arm y traversed before tem porarily establishing its
headquarters in Omitlan to prepare the attack on the lacustrine district of

episode, argues that his death sentence made justice to the num erous Christians he had killed(Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 63). The testimony that Francisco de Arceo gave to Gonzalo
Fernandez de Oviedo also keeps silence about the torture that the Cazonci was submitted toand asse rts that in knowing his death sentence the monarch confessed that several Spaniards
had been killed upon his order (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 242-245). The relaciones by Juan de
Sam ano (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 117), Cristobal Flores (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 185- 189), andGarcia del Pilar (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 217-220) contain more detail showing the cruelprocedure surrounding the Cazonci's prison and death.
25 The so u rces write this nam e differently: Cuisco, Cuiseo or Cuyzco.
26 Letter from Omitl&n (in Razo Zaragoza 1963: 38-44).
27 The site of El Teul (Teblinchan in Guzman's erroneous transliteration) was also called
Tonanipan according to the second anonymous Relacidn (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 292).

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Aztatlan that Gonzalo L6pez had discovered in a scouting mission (letter from
Omitlan, Arceo's Relacidn, & Gonzalo Lopez’s Relacidn, in Razo Zaragoza 1963:
52-53,83-85 & 260).
In December 1530, after crossing the Sebastian de Evora (Mocorito) river,Guzm an subjugated the towns of Chametla and Piaxtla and then proceededagainst Cihuatan and Quila, reaching present-day Culiacan by Easter 1531.
There he later established the village of San Miguel that rem ained the m ost
advanced outpost of the Spanish occupation for the following sixty years.28
Indeed, before the year ended Guzm an was convinced that nothing of interest
existed beyond this point, as neither Lope de Samaniego, w ho set off N orth
exploring the land up to the Petatlan river nor Gonzalo L6pez, who travelled
East across the sierra to the Nazas river, found anything they considered w orthconquering (Gonzalo L6pez & second anonymous Relacidn, in Razo Zaragoza
1963: 99-104 & 321; Ortega Noriega & del Rfo 1993: 28-30; Ortega Noriega 1993:
38-42; Bancroft 1889: 1-19). Therefore in December 1531 he sent Juan de Onate
south-east to establish the village of Guadalajara (Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 33-34)
while he m oved South tow ards Espfritu Santo-Compostela. Emulating Cortes,
he had form erly established this village in the region of Tepic to serve as
provisional seat to a municipal council with jurisdiction over the lands he hadthus far occupied.29 There he received official notice of his appointm ent as
governor of N ueva Galicia on 16 January 1532 (letter to the Empress, in
Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 239-240).
28 The original foundation of San Miguel w as located at the shore of the Cihuatten river but
the ninety-six Spaniards and numerous Tlaxcalan Indians that remained in the village soon
decided to relocate it, moving to the confluence of the Humaya and Tam azula rivers where th ecity of Culiacan stands today (Ortega Noriega & del Rio 1993: 28-30, Ortega Noriega 1 9 9 3 :38-42). This enormous territory received the name of Sinaloa and w as organised in tw oprovinces of undefined limits: Chametla to the South and Culiacan to the North, eachadm inistered by a mayor subjected to the authority of the governor of Nueva Galicia. Spanish
presence in Cham etla was ephemeral as in 1535 a severe epidemic and an indigenous rebellion
pushed the colonists away.
29 Guzm&n commissioned the foundation of this village to Francisco Verdugo in January 1 5 3 1 ,when the army was still in the province of Chametla. The original nam e w as Espfritu Santo but
the Spanish em press ordered that it be changed for Compostela (Bl&zquez & Calvo 1992: 3 3 ,65, 250-251).

131

N ow that he nominally held the governm ent of all the lands know n until
then north of N ew Spain, from coast to coast, Guzm an pursued their effective
occupation, so he left east from Compostela early in 1533 seeking to connect
Panuco and N ueva Galicia. Having followed the Lerma river to the Huasteca
Potosina he founded Santiago de los Valles in the region of Oxitipa, theconquest of which he had commissioned some years before.
Guzm an was dismissed from the governm ent of Panuco on April 20,
1533, though he rem ained governor of N ueva Galicia until January 19, 1537,
w hen he was rem itted to Spain as a prisoner in compliance w ith an order issued
in March 1536 (Blazquez & Calvo 1992: 33,44). In less than two years (February
1530-September 1531) he had placed an enorm ous territory nearly half the sizeof N ew Spain itself under the Spanish Crown (map 10). But the w ar strategy hefollowed, i.e., to enter settled villages, defeat the population, take hold of theirmaterial w ealth and destroy the remains so that no counter-offensive could beorganised as he left (Ortega Noriega & del Rio 1993: 27) w ould eventually
prove counter-productive.30 Between 1540 and 1542 the region comprisingsouthern Zacatecas and Jalisco became the theatre of several revolts, the m ost
famous being the Cazcan rebellion or Mixton w ar because it represented such a
threat to Spanish domination that the Viceroy personally attended it and put it
dow n (Cabrero 1986: 114-118, Bernard & Gruzinski 1999: 127-128). Even w hen
30 Although som e w itnesses like Gonzalo Lopez (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 70, 97) and Juan deS£mano (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 126) occasionally acknowledged that a s they found a town th ey
took the food and burnt the place before leaving, Nuno de Guzman (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 3 8 ,47), Arceo (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 251), Lopez (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 72), and Samano (Razo
Zaragoza 1963: 129) system atically blamed this destruction on the Indian allies. Someaccounts are more critical. Pedro de C arranza, for instance, a ss e rts that in the town of
Cynan "the friends spread around and began to burn the land so in every town we went toeverything was left completely burnt" (y luego los amigos se tendieron por la tierra ycomenzaron a la quem ar [...] y por los pueblos por do andabam os todo quedaba quemado. In
Razo Zaragoza 1963: 159). N evertheless, he also admits that in Xalisco it w as Guzman who"ordered the Indian allies to set fire and burn the houses, which they did" (mandaba que losindios pusiesen fuego y quem asen todas las casas, y ellos as! lo hacian. In Razo Zaragoza
1963: 164). He repeats the sam e indictment later, asserting that he personally heard Guzman
instruct the Indians to burn the town of Chiametla ("porque yo se lo oi al mismo que dijo que loquem asen [...] y asi cuando se partio Nuno de Guzm£n, se quedb quemado el pueblo de
Chiametla." In Razo Zaragoza 1963: 171-172). The sam e denouncing tone is used by the f i r s t
anonym ous Relacidn when describing the attack on Xalisco (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 294).

132

this uprising —according to the third anonym ous Relacidn on the conquest of
N ueva Galicia (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 331)— began as an Indian refusal to pay
tribute to the Spaniards living in Guadalajara and Compostela, and Guzman,
therefore, was not directly responsible for its eruption, the bitter resentm ent he
had left behind certainly fostered a rebellious m ood among native population.
After the authorities arrested Guzman, Antonio de M endoza —first
viceroy of New Spain (1535-1550)— took on the exploration and conquest of
the N orth, encouraged by the news that a handful of survivors of the N arvaez
shipwreck brought to N ueva Galicia in 1536 and using the m ost im portant ofGuzm an's settlements, Compostela, Culiacan and Guadalajara as departure
stations for the expeditions he organised.

4.3.- The promise of Cibola: Cabeza de Vaca, Niza and Vazquez de Coronado.
Chi N ovem ber 17, 1526, Panfilo de Narvaez signed a capitulacion for the
discovery, conquest, and colonisation of the lands comprised betw een the Riode las Palmas river and the cape of Florida. He had participated in the conquestof Cuba in 1511 and had been expecting an opportunity to try his fortune since1520, w hen he returned to Spain as a prisoner after having failed to reduce
H ernan Cortes to the obedience of the governor of Cuba, whose authority theconqueror of Mexico had dismissed. Narvaez was now finally in comm and,ready to become the m aster of a much ambitioned territory that he imagined,
like others before, to be as rich and wonderful as that Cortes had subdued.
W hen Narvaez set sail from Spain on June 17,1527, leading five ships thattransported around six hundred men, he did not suspect how disastrously thisexpedition would turn out. Neither could his treasurer, Alvar Nunez Cabeza deVaca foresee the importance that his personal memories would acquire. In
April 1528 unexpected w inds pushed the boats tow ards the coast of present day
Texas, after having experienced several sea-storms in the Caribbean w here
they had stopped to reprovision. Of the four hundred survivors, N arvaez sent

133

a small group by sea to locate the m outh of the las Palmas river and took therest inland to search for rich and densely settled "senorfos". Neither wealth nor
people were found, and as the soldiers despaired, hopelessly waiting on thebeach for the ships to return, disease, starvation and Indian arrow attacks
dramatically reduced their numbers. Finally, on September 22, 1528 theagonising expeditionaries again set sail aboard five precarious rafts which theybuilt themselves, only to suffer by Novem ber yet another shipwreck in theisland they called Mai Hado (111-Fate). The few survivors fell prisoner and w ere
apportioned as slaves am ong different Indian groups. Although we know thatat least one became assimilated to the culture of his captors —H ernando deSoto found him and received his help in 1539 (Bernard & Gruzinski 1999: 341)—
the majority certainly perished, while only four m anaged (or w anted) to escapeand go back to their fellow countrymen.
The amazing story of how Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Andres
Dorantes, Bernardino del Castillo Maldonado, and the Moor slave Estevanreunited, escaped (1533 or 1534) and travelled w estw ards until reaching thefrontier settlements of New Spain, managing to survive as healers andm erchants is told by Cabeza de Vaca in a Relacidn today know n as Naufragios,
first published in Zamora, Spain, in 1542.31 A shorter account based on anotherm anuscript that Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, and Castillo M aldonado supposedly
w rote and sent to the Audiencia of Santo Domingo in 1539, is contained inchapters one to seven of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's Historia General y
Natural de las Indias (1959 [1535-1552]).32 Most chroniclers of the sixteenth and
31 La relacidn que dio Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca de lo acaescido en la Armada donde iva por
Gobernador Pamphilo de Narbaez desde el ano de veinta y siete hasta el ano de treinta y seisque bolvio a Sevilla con tres de su compagnia. The British Library preserves one of the th re e

extant copies of this edition and one of the thirteen that still survive of the second edition(Valladolid 1555).
32 The only accounts written by the participants them selves that have come to us are the
Naufragios and a short testimony by Cabeza de Vaca that ends abruptly at the island of Mai
Hado, preserved in the Archivo General de Indias and published in CODOINAO (XIV, 2 6 9 -2 7 9 ) :Relacidn del viaje de Panfilo de Narvaez al Rio de las Palmas hasta la punta de la Florida,hecha por el tesorero Cabeza de Vaca, ano 1537. In a letter to the em press dated February

11, 1537, viceroy Mendoza mentions a manuscript by the three surviving Spaniards which

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seventeenth centuries also include a section on this expedition, certainly basedon the Naufragios.33
Cabeza de Vaca and his companions arrived at San Miguel de Culiacan in
May 1536 escorted by one of Guzm an’s soldiers w ho had spotted them near
the Petatlan river while conducting a slave raid. After meeting governor
G uzm an in Compostela they continued dow n to Mexico City where they m etviceroy M endoza and H ernan Cortes on July 23 (Gutierrez 1991: 41, Ortega
N oriega & del Rio 1993: 30). M odem scholarship has engaged in num erous
controversies concerning the truthfulness and accuracy of the stories these m enrecounted. The miracles they said to have perform ed (e.g. Pupo Walker 1987,
Lafaye 1993, Lewis 1993) and the route they followed from Mai Hado to thePetatlan river34 (Bandelier 1890 & 1981, Ponton & M'Farland 1898: 175-186,
Bishop 1933, Coopwood 1900) are the most debated issues, although m uch
attention has been given in recent years to the textual analysis of the Naufragios
as a particular form of colonial discourse (Barrera 1984, Glantz 1992, Pastor
Bodmer 1992, Adorno 1994).
The scepticism that has surrounded the reports of Cabeza de Vaca andhis companions since the nineteenth century was not there in the sixteenth.
Their story concerning seven populous cities they did not see but heard about
seemed to confirm the rum ours that had put N uno de Guzmdn on the road in
1529 and therefore gave rise to a frenzied exploring activity (Bandelier 1981: 6566). Friar Jeronimo de M endieta says in his Historia Eclesidstica Indiana (1997[1596]: II, 59-61) that in January 1538 friar Antonio de Ciudad Rodrigo,

may have either been the one that Oviedo sum m arised or another independent document.
Neither has ever been found (Barrera: 1984: 23-24, Nicolau D’Olwer 1963: 86, W agner
1967: 36).
33 Francisco L6pez de Gomara (1986 [1552] book ix chapter ix) and Antonio de H e rre ra(1945 [1615]: decade iv, book ii, chapter iv & book iv, chapter iv; decade vi, book i,
ch ap ters iii-vii) are the m ost extensive.
34 In the nineteenth century it was believed that the odyssey began ea st of the M ississippi
river and that the vagabonds traversed Arkansas and New Mexico. Today it is generally
agreed that the last shipwreck occurred in Tampa Bay and that the four survivors walked
through Texas, part of Chihuahua, Sonora and Sinaloa.

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provincial of the Franciscan order sent three friars by sea to discover the pacificcoast to the N orth and some others over land across N ueva Galicia. According
to his account, one of these religious explorers heard news along the w ay of arem ote land where cotton dressed people lived in houses several stories high.
Reason w hy friar Marcos de Niza, who had just arrived from Peru andGuatem ala to succeed Ciudad Rodrigo, set out to trace the multi-quoted urban
district. The same episode is related with less detail in a Relacidn that a Jesuit
friar, Geronimo de Zarate Salmeron wrote around 1629 (1965: 120-121) and isrepeated in a 1792 chronicle by friar Juan Domingo Arricuita (quoted in M ora
1992: 16), w ho names only two travelling friars —Juan de la Ascension andPedro Nadal— and confers the responsibility of the commission to viceroy
M endoza rather than to Ciudad Rodrigo.
No first-hand reference concerning the journeys commissioned by
C iudad Rodrigo has come to us; nor does the m uch earlier testimonial chronicle
by Castaneda Najera (1992 [1560-1565]) on Vazquez de Coronado's journey to
Cibola, and its precedents, m ention any such expedition. The first well
docum ented undertaking aimed at reaching the "Seven Cities" we know about
is that of Marcos de Niza, who took the commission from the Viceroy. His
report and the instructions he received before departing35 are preserved in theArchivo General de Indias, together with several letters and other m inor related
documents.
Francisco Vazquez de Coronado was appointed to substitute Guzm an as
governor of N ueva Galicia late in 1538. His m ost immediate comm itm ent was
the m inute organisation of Niza's excursion (Aiton 1939). Like the Viceroy, hew as deeply interested in discovering the w ondrous universe the N orthapparently concealed. Thus after dispatching the friar from Culiacan on March
7, 1539,36 he led an ambitious though unsuccessful expedition to another
35 They have been published in many collections of documents. I quote from Carmen de Mora
(1 9 9 2 ).
36 Niza's 1539 report (in Mora 1992:148).

I

136

reputedly w ealthy province north-east of Culiacan: Topira (Lecompte 1989: 285,
Castaneda Najera 1992 [1560-1565]: 67-68). Back in Compostela in Septem ber
he received Niza's reports about four neighbouring kingdoms that had neverbeen visited by Christians before. As we saw above Niza was indeed the first
European ever to reach the Pueblo area and his report is the first docum ent tocontain the w ord Cibola —phonetic transcription of the name that the Zuhi
Indians gave to themselves: Shi-wi-nah (Mora 1992: 76-77n).
Only a few places that Niza visited are nam ed in his Relacidn, although hetook along som e natives from Petatlan, together w ith Estevan and various
Indians w ho had followed Cabeza de Vaca back to N ew Spain (Niza 1539, inM ora 1992: 148). The highlights of his journey, that followed roughly a coastalroute through Sinaloa, Sonora and Arizona, are the following:First Niza stopped at Petatlan where he left friar Onorato, his only
Spanish companion. Then, after meeting some Indians from the "island" w here
Cortes had recently been (i.e., California),37 nothing remarkable happened until
he reached a four-days-long despoblado, (uninhabited area) after which he cameacross people w ho had neither seen nor heard about any European ever. These
people indicated that heading inland five days further the m ountains gave w ay
to an open-land country with huge settlements, but the friar preferred to stickto his coastal route and visit this place on the way-back journey. From the"reasonably large village of Vacapa" that he came across next the friar sentm essengers to the seashore while Estevan rushed ahead to reconnoitre thecountry, prom ising to m ark his path with crosses of varying sizes to indicate
the m agnitude of his discoveries. A few days later Estevan's envoys returnedbringing crosses the size of a m an and, for the first time, news alluding to "theland they call Cibola." From this m om ent on natives would not cease toprovide glowing reports about Cibola, Marata, Acus and Totonteac, described

37 Cortes had been in California in 1536.

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in every place as wealthy provinces teeming with cities of multistoried, stone
houses inhabited by people who dressed cotton and wore turquoise jewellery.
Accompanied by an ever growing escort of Indians, Niza crossed densely
populated lands and a couple of despoblados, making a brief detour at somepoint to take a look at the coast. One day's distance from Cibola, however, hem et some of Estevan's Indian companions hastily running away, as the ex-slaveand m ost of his vanguard party had been killed by order of the local ruler.
Despite the dangers this situation implied, the friar pushed forw ard until hebeheld Cibola in June 1539, after which he took possession of the region andturned back immediately, only stopping to cast a quick glance at the cluster ofsettlements he had been referred to just before he first reached Vacapa (Niza,in M ora 1992:145-160, Horgan 1963:152-159, Cutter 1992:11-15).
Marcos de Niza's report was favourable enough to reaffirm the Viceroy's
conviction to colonise the newly discovered land, a task he entrusted toFrancisco Vazquez de Coronado on January 6,1540, simultaneously appointing
H ernando de Alarcon to travel by sea as a m arine rearguard. H ernan Cortes,
N uno de Guzman, H ernando de Soto, and Pedro de Alvarado also claimed theright to take on this conquest, adducing the contracts or appointm ents they had
previously signed or received, either to explore the Southern Sea or to colonise
and govern a particular territory N orth of N ew Spain (Horgan 1963: 151, 162,
164; Rio 1990: 23; M artinez 1990: 732-733). The legal process concerning theseclaims38 ended with the issuing of a royal charter on 10 July 1540, which
proclaim ed that neither Niza's excursion nor Vazquez de Coronado's ongoing
expedition invaded the jurisdiction formerly granted to any of the discording
captains (Martinez 1990-1992: IV, 216-219). Still, viceroy M endoza reached acompromise with Alvarado, too influential among the conquerors of N ew
Spain to be simply dismissed. The contract they signed in N ovem ber 29 (in38 "Proceso-pleito entre el Marques del Valle, Nuno de Guzman, Diego de Guzman, Pedro de
Alvarado, Hernando de Soto y Lucas Vazquez de Aylldn sobre los descubrimientos en Nueva
Galicia y la Mar del Sur" (AGI, Patroato, 21, No. 2, R. 4).

138

Mora 1992: 160-170) conferring on Alvarado one fifth of all the benefits
resulting from the conquests achieved by Vazquez de Coronado up to thatpoint, and a half of the benefits resulting from those that he m ight still achieve
thereafter, never came into effect since Alvarado died in 1541 fighting against
Cazcan rebels during the Mixton war.
Like Niza's excursion, Coronado's expedition is fairly well documented.
Three general accounts by participant soldiers covering the whole expedition
survive. Two, the narrative by Juan Jaramillo and the anonym ous "relation delsuceso," are almost contem porary with the events, but the chronicle that
Castaneda Najera wrote some tw enty years later is the m ost extensive.
A dditionally we have several letters and short anonym ous reports referring toparticular events or periods of the enterprise.39
Vazquez de Coronado left Compostela late in February 154040 leading an
arm y composed by some three hundred soldiers of European origin and nearly
one thousand Indian allies from Central Mexico (Gutierrez 1991: 42, C utter
1992: 16, Lecompte 1989: 286). At Culiacan Vazquez de Coronado parted withthe bulk of the expedition, m oving ahead on April 22 with a small m ounted
vanguard —including friar Marcos— that reached H aw ikuh (Zuni-Cibola) by
the seventh of July. Meanwhile H ernando de Alarcon navigated north to them outh of the Colorado river, and having lost the track of his over-landcompanions, he followed the river inland for perhaps one hundred miles until
he finally decided to return, leaving behind a note should they ever reach thesame place. W hen the infantry reached H awikuh by N ovem ber that year,
Vazquez de Coronado had already sent Pedro Tovar to reconnoitre theTusayan (Hopi) pueblos of eastern Arizona and Garcia Lopez de Cardenas toexplore the Tizon river (Grand Canyon). He had also commissioned H ernando
de Alvarado to travel east to the Rfo Grande and beyond into the prairies,

39 The m ost important are published in Mora (1992), and Hammond & Rey (1940).
40 Legally constituted and notarised on February 27 (Horgan 1963: 167)

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following an Indian from Cicuye (Pecos) that offered his services as guide.
Alvarado visited Acuco (Acoma), Taos (the northernm ost Zuni Pueblo), andTiguex (today Bernalillo in the central valley of the Rio Grande), which herecom m ended should be used as winter quarters. During this excursion an
Indian he nicknamed "The Turk" volunteered to take the Spaniards to Quivira, ariverside kingdom tow ards the Northeast, gold-rich and extremely refined(Cutter 1992:16-17, Lecompte 1989: 288-290).
Towards the end of Novem ber 1540, as soon as the infantry caught up,
the complete arm y moved to Tiguex for the winter. However, the Spaniards'
abuse and excessive dem and of resources provoked a widespread revolt thatlasted until March 1541. Once in control of the situation Vazquez de Coronado
burnt one hundred "rebels" alive as exemplary punishm ent (Horgan 1963: 167173 C utter 1992: 17-22, Lecompte 1989: 291, Ham m ond & Rey 1940: 24, 225).
Then he sent two captains to explore Quirix and took personal lead of an
expedition to Quivira. The party w andered m ore then tw o m onths (April-July)across the plains from eastern New Mexico to Oklahoma, and perhaps Kansas,
guided by "The Turk" —who said the Quivirans navigated a river "two leagues
wide" in large canoes and had plenty of gold which they called "acochis." Asthey found no metal wealth at the place "The Turk" finally identified as Quivira—a m odest peasant settlement beside a m oderate-size river— they garrotted
the Indian after obtaining from him the confession that he had purposefully led
the Spaniards astray (Forbes 1960: 14-19). Janet Lecompte (1989: 298-300)
argues that his execution was the dreadful result of a m isunderstanding, as
rather than telling lies he may have been talking about the only river that could
be described as "two leagues wide:" the lower Mississippi. After all, the Knightof Elvas, chronicler of the de Soto expedition to Florida that reached aneighbouring area around the same period, described Qw apaw Indianscrossing the Mississippi stream in large canoes with canopies too. O n the other140

hand, she contends, the w ord that Wichita Indians living in that region had formetal was precisely acochis (ha:kwicis).
Vazquez de Coronado returned to his Tiguex base in October 1541 and in
April 1542 he was just as ready to abandon the would-be province of Nuevo
Mexico as most of the prospective settlers he ruled. By June that year the
expedition returned to Culiacan, leaving behind a Portuguese soldier, Andres
do Campo and two or three missionaries, Friar Juan de Padilla and two others
whose names are not clear.41 All of them were m artyred by the Indians except
the soldier, who escaped and lived as a sham an before returning to New Spain
five years later. Also a num ber of Mexican and Tarascan Indians rem ained
am ong the Pueblo. Vazquez de Coronado continued to govern N ueva Galicia
until September 1544 but his residencia charged him with incompetence anddereliction of duty. The following year he was also accused of a m isdem eanour
during the expedition but since he was found not guilty, he continued to serve
as a m inor public official until he died ten years later in Mexico City (H organ
1963: 174-182, Bancroft 1889: 64-68, Beck 1969: 46-48, Forbes 1960: 22, Petersen
1980: 58, Lecompte 1989: 302-304, Cutter 1992: 23-27).
For over a century scholars have debated the routes that N unez Cabezade Vaca, Niza and Vazquez de Coronado followed (e.g. Bancroft 1889, Bolton
1949, Di Peso 1974, Sauer 1932, 1935 & 1940, Winship 1896, Riley 1971) sincesome of the kingdoms appearing in their accounts, such as Corazones, Senora
and Totonteac, do not appear in the reports by seventeenth century
missionaries who traversed the area. This lack of correspondence has led
m odern anthropologists and historians to assume that early explorers lied
about the size and complexity of aboriginal cultures. Such m istrust of pre­anthropology or pre-scientific texts, as Reff (1991: 636-637) contends m ay not
be justified, as the noted discrepancy rather reflects depopulation. Most early
41 According to Bancroft (1889: 67) there were only two, Padilla and a certain friar Luis but
according to Cutter (1992: 26) there were three: Padilla, Juan de Ubeda (Belda), and Juan dela Cruz.

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accounts concerning the search for Nuevo Mexico, juxtaposed with thearchaeological record,

indicate theexistence of complex socio-politicalorganisations and m ore population than that observable in later times.
Sixteenth century Spaniards, Charles Gibson asserts (1964: 32), were quite
conscious of settlement size distinctions for both legal and ideological reasons.
Therefore it is significant that friar Marcos referred to villas or pueblos as
opposed to ranchos or aldeas. Moreover, the fact that he reported only threeuninhabited areas (despoblados) during his entire journey, suggests that in 1539
north-w estern Sonora and southern Arizona retained a sizeable population
possibly related to the so-called Hohokam culture which, attending to Niza's
descriptions, m ay have collapsed not in the first half of the fifteenth century as
is generally believed, but m uch later (Reff 1991: 645-646).
The polemic concerning the credibility of Marcos de Niza's report centres
on w hether he really reached the heart of the N orth American Southwest. An
interrogation already posed in his own days as he abandoned Vazquez deC oronado's expedition in August 1540, returning to Mexico w ith a courier
party to escape the rage that filled the expeditionaries at the sight of Cibola.
H ernan Cortes ("account of the Viceroy's affronts..." in M artinez 1990-1992: IV,
210-21242) and Vazquez de Coronado (letter to viceroy Mendoza, August 3,
1540, in H am m ond & Rey 1940: 170) raised bitter accusations against the friar,
whose report they considered a fabrication (Horgan 1963: 171). In m odern
times Bancroft (1889), Bandelier (1981), H organ (1963), Undreiner (1947), andReff (1991) have sustained the veracity of Niza's Relacidn against such authors
as W agner (1934), w ho considered the friar a victim of the overexcitedim agination of his time; Sauer (1932), who thought the report was fabricated inorder to block Cortes and other suitors to the N orth, or Hallenbeck (1987) w ho

42 Memorial de Hernan Cortes a Carlos V acerca de los agravios que le hizo el virrey de la
Nueva Espana, impidiendole la continuacion de los descubrimientos en la Mar del Sur, June 2 5,
1540.

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adduced as proof of N iza’s mendacity his incapacity to provide Vazquez deCoronado w ith clear distance indications.43
W hether Niza actually beheld Cibola is not all that im portant for theargum ent of this thesis. In any case I endorse Reff s opinion (1991: 639-642) thatm ost doubts surrounding Niza's Relacidn reflect a m isreading derived fromincorrect presuppositions about aboriginal culture and sixteenth century
Spaniards' capacity to observe, to which I shall add an anachronistic
perspective. D. J. Weber (1987: 20-21), for example, regards Friar Marcos' claimthat Cibola was the best of the discoveries as "an extravagant recom m endationfrom a m an w ho knew first hand the wealth of Mexico and Peru." But the friar,
as Bandelier rem arks (1981: 100), never saw Mexico-Tenochtitlan before it wasdestroyed so w hen he spoke of Mexico he certainly referred to the colonial city,which in 1539 had a much smaller population. Likewise, the assum ption that
Vazquez de Coronado and Niza followed the same trails as Cabeza de Vaca israther incorrect, since as Reff contends (1991: 640-642) the friar did notprim arily follow Estevan's lead but relayed essentially on Indian guides andinformants. Therefore he probably travelled a som ewhat coastal route, walking
from Vacapa along the same road that frequent travellers to Cibola also used
(Reff 1991: 638). Finally, the dazzling image of the seven cities drafted in Niza's
Relacidn is very m uch a transcription of his Indian inform ants' perception, as heis very m uch restrained w hen describing w hat he saw himself. This confidence
in the w ord of the Other is w hat m atters to us, since the construction of Nuevo
Mexico resulted largely from the Spanish engagement w ith native views.

4.4.- Searching for Nuevo Mexico: Francisco de Ibarra and N ueva Vizcaya.
After Vazquez de Coronado returned from Cibola the northern frontier ofN ew Spain lived through a prolonged period of w ar that would only end

43
W eber (1987: 24-29) and Reff (1991:
controversies this issue raised until the 1980s.

636-645)

providean overview

of the143

around 1590. This was also a time of constant expansion as it w as then thatm ost mine discoveries took place. The precarious peace ensuing the Mixton
W ar or Cazcan rebellion (1540-1542), personally suffocated by viceroy
M endoza w ith the collaboration of num erous Indians from Central Mexico
w ould not last for long, as the opening of cart roads and slave raiding
activities44 that accompanied the discovery of silver mines in Xalpepec andEspfritu Santo (1543), Guanajuato (1544), and Zacatecas (1546) am ong othersites, provoked the fierce response of such Indian groups as the Zacatecos,
Guachichiles, Guamares, Pames, and Tepehuanes (Gerhard 1982: 6-7 & 1972: 7,
Jimenez Moreno 1958: 49, Gutierrez 1991: 39-42 & 45, H organ 1963:152).
Like the Mixton uprising, the Chichimeca W ar —as historians call theinterm ittent but constant struggle fought over forty years against these
resisting tribes— forced the Spaniards to propitiate a wide northw ard
m igration of Mexicans, Tlaxcalans and other natives from the South, w ho
would establish peasant colonies aimed at inducing rebel Chichimecas into
farm ing and obedience (Gerhard 1982: 7-8, Forbes 1960: 29-34, Radding 1997:
30-31). This was at once a peace achieving m easure and a m eans to securelabourers for the mines. Natives from Michoacan lived in Zacatecas since 1550,
and by the beginning of the seventeenth century most mine w orkers in the citywere Indians w ho spoke Nahuatl and Tarascan, m any of w hom had fought on
the Spanish side in the Chichimec frontier before settling as day-labourers(Lecoin 1988:131).45 The cultural dislocation and readjustment that such a policy
generated in the hybrid communities thus constituted, as well as the
expectations that the new circumstance created am ong the conquered groups
eligible as decoys for the northern frontier contributed to shape the dream of
Nuevo Mexico.

44 The slave raiding system went a s far as the south of Texas, reaching its peak from 1 5 7 5
to 1585 (Forbes 1960: 34).
45 This is clearly stated in the Relacidn de Nuestra Senora de los Zacatecas, written in 1 608(BNM, 3064, Descripcion de Indias I: 85).

144

According to the records of the local municipal council (Ribera Bernardez
1945: 9), Juan de Tolosa discovered the first silver mines in Zacatecas on
September 8, 1546. Three years later a massive flow of Spanish and Indian
im m igrants had turned the place into the second largest city of the viceroyalty
in term s of population; thus although it only received the title of "Ciudad" in1585 (Relacidn de Nuestra Senora de los Zacatecas 1608: 84v; Ribera Bernardez
1945:12; Jimenez Moreno 1958: 56), it immediately became a principal base forthe organisation of northw ard exploration and conquest. In 1554 Francisco de
Ibarra set out from here to search for new silver veins, financed by his uncle
Diego de Ibarra, one of Zacatecas' first settlers w ho had quickly amassed afortune in mining and cattle rising, like others that would later figure
prom inently in the conquest of Nuevo Mexico.46 In the following eight years
Ibarra discovered the mines of Avino, San M artin, Sombrerete (Llerena since1569), Fresnillo, and Chalchihuites thereby starting an incipient colonisation in
the region, m omentarily interrupted by a Zacateco rebellion: the League of1561.47
Documents concerning the events occurred locally after the defeat of therebels, such as Francisco de Ibarra's reports and letters, are vague andconfusing w hen it comes to chronology. In consequence it is difficult todeterm ine

the date andsequenceofcertain

episodes.

Nevertheless,chronological precision is much less im portant for us then the fact that,
betw een 1561 and 1565, Francisco de Ibarra sought extensively for the ancient
Mexicans' place of origin, in those days called Copala according to Baltasar deO bregdn.48 As result of this endeavour, Ibarra conquered a wide territory that46 Cristobal de Onate, Juan de Saldivar and Vicente de Saldivar (Ribera Bernardez 1945: 9 ,Relacidn de Nuestra Senora de los Zacatecas 1608: 84v).
47 "Account of the feats that Ibarra performed in the service of His M ajesty, 1 5 7 4 "(Memoria de los servicios que ha hecho el gobernador Francisco de Ibarra a Su Magestad [.. .]en las provincias de Copala, Nueva Vizcaya y Chiametla. AGI, Patronato, 21, No. 4, R 2: 1 -2v). S ee also Barlow & Simsor (1943: xvi).
48 Obregdn was born in Mexico City in 1544 to a son of Rodrigo de Baeza, one of the f i r s t
settlers of New Spain. He joined Ibarra's army in Chiametla in 1566 and later on he wrote a tlength about this expedition in a chronicle that described the search for Nuevo Mexico —from

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he nam ed N ueva Vizcaya, at first comprising the area he had barely settled
since 1554 plus all the yet unconquered lands beyond Nueva Galicia.49
In a letter that Ibarra addressed from Avino to the Viceroy on 6 June
1562 (AGI, Mexico, 19, No. 27) he said to have set out from San M artin withfriar Cintos50 and another monk to confirm the rum ours about Copala thatcirculated around the region, which he could not verify personally due to thepouring rains. He also informed that the friars rem ained near a certain valley
he then discovered in order to assemble "the people,” and he requested official
support —a hundred soldiers provided by the Viceroy— to complete his
inspection. Unfortunately the document does not record the date w hen thisjourney began nor the nam e of the valley. Judging from the 1574 'Account on
the feats that Ibarra performed..." (AGI, patronato 21, No. 4, R 2: 2-4), how ever,it seems that this was the same excursion as that when, accompanied by agroup of Franciscan friars he discovered the valley of San Juan and founded thevillage of Nom bre de Dios (June 1562), aimed at attracting the recently defeated
Chichimecas to Christian life. An indigenous account concerning the services
that a group of Mexican and Tarascan Indians who served as decoys in thesettling of this village, published by Barlow and Simsor, suggests the sameconclusion. It asserts (Barlow & Simsor 1943: 14-24) that Francisco de Vara
(Ibarra) com m anded the settling process, although he parted before it was
accomplished, leaving behind three of the four friars who had also been
involved —Geronimo de Mendoza, Pedro de Espinareda, Diego de la Cadena

Hernan Cortes (1521) to Antonio de Espejo (1582). He finished the chronicle in 1583 or 1 5 8 4and sen t the m anuscript to the Consejo de Indias, but it w as only published in 1924 (B ravo
1997: 22-27, Cam elo 1981: 29).
49 In 1579 the governor of Nuevo Leon, Luis de Carvajal, laid claim to the Chichimec country
north of Panuco and various mining centres such as Mazapil and Coahuila. After a period ofdispute, several fertile valleys and strategic p asses in the Sierra Madre Oriental w e redetached from Nueva Vizcaya to become part of the New Kingdom of Leon (Gerhard 1982: 7).
50 Jacinto de San Francisco, a former soldier who had renounced the encomiendas he attainedin the conquest of Mexico to become a monk, was better known a s friar Cintos (or Cindos)
after receiving the Franciscan robe.

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and Jacinto de San Francisco— to supervise the full establishment of thevillage.51
On July 24, 1562, viceroy Luis de Velasco appointed Ibarra governor of
the province of Copala / N ueva Vizcaya comprising all the lands he m ay
conquer beyond the mines of San M artin ("Report on the governm ent of
N ueva Vizcaya 1574," AGI, Patronato, 20, No. 5, R. 16). The m ain goal of thisassignment, as the respective ordinance stipulated (AGI, Mexico, 19, No. 49),w as to invest the captain w ith the authority to lead an expedition into the large
settlements inhabited by people w ho wore clothing that he was told about
while exploring the valleys he had discovered beyond Avino. According to aletter by viceroy Velasco (May 26, 1563) those settlements lied precisely in theprovince of Copala that had m any silver mines as well (AGI, Patronato 21, No.
4, R. 3). In compliance with this commission, Ibarra conducted a lengthy
discovery expedition leaving from San Martin, where he assembled a newgroup of volunteers including interpreters from the region who spoke Nahuatl
and Chichimeca languages, as well as soldiers who had been to Cibola w ith
Vazquez de Coronado.
In the valley of Guadiana, explored ten year before by Gines Vazquez delM ercado, Ibarra founded the would-be capital of his province, Durango (1563).
W hether this occurred before or after he engaged in organising his newjourney is not clear, as his reports are vague and m utually contradictory. In any
case, w e know from various letters by viceroy Velasco, Francisco and Diego de
Ibarra,52 that tow ards the beginning of March 1563 the governor left the valley

51 The Descripcidn de la villa de Nombre de Dios (BNM, 3064, Descripcidn de Indias I: 1 1 5 124) elaborated in 1608 by the local authorities provides an incorrect date for th isfoundation: 1563. The document, however, also mentions Pedro de Espinareda among th efounders and asserts that most of the town's population at the time w as still of Mexican andT arascan origin, though many natives from Tonala had also settled there.
52(May 1563, AGI, Patronato 21, No. 4, R. 3). This includes the Relacidn de lo que descubrid
Diego de Ibarra en la provincia de Copala, llamada Topiame... 1563.

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of San Juan with his entire arm y in the search for Copala,53 which he did notfind. Instead he discovered the mines of Indehe, Santa Barbara, and Coneto,
and after dispatching most of his m en back to San Juan he took a smallvanguard of thirty five soldiers to follow a native w om an into the w estern
mountains, as she prom ised to show him another large and populous town.
The village of Topia that he sighted near the end of April had in his opinion "thelooks of another Mexico" ("an undated soldier's report," AGI, Patronato, 21, No.
4, R. 3) so he brought his arm y from San Juan and took over the place.
After the successful attack on Topia, Ibarra crossed the m ountains anddescended to the coastal plain of present day Sinaloa, arriving at San Miguel deCuliacdn sometime in the beginning of 1564. The village was by then almost
abandoned as death and desertion had caused a severe population drop since
N uno de Guzm an left in 1531.54 Diego de Ibarra's 1563 Relacidn, Francisco de
Ibarra's 1574 report, the chronicle by Baltasar de Obregon (1924 [c. 1584]) and
the Relacidn by Antonio Ruiz (1974 [c. 1595-1600]) on the conquest of Sonora
and Sinaloa narrate this part of his doings. Despite the discrepancies that all
four accounts display w hen it comes to the sequence and dates of the events, it
is clear that the governor headed N orth from Culiacan across the Mayo andYaqui valleys, venturing into an almost unexplored territory until reaching theruins of the ancient city of Casas Grandes (Paquime).55 Either on leaving or on
his w ay back Ibarra founded the village of San Juan Bautista de Cinaloa (June1564), from where he would later re-conquer the neighbouring province ofChametla (1565) that had been abandoned thirty years before (Ortega Noriega

53 The account of the Mexican and Tarascan Indians who colonised Nombre de Dios alsomentions the episode (Barlow & Simsor 1943: 24-26), which Ibarra's 1574 Acount re p o rts
a s an excursion to Topia (AGI, patronato, 21, No. 4, R. 2: 6-7v).
54 It has been observed that by 1550 only twenty five of the ninety six original Spanish
colonists were still living there (Ortega Noriega 1993: 40, 42).
55 Francisco de Ibarra and his men were perhaps the first Spaniards to see these m agnificent
ruins. The first written description we have of the site is contained in the chronicle byBaltasar de Obregon quoted above (Guevara 1995: 342).

148

1993: 43-44, Ortega Noriega & del Rio 1993: 32-33, Jimenez M oreno 1958: 36-8,
61-62,99 & Radding 1997: 32).
Although Francisco de Ibarra held the governm ent of N ueva Vizcaya
until he died, none of the places he conquered m atched his idea of w hat the
Nuevo Mexico should have actually looked like, not even the province of Topia
that at some point he had considered the most likely candidate. Other captains
and missionaries took on his quest later on, as the slave-raiding and Indianconverting incursions brought renewed reports concerning cities and people
dressed in cotton north-west from Santa Barbara (m odern Parral), thenorthernm ost Spanish enclave until 1581.

4.5.- Cibola becomes Nuevo Mexico: The 1580fs non-A uthorised expeditions.
The Com prehensive

Ordinances for N ew

Discoveries andPopulation

Settlement issued on 13 July 1573 (BNM, 3017, Bulas y Cedulas para el Gobierno deIndias, siglo XVI: 281-301)56 m ark a fundamental change in relation to thepreceding period of territorial expansion. After their prom ulgation, conquest
w as to be substituted for pacification, which m eant that grand military
expeditions such as Cortes' and Vazquez de Coronado's w ere forbidden infavour of small scale, peaceful settling enterprises directed by missionaries,
w ho should avoid the exercise of force except for reasons of self-defence(Simmons 1991: 4, H organ 1963: 185-188). It was within this legal frame andthrough the missioizing zeal of a few friars that old Cibola was revived to
Spanish eyes, under the nam e of Nuevo Mexico. Other charters similar incharacter had been issued previously, like the one of December 30, 1549 (BNM,
3045, Ordenanzas y Cedulas de Indias, S. XVI: 99-100) w hereby the m onarchs
prohibited any new enterprise of conquest in the Indies. Such a general ban
56 A manuscript copy of the sam e document ( Ordenanzas de Felipe II para los Descubrimientosy Poblaciones Nuevas) is contained in a different compilation of laws and ordinances alsopreserved in the National Library of Spain (BNM, 3035, Ordenanzas de la Hacienda Real en
Indias: 282-316). The copier of this compilation made a mistake and trascribed the issuingdate of the docum ent as 1563 instead of 1573, the correct year.

149

was, of course, nothing more than wishful thinking, as the colonists in the N ew
W orld were not prepared to cancel their ambitions of wealth and power. In thissense the 1573 ordinance was much more realistic.
Between 1580 and 1590 four small expeditions, two organised by
missionaries and two by lay adventurers, entered the region that would later
become Nuevo Mexico, but none established a perm anent grip.
In 1581, encouraged by the Spanish residents of the northernm ost m ining
centres in Nueva Vizcaya, the Franciscan friar Agustrn Rodriguez recruited
tw o fellow monks, Juan de Santa Maria and Francisco Lopez, to evangelise thelands formerly visited by Francisco Vazquez de Coronado. Parting from Santa
Barbara towards the beginning of June on a journey that lasted nearly a year,
an escort of nine soldiers headed by Francisco Sanchez de Cham uscado57 andnineteen Indian guides, interpreters and carriers accompanied the adventurous
friars (Bancroft 1889: 76-77, Horgan 1963: 214, Cutter 1992: 32).
For a couple of m onths the expeditionaries journeyed north along therivers Conchos and Grande (today Bravo, which they called Guadalquivir)58
and w ere probably the first group of Spaniards to visit Acoma and Zuni since1542. According to Baltasar de Obregon (1924 [c. 1584]: 243, 246-247) and acouple of reports by participant soldiers (Escalante & Barrando, H ernando
Gallego), after crossing the Conchos river they heard about both the miracles
perform ed by N unez Cabeza de Vaca and the brutality that Vazquez deC oronado and his m en exercised. Taking advantage of these m em ories they
prom ised that no harm would ensue from their visit and distributed crosses,
instructing the natives to show them to any Spaniard they m ay come across inthe future to avoid mistreatment. Gaining the Indians' confidence, how ever,w as not as easy as Rodriguez imagined. In December 1581 (or January 1582)

57 The other soldiers were: Hernando Barrado, Pedro de Bustamante, Hernando Gallego, P ero
S&nchez Chavez, Felipe de Escalante, Pedro de Herrera, Pero S anchez de Fuensalida, and Ju an
Sanchez de Fuensalida.
58 O ther nam es for this river: Concepcion, Magdalena, Turbio, Bravo (Cutter 1992 : 32).

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friar Francisco Lopez (or Juan de Santa Marfa) was killed at a place called
Puaray, in the Pecos river area. Most members of the expedition then returned
to New Spain, and upon arriving at Chihuahua (April 1582) they inform ed thatthe surviving friars, who had preferred to stay behind, might be in danger. As
a consequence, the Franciscan order prepared a small rescue mission (Bancroft
1889: 75-81, Beck 1969: 49-50, Lamar & Truett 1997: 68, Forbes 1960: 49-55,
Obregon 1924 [c. 1584]: 10 & 15, Cutter 1992: 31-33, Zarate Salmeron 1965 [c.
1629]: 125-128).
Organised from the city of Durango by friar Bernardino Beltran, thism odest enterprise headed by a certain Antonio de Espejo lacked royal approval
and, of course, official funding. Nevertheless, the governor of N ueva Vizcaya
granted a late authorisation, once the expedition was already on its way, as heendorsed the permission initially given by the major of Cuatro Cienegas, Juande Ontiveros (Forbes 1960: 55-56, Ocaranza 1934: 7). Four soldiers and tw ofriars, one called Pedro de Heredia, were all the m en that Espejo took along.
They left from San Bartolome (today Allende) in the w inter of 1582 and having
confirmed, after visiting the Great Plains, Acoma, and Zuni, that the friars they
had come to rescue had been killed they parted West in search of a golden lake
they never found (Beck 1969: 50-51, Cutter 1992: 32-34, Zarate Salmeron 1965
[c. 1629]: 129). Back in Santa Barbara, New Spain, in September 1583, Espejo
wrote a long report stating that he had discovered fifteen provinces full ofpeople, which altogether he nam ed Nueva Andalucfa, although others called
the place "el Nuevo Mexico" (Ocaranza 1934: 7). One of his companions, Diego
Perez de Luxan also wrote a report on the expedition.
The Agustrn Rodriguez incident is fundamental. N ot only because theterm Nuevo Mexico was then first applied to the land formerly called Cibola,which the friar re-nam ed as province of San Felipe del Nuevo Mexico, but also
because it can be considered the immediate antecedent of Onate's definitive
conquest expedition.

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In Novem ber 1582, before Espejo initiated his non-authorised excursion,
Rodrigo del Rio de Losa, lieutenant Captain General of N ueva Galidarequested the king for a reinforcement of at least 300 soldiers to punish them urder of friar Agustfn Rodriguez' companion. The king's answer came as aroyal chart, dated September 1583, that ordered the facts be investigated by a
private individual who w ould be commissioned to gather, on his ow n expense,a large and powerful arm y to subdue the province. During the following years
m any petitioners subm itted their offers to the viceroyal and m etropolitan
authorities.
Although m ost of these petitions were rejected —Cristobal M artin,
Francisco Diaz de Vargas, Antonio de Espejo, Baltasar de Obregon, and Gaspar
Castano de Sosa59— two contracts, which never came into effect, w ere signed
before the authorities finally entrusted Juan de Onate with the enterprise(Gutierrez 1991:46, Bancroft 1889: 79-81 & 94-97, Ocaranza 1934: 7-9, Beck 1969:
51-52). The first, approved by viceroy Villamanrique on March 11, 1589, wasgranted to Juan Bautista de Lomas y Colmenares, a rich resident of the minesof Las Nieves, in N ueva Galicia. By virtue of this docum ent the petitioner
committed himself to assemble an arm y absorbing the full expense, receivingin exchange the governm ent and general captaincy of Nuevo Mexico for six
generations, w ith a salary of 8000 ducats, the title of Count or Marquis forhimself and his offspring, and the right to fortify harbours in the N orthern andSouthern Seas. But as neither the King nor the Consejo de Indias ever confirmed
this agreem ent Villamanrique's successor, Luis de Velasco, signed a newcontract in 1592 with Francisco de Urdinola, who was nevertheless arrested
before departing on charges of poisoning his wife (Bancroft 1889: 92-100).
Even though no official expedition into Nuevo Mexico took place until
Onate's, a couple of illegal attem pts at penetrating the region occurred in theyears immediately preceding his departure. In July 1590 Cristobal M arin and
59 Their offers are preserved in the Archivo General de Indias.

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Gaspar Castano de Sosa, lieutenant governor of N uevo Leon, led 170 persons
from N ueva Almaden (today Monclova) —including wom en and children— tocolonise the now famous province. Captain Juan Morlete and fifty soldiers
were immediately sent after the would-be colonists, who had to w ithdraw inMarch 1591, in compliance with the detention order presented against Castanode Sosa (Bancroft 1889:100-107, Forbes 1960: 67-73, Cutter 1992: 34-5). A coupleof years later60 Francisco Leyva Bonilla and Juan de Hum ana,61 w hom thegovernor of N ueva Vizcaya had sent to fight against rebellious Indians in thefrontier, m ade their ow n illegal incursion. Despite the obscurity surrounding
the events concerning this "entrada" —there is only one brief Relacion by an
Indian survivor called Jusepe or Jose who joined Juan de Onate in 159862— weknow that a certain Pedro Cazorla was unsuccessfully sent after theinsubordinates and that once they entered "unknown" territory H um ana killed
Leyva Bonilla, which provoked the desertion of the few Mexican Indians w ho
had joined in the adventure (Bancroft 1889:108-109 Cutter 1992: 35-6).
In his Relaciones on the history of Nuevo Mexico Geronimo de Zarate
Salmeron (1965 [c. 1629]: 155-156) wrote that Juan de Onate found remains ofhorses and iron objects in Quivira, which he considered to be sound evidence
that Hum ana was killed there. He also m entioned the adventure’s threesurvivors: the Indian Jusepe, a m ulatto w om an and a Spaniard, Alonso
Sanchez, who established himself in the region and by 1599 was enjoying thenatives' respect. Com m enting on this text more than one century later, father
Juan Arm ando Niel (1965 [1710]: 259-263 & 273) deplored Zarate Salmeron's
imprecision regarding the 1580-1595 "entradas," considering that the Jesuit
could have spoken with the Indian Jusepe personally, as he had served as a
guide w ith Onate and was certainly alive in Zarate's days.

60 1593 according to Cutter (1992: 35), 1594-1596 according to Bancroft (1889: 108).
61 Antonio Gut6rrez de Humana according to Cutter (1992: 36).
62 Cutter (1992: 36) mentions this report but I have not found it.

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4.6.- Juan de Onate and the foundation of Nuevo Mexico.
Juan de Onate's assignm ent to lead the conquest of Nuevo Mexico was a difficultand a m uch interrupted process. Son of Cristobal de Onate, ex-governor of
N ueva Galicia, Don Juan was m arried to a daughter of Juan de Tolosa,63 granddaughter of H em an Cortes and great grand daughter of Moctezuma (Horgan
1963: 215-216). He resided in Zacatecas, dedicated to mining and cattle-rising,
and was am ong the richest m en in New Spain. It was no doubt on account of
his enorm ous fortune and his kinship to such illustrious families that, as
Simmons (1991: 3) observes, viceroy Velasco encouraged him to apply for thepost. His appointm ent and departure, however, w ere m uch delayed due to theViceroy's succession and the late consideration of an offer m ade by anotherpetitioner.
Based each on a few of several ordinances that authorised or banned
Onate's advance, m ost historians who have narrated this process since Bancroft(1889: 116-123) provide discordant accounts. Nevertheless the chronology canbe fairly well established on the basis of Gaspar de Villagra's Historia de la Nueva
Mexico (1610)64 and three contem porary documents: the m inutes which record
the act of taking possession of the territory, celebrated April 30, 1598 (Traslado
de la posesion); the Memorial de Nuevo Mexico that either Onate himself or one of
his officials compiled in 1602 to keep the authorities inform ed of local
developm ents and a general evaluation of Nuevo Mexico's situation, m ost

63 As I noted above, Tolosa had discovered the mines of Z acatecas where he established as
first settler, contributing along the years to "pacify" and colonise the region.
64 Villagra joined O nate's party at the village of Llerena in June 1596. He occupied im portantcom m issions almost from the beginning. Like other captains he contributed a small company of
men that he recruited himself, paying seven thousand pesos of his own resources to buy
h orses, w eapons and clothes for the soldiers. It seem s that he served tem porarily as
governor of the town sometime after the Acoma rebellion, since O nate addressed him a le tte r
using this title on January 30, 1599 (Villagra 1900 [1610]: II, 28). He also served a s m ajo rof Guanacevf and Captain of the region of Tepeguanes in 1602-1603 (Villagra 1900 [1 6 1 0 ]:II. 1-4).

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probably w ritten in 1600 by viceroy Zuniga y Acevedo, C ount of M onterrey(Discurso).65
According to the Traslado de la posesion (Villagra 1989 [1610]: 218) the kingsigned a charter appointing Onate Governor and Captain General of Nuevo
Mexico in June 21, 1595. Viceroy Velasco transm itted the order to Onate inAugust the 24th (Villagra 1989 [1610]: 126) and then sum m oned him to court tosign the correponding capitulaciones the 21st of September (Memorial de Nuevo
Mexico, in CODOINAO: XVI, 188). Meanwhile a new viceroy, Gaspar de Zunigay Acevedo, had been appointed and arrived at Veracruz on September 18.
Before the succession ceremony took place in Novem ber the functionaries
discussed the issue by correspondence (Rubio Mane 1983: I, 134-135). As aresult, Zuniga y Acevedo authorised Velasco to allow O nate to begin
preparations for the journey, taking to Santa Barbara the people he had
recruited in Zacatecas (October 21, 1595 according to the Memorial, in
CODOINAO: XVI, 189). Nevertheless, the new Viceroy had to read the contract
and confirm its approval, and this only occurred until 15 December 1595.
Although Onate's original petition is lost, Josiah Gregg (1990 [1844]) had
the opportunity to see it in 1844. According to his sum m ary, Onate offered torecruit 200 m en at his ow n expense to serve in the dual role of soldier andcolonist, as well as to purchase the necessary food and clothes and take enoughweapons, mining and blacksmithing tools, medicines, seeds, plows, Indian
trade goods, and other items to m eet the colonists' requirem ents. In exchange
he asked for the title of Adelantado, Governor and General Captain, thirty
leagues of land with its vassals, a yearly salary of 8000 ducats and a mining
65 The first of these documents, Traslado de la posesion que en nombre de Su Magestad tomd
Don Juan de Olate de los reynos y provincias de la Nueva Mexico; y de las obediencias yvasallaje que los indios de algunos pueblos de los dichos reynos y provincias le dieron en eldicho nombre, is reproduced by Villagra (1989 [1610]: 217-224) and is also contained in
CODOINAO (XVI: 88-142). The other two, contained in the sam e collection, are: Memorial
sobre el descubrimiento de Nuevo Mbxico y sus acontecimientos, anos desde 1595 a 1602
(CODOINAO, XVI: 188-208), and Discurso y proposicidn que se hace a vuestra magestad de lo
tocante a los descubrimientos del Nuevo Mexico por sus capltulos de puntos diferentes(CODOINAO, XVI: 228-276).

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tribute exemption. Apart from reducing Onate's salary to 6000 ducats a year,
when viceroy Zuniga y Acevedo approved the contract on the 15th ofDecember, he also m oderated the judicial faculties and tribute privileges
originally granted, and he ordered everything to be ready in Santa Barbara by
January 1596 rather than at the end of March, deadline that Onate had first
proposed66 (Horgan 1963: 216, Simmons 1991: 5, C utter 1992: 39-40, Bancroft
1889:116-123).
The reduction of the time granted to conclude Onate's recruitm ent
campaign and preliminary preparations reveals the urgency that the colonial
authorities felt for securing a territory that, as the ever m ore frequent non­authorised "entradas" of the previous decade and the num erous rejected
petitions demonstrated, would not cease to awaken the colonising ambitions ofprivate adventurers.
People living in the frontier would not give up their desire to appropriate
this highly attractive region, so it was perem ptory to incorporate them into an
officially controlled project. Otherwise the risk was they m ight organise theirown autonom ous enterprises, which could easily contest the authority of the
Crown and her viceroyal representatives. In addition, the shattering of theGreat Arm ada that Philip II had sent against Queen Elizabeth in 1588 had left
the northern frontier dangerously exposed (Simmons 1991: 9), renovating thefears that, between 1560 and 1573, had led Cuba's governor, Pedro M enendezde Aviles, to insist on the exploration of northern N ew Spain; namely, that the
English and French penetration in the heart of the continent threatened N ew
Spain's mining districts in the north and even Spanish trade with China and the
Moluccas (Velazquez 1974: 34-37). Thus if the defence policy had initially been
centred on the sea and the fortification of Florida, the strategy now shifted
66 Mendieta mentions in his Historia Eclesiastica Indiana (1997 [1596]: 402) that Juan deOnate's expedition is under preparation. Other secondary but early sources are: Torquemada(1975 [1615]: I, 670ss.) Zarate Salmeron (1965 [c. 1629]: 23-24), Alegre (1956-1960: I,
310-311), Niel (1965 [1710]: 89-94), Alcedo (1786: III, 189), Ribera Bern£rdez (1 9 4 5 :
3 1 -3 4 ).

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towards achieving an effective inland colonisation over the unknow n area
extending between Florida and California. A region which held, according toBaltasar de Obregon (1924 [c. 1584]: 202-204), the enorm ous and scarcely visitedprovinces of Cibola, Paquime, Quivira and Nuevo Mexico.
Despite all this and even after Onate accepted his assignm ent under themodified capitulaciones in Mexico City on December 16, 1595, starting on his
way to Santa Barbara in January 1596, new delays were forced upon him(Horgan 1963: 218-219). Since February 1596 Zuniga y Acevedo had reported to
the king the state of Nuevo Mexico's affairs (Memorial de Nuevo Mexico, in
CODOINAO: XVI), hoping no doubt that his decisions would be simply
acknowledged and his letters filed away. But the monarch and his councils w ere
clearly not aware of the importance of a quick decision, and since the Consejo deIndias had m ade its own election, granting the enterprise to a Spanish suitor,
Pedro Ponce de Leon, the king issued a royal charter (May 8, 1596 according to
the Memorial de Nuevo Mexico, in CODOINAO: XVI, 192) ordering Onate to stop
until new instructions, so as the Consejo could ponder both proposals.67
Therefore, by 1598 Onate had only m anaged to reach the already establishedfrontier settlements of the viceroyalty.
On 6 June 1596 the Viceroy commissioned Lope de Ulloa to visit Onate in
Zacatecas in order to determine how far advanced he was in gathering thepeople and supplies stipulated in his capitulaciones. Of course this was an
im portant consideration w hen it came to deciding w hether he or Ponce deLeon were to be finally granted the expedition's leadership. But although Ulloa
notified him in September of the king's order to stop his preparations (Memorial
de Nuevo Mexico, in CODOINAO: XVI, 193) he was never told the reason behind
this order (Horgan 1963: 219). A series of complications regarding this visita,that we need not to examine in detail, detained Onate's advance for almost
67 The Archivo General de Indias preserves an interesting document that sy ste m a tic a lly
compared the capitulaciones signed by Onate and Ponce de Leon to see which one w as the m ost
advantageous (AGI, Patronato, 22, R.12 [6]).

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another year until the Spanish suitor was turned down, a period during which
he nevertheless reached the valley of San Bartolome, near Santa Barbara. There
his arm y was subm itted to a second visita, conducted by a certain Juan de Frias
Salazar and before the presence of the Viceroy, betw een December 1597 andJanuary 1598 (Discurso, in CODOINAO: XVI, 229-232, Villagra 1989 [1610]: 164175).
It was January 26, 1598 w hen Onate's soldiers and would-be colonists—which included 130 families with their cattle (Horgan 1963: 221)— ventured
into the wilderness of "tierra incognita" (non-subjected territory), viceroy
Zuniga y Acevedo had already left for Mexico City, having approved the
expedition in accordance to the results of the last inspection. The route that
Onate followed was new, as he took from the Conchos river a m ore direct,
northw ard path than previous explorers (Cutter 1992: 40). By the 20th of April
the com pany reached the Rfo Grande river and ten days later, at the site w here
the city of El Paso stands today, Onate celebrated the cerem ony of possessionthat placed the province of Nuevo Mexico under the sovereignty of the Spanish
C row n (Horgan 1963: 224, Traslado de la posesion, in Villagra 1989 [1610]: 208224). Indians in the region took their precautions: Shortly after the cerem ony
took place a group of Athabascans, known since then as Manso Indians, cameto the camp m aking the signal of the cross and saying "manxo, manxo, micos,
micos " for mansos (peaceful) and amigos (friends) (Discurso, in CODOINAO: XVI,
250-251). Rather than indicating, as Forbes (1960: 78-79) contends, that localgroups w ere familiar with Spanish language and culture, the anecdote showsthat they had not forgotten the disgrace that ensued from Spanish presence
and so they had learnt w hat they thought to be the appropriate procedure to
avert it.
At the site of El Paso, Onate divided his company. On May the 1st, 1598
he took a small vanguard group and moved N orth along the Rio Grande.
Towards the end of the m onth they left behind a large despoblado and came

15 8across a different village every

day, someabandoned(Discurso,

in

CODOINAO: XVI, 247-252). This was the cluster of settlements that Niza had
heard about before reaching Vacapa and which he stopped to see on his w ay
back to Mexico; that is, the eastern Pueblos of the Rfo Grande valley w here
Vazquez de Coronado had also been (Horgan 1963: 228-229). Finally on Junethe 30th the vanguard cam ped in a town they nam ed Santo Domingo, in theZuni area, where Onate sum m oned the chiefs of thirty one Pueblos to havethem swear obedience. There he also incorporated as guides tw o Mexican
Indians that Castano de Sosa had left behind in 1590 (Discurso, in CODOINAO:
XVI, 253-256, Horgan 1963: 229).
As soon as the bulk of the company, which had stayed behind with thecarts and cattle, reached Santo Domingo (July 27), the expedition moved East
tow ards the Rfo Grande valley, and the 11th of August they established thecapital of the province at the town of Caypa, which they renam ed San Juan delos Caballeros (Discurso, in CODOINAO: XVI, 259-262, Cutter 1992: 42,
Gutierrez 1991: 50, Beck 1969: 54). But the great kingdom of Nuevo Mexico
vanished behind adobe houses and deserted lands, as neither precious metals
nor a city like Tenochtitlan were actually found.
On the 20th of August 1598, forty five soldiers w ere caught planning
desertion. The lesson of loyalty that Onate prepared, which consisted of a death
sentence followed by a general absolution next day (Horgan 1963: 231,
Discurso, in CODOINAO: XVI, 263) required to be supervened by w ider
exploration. Therefore, as autum n began Onate sent Vicente de Saldivar to
explore the prairies to the East and find Quivira while he led a small party
westwards in search of the Mar del Sur. The events that ensued are dramatic.
Vicente de Saldivar returned to San Juan on the 8th of Novem ber, having
found nothing he considered w orth pursuing. His brother Juan, in charge ofthe capital, took then a party of thirty one soldiers to look for Onate and tell
him the sad news. At the tow n of Acoma, the only one that had not yet pled

159

allegiance to the Crown, Juan de Saldivar requested supplies from the chief
Zutacapan thereby causing a local uprising with terrible consequences(Discurso, in CODOINAO: XVI, 264,268, Horgan 1963:232-236).
According to Gutierrez (1991: 52) —and I agree— we m ust seek for the
explanation of the violent eruption of the Acoma rebellion in the different
views that Indians and Spaniards held regarding good exchange. For w hat the
Indians thought they gave as gifts —a small am ount of w ater and wood, a few
tortillas and some maize— with the attendant obligations of reciprocation, theSpaniards thought was surrendered as tribute and were consequently
expecting to receive more. Thus on the 4th of December Saldivar took eighteen
soldiers to the top of Acoma mesa to help him collect the corn flour that he hadrequested three days before. There, Indian w arriors attacked them as non­w anted intruders after an all-too-confident Spaniard stole a pair of turkeys andraped a woman. To punish the death of ten soldiers, two servants and captain
Juan de Saldivar, killed in the skirmish that ensued, Onate sent a punitive
expedition on January 12, 1599, composed by seventy soldiers under thecom m and of Vicente de Saldivar. Acoma surrendered twelve days later,
having lost 800 lives, counting men, wom en and children, as well as 580 people
w ho w ere m ade prisoners. Not happy with this result, Onate organised am ilitary trial against the tow n as a whole and the sentence was merciless. Everym an over twenty five years old was condem ned to serve tw enty five years of
personal labour and be mutilated loosing one foot while every w om an overtwelve years old and every m an between twelve and tw enty five wassentenced to serve tw enty years of personal labour (Discurso, in CODOINAO:
XVI, 268-272, Gutierrez 1991:53, Horgan 1963: 236-242, Beck 1969: 55-57, C utter
1992: 44-45).
Once the rebellion was thus put down and punished, the province's
capital d ty was m oved across the Rio Grande river, from San Juan to theIndian village of Ohke that was renam ed San Gabriel (Horgan 1963: 243, C utter160

1992: 42). Then Onate wrote a report-letter to the Viceroy dated March 2, 1599
(in CODOINAO: XVI, 302-315), but his request of reinforcement was only
attended the following year, w hen a royal charter issued on May 31st ordered
the Viceroy to furnish the Nuevo Mexico enterprise with all the support it m ight
need. The party of seventy three soldiers that Zuniga y Acevedo sent incompliance w ith this instruction, which arrived at San Gabriel in December 1600
(Bancroft 1889: 132-147, Beck 1969: 57-58), was too small to represent m uch
help. At the beginning of 1601 Onate sent an official embassy with an optimistic
report to the Viceroy; nevertheless, one of his messengers, captain Gasco deVelasco, wrote a letter contradicting his lofty description of the land. M oreover,he accused Onate and the colonists of cruelty and m istreatm ent of docile andgenerous Indians, whose wom en were perm anently abused and w ho sufferedfrom the constant stealing of their food supplies as well. Completely ignoring
this intrigue Onate took 100 m en in search of Quivira, travelling across theprairies between the m onths of June and November of 1601 (Horgan 1963: 244245,247).
In response to the secret report w ritten by captain Velasco, the Viceroy
ordered Don Francisco de Valverde y Mercado to interrogate three m en w ho
had forsaken Nuevo Mexico and sent Velasco's report and a sum m ary of Onate's
letters to the King. Although Valverde’s interrogatories were not conclusive, in
San Gabriel things worsened to such a degree that lieutenant Penalosa wasforced to allow the malcontents to return to N ew Spain. Thus the tow n was
virtually deserted w hen the governor returned from his journey to Quivira. In
view of the circumstances, Onate decided to send Vicente de Saldivar to Madridin 1602 to request royal support in the form of men, m oney and supplies, but
the complaints set forth by the deserter-settlers, that the province contained no
precious metals, that the climate was harsh and the natives ferocious, and theaccusations of Onate's of power hungry behaviour and m isdem eanour had
already reached the court. Nuevo Mexico had now become a problem for the161

Viceroy, the Audiencia and the king, who pondered, in secrecy, the charges
against its governor for two years, considering how to depose him w ithout therisk of having the entire colony disintegrate (Horgan 1963: 247-251, Cutter 1992
: 45-46).
Although the Crown decided to send no support, until a final resolution
was made, the king meanwhile authorised Onate to explore the coast ofLabrador. The expedition was carried out betw een October 1604 and April
1605. The party included thirty soldiers, two Franciscan friars and some Hopi
Indians, who reached the Colorado river —then baptised as Rfo de Buena
Esperanza— and followed it down to its m outh into the Mar de Cortes (Beck1969: 60, Cutter 1992: 47, Ocaranza 1934: 27-29).68 This was the last enterprisethat Onate was allowed to undertake, as the following year the king instructed
the Viceroy to forbid new explorations in the area and to discretely sum m on
Onate to Mexico. The fate of the province was pondered until December 1608,
when a report by friars L&zaro Jimenez and Isidro Ordonez asserting that 700
Puebloans had been converted, convinced the Crow n to keep a foot hold in thecolony but to forbid further exploration into outlying areas. Only a governor
directly appointed by the king and fifty m arried soldiers for defence and peace
keeping purposes would remain. Consequently Onate was dismissed andsubjected to a trial, being substituted by a certain Pedro de Peralta (Gutierrez
1991:54-55, Bancroft 1889:148-157, Beck 1969:58-60, Horgan 1963: 251-252).
For more than half a century passed 1609 the colony survived
precariously without receiving resources or new colonists until 1676, w hen theViceroy sent fifty soldiers, 100 horses and several workers, including fifty sevenconvicts, in response to the desperate request that a Franciscan friar m ade on
account of the rebellious mood that repeated epidemics and hunger hadprom oted among the Indians. Despite this timely response, the reinforcements
were not enough and a widespread revolt exploded in August 1680, draw ing
68 Ocaranza includes a summary of the report that Escobar gave to Onate after discovering
the mouth of the Colorado River.

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the participation of m ost of the local indigenous groups, w ho according toForbes (1960: 74) had become horse users, at least in southern New Mexico andTexas, since the 1590s. After the fierce attack that rebel Indians w aged on thevillage of Santa Fe (August 12) —capital of the province since 1610— governor
Otermfn decided to flee with the survivors, arriving tow ards the beginning of
October to the region of El Paso, in N ueva Vizcaya (Horgan 1963: 261-269,
Ocaranza 1937: 39-52, Cutter 1992: 81-96, Gonz&lez de la Vara 1992: 11-18).
Shortly after he attem pted to re-conquer the province but was unable toconsolidate a position, only managing to b u m several villages and take som eprisoners. The remains of the colony stayed in El Paso for the following twelve
years, and although several attem pts at recovering the territory were m ade
under successive governors (1681, 1688, 1689) it was only in 1696, after four
years of continuous war, that governor Diego de Vargas Zapata broke dow n
Indian resistance and re-established Spanish dom ination in the area (Horgan
1963: 272-273, Cutter 1992: 97-110, Gonzalez de la Vara 1992: 32-35).
Onate's deposition m arks the end of the period I cover in this thesis, for it
was during his explorations that the imaginary kingdom of Nuevo Mexico was
first reified and then disavowed. Nevertheless, the great rebellion of 1680
deserves a few comments because it represents, am ong other things, a local
developm ent of the idea of Aztlan-Chicomoztoc-Nuevo Mexico. The revolt, led
by a Tewa Indian called Pope who had been prisoner of a presidio garrison(Gonzalez de la Vara 1992: 24-25), was a typical millenarian m ovem ent of thekind described by Peter Worsley (1968) for Melanesia and the Pacific. That is, am ovem ent of resistance to colonial rule articulated around the prophetic
declarations of a charismatic leader proclaiming the end of one age and thedaw n of another, characterised by the reversal of current conditions ofinequality generated by the colonial order and frequently involving theinversion of current affairs.69
69 Millenarian movements of this kind differ from those of the European Middle Ages th a t
Norman Cohn (1970 [1957]) studied in their direct link to colonialism. As a response to theexternal imposition of a colonial rule they seek to re-establish the order prevailing before theexternal intervention took place and they frequently represent that return as an inversion of
the current social order. Thus it is not the kingdom of God described in the Apocalypses th a tthey pursue, but rather a utopian order of abundance and freedom which is generally expected

163

The behaviour and ritualised practice of the Pueblo rebels, like therhetoric that Pope used to recruit them, was indeed formally very similar to
those characteristic of Melanesian Cargo Cults. It is clear from an eye-witness'letter quoted by Ocaranza (1934: 43) describing how in certain occasion, at the
town of Santa Anna, Pope prepared a large table w ith the food and things usedby the Spaniards and then, taking the seat of honour he ordered chalices to bebrought for a toast. Through his preaching Pope convinced the rebels that hewas the lieutenant of Moctezuma and as such he periodically received the visitof three spirits w ho came from the underw orld through the lake of Copalla—then locally considered to be the place of origin of both Pueblo and N ahua
Indians— to give instructions and provide their superhum an support (Zarate
Salmeron 1965 [c.1629]: 190-194). Like the charismatic leaders studied by
Worsley, Pope announced to his followers the overthrow of the existing society
and the reinstatem ent of the traditional order, but this time the Indians, united
as one people, would live in a doubly bountiful kingdom. Thus Pope waselected chief of a confederation of Indian peoples once the Spaniards decided toflee after a series of exceedingly violent attacks that could be described, inTaussig's terms, as mimicry of the violence that the colonists themselves had
displayed one hundred years before (Taussig 1993: 64-65). Traditional dances
suppressed by the missionaries were re-instated, catholic m arriages w ere
invalidated and the use of Christian names prohibited, and, m ost importantly,
it was agreed that only local crops like maize, cotton, beans, and squash w ere
to be grown in the future (Gonzalez de la Vara 1992: 26-29).
The history of this rebellion and the brief period of local utopian
independence that ensued could make themselves a separate thesis. I only
bring it up to rem ark the fact that hybrid H ispanic/N ahua notions about
Nuevo Mexico as the "recovered" original abode of the ancient Mexicans w ere
so powerful that they even articulated native resistance am ong Oasis American
peoples.

to be brought by the ancestors who will make them selves present in a material, objectified
form. David Martin has studied the rapid spread of protestantism in late twentieth c e n tu ry
Latin America from this perspective (Martin 1990).

Part Two
"Nuevo Mexico" as an Imaginary World

165

CHAPTER FIVE
THE MEDIAEVAL HYPOTHESISThis and the following chapters explore a num ber of mythical and legendary
them es that served the Spanish conquerors to conceptualise the strange
realities they faced in the New World. I will focus on the revision of tw o topicalconstellations linked to the construction of Nuevo Mexico, which I understand as
an ill-defined entity with long discursive existence am ong Indians andSpaniards —be they soldiers, bureaucrats, or settlers— that for a long period
did not correspond to any particular geographical place. Chapter five deals
w ith a series of European legendary motifs that m any scholars regard as them ain "goal providers" for those expeditions that w andered across northern
N ew Spain, and builds a preliminary demonstration for the argum ent that theyd id not constitute a significant element in the collective imagination. Chapter six
examines the corpus of m yths of ancestral origin held by N ahuatl speaking
Indians from the highland plateau of Central Mexico that, as I will prove inchapter seven, served as the conceptual axis around which the colonial
penetration in the N orth was organised.

5.1.- Indian and Spanish focused sources.
D ocum entary sources available for the study of pre-conquest N orth America
and colonial N ew Spain comprise a wide variety of printed items, as well asalphabetic and pictorial manuscripts elaborated for all sorts of reasons by
Indian, Spanish, or Mestizo authors. For the purpose of my analysis andw ithout pretending to achieve a comprehensive classification, I have divided
those materials dealing w ith historical developments and cultural description in
tw o major categories, according to w hether the m ain issues they address are
Indian or Spanish topics. This classification is in part due to the custom ary usethat scholars make of such material. However, it also responds to the practical166

need to allow the reader to quickly distinguish, as I write, w hether the
docum ent referred m eant to portray the native discourse I identified in it, o r
w hether this discourse was secondary to the writer's intentions.
U nder the category of Spanish-focused sources I include accounts w ritten
by Spanish soldiers and settlers who took part in the conquest and explorationof the land, and were obliged (or wanted) to report on the events and theirow n perform ance. Some of these texts were intended for publication, like
Baltasar de Qbregon's Historia de los descubrimientos antiguos y modrnos de la
Nueva Espana (1924 [c. 1584]), and the epic poem by Gaspar de Villagra Historia
de la Nueva Mexico (1989 [1610]), but m any were addressed to particularauthorities rather than the public at large. Such is the case of the testimonies
rendered before the Audiencias on occasion of the customary Residencia trials,
or any other litigation over the conflicts derived from expeditionary action. The
same goes for routine Hojas de Meritos y Servicios, that itemised w hateverbureaucrats and soldiers considered to have done "in the service of Your
Majesty"; and for the innumerable petitions that conquerors and first settlers
m ade to the viceroyal and m etropolitan authorities. Also within this category
fall various reports of missionaries or secular ecclesiastics to their superiors; aswell as lists of individuals enrolled and resources invested in concrete journeys,
together w ith the instructions issued for the captains. Essentially, the group
comprises documents by Spaniards —andoccasionally by

Indians or

Mestizos— speaking about Spanish actions, failures and achievements; o r
docum ents that reflect and represent Spanish interests, in the sense that it istheir agency the one emphasised or it is their rights and privileges that areunder discussion.
The other category comprises Indian-focused sources produced in thelate pre-conquest era and during the colonial times. That is, pictorial records ofindigenous forms of knowledge; historical accounts and encyclopaedic w orks,
com posed either by Indians or Spaniards with the purpose of understanding,167

or conveying, native past, beliefs, and practices; personal memoirs and official
reports partially or significantly devoted to ethnographic description; Indianaccounts of their ow n participation in the enterprise of conquest; and a wide
variety of bureaucratic and legal documents springing from the administrationof Indian issues and the settlement of disputes betw een Spaniards and Indiansor amongst Indians themselves.
Certainly, a good quantity of the material available cannot be classified
within any of these categories; either because it concentrates on subjects I do
not consider in this thesis, or because it could belong to both, as the chronicles
that official historians appointed by the Consejo de Indias wrote to register pastand current developments in the colonies. My point, however, is not to fit
every extant document in this taxonomy but to rem ark that the tw o categories
of sources it defines are seldom combined as evidence in m odern literature,
either devoted to draft colonial institutions and policies of conquest, on the one
hand, or that on native Mesoamerican civilisations, on the other.

5.2.- Indigenous m igration / Spanish "de-migration7
Since the nineteenth century the study of Native Mesoamerican civilisation has
primarily relied upon Indian-focused sources w ritten in colonial times, as wellas on archaelological evidence and the few pre-conquest pictorial documentsthat survived the destructive action of Christian invaders and the passage oftime.
It is just natural that scholars who attem pt to reconstruct indigenous
culture in the area at the m om ent of the Spaniards' arrival, and the process of
its development, should turn their attention to those materials portraying
indigenous culture and society before(or contem poraneous with) theEuropean intrusion. And so they have done, draw ing a great deal of
information from painted books elaborated by indigenous authors, both on
their own initiative like the Codex Boturini or Tira de la Peregrinacion (the oldest

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record we have of Aztec ancestral origin myths), or upon the request of a
Spanish patron, like the Codex Mendoza (record of the tributary provinces of theso called Aztec empire). Also im portant for this reconstruction are the treatises
on native peoples written or compiled by missionaries such as Diego de Duran(1967 [c. 1579-1581]) or Bernardino de Sahagun (1989 [c. 1558-1577]), and thevillage or ethnic-based histories and annals that Indian and Mestizo authors
composed in the interest of personal or communal betterm ent, like the writingsof Alvarado Tezozomoc (1980 [1598] & 1992 [c. 1600-1610]) or Chimalpahin(1998), and several anonymous short narratives.1 Indigenous traditions dealing
with places of ancestral origin and migration are am ong the most conspicuous
themes these sources address, and they also figure, though in a different
manner, in the Spanish-focused sources that m odern scholars w riting on native
societies before the conquest seldom use.
Various ethnic groups in Mesoamerica claimed that their ancestors w ere
foreign to the lands they occupied themselves, having left their prim eval abodefollowing the m andate of a patron god to begin a long "pilgrimage" that would
eventually lead them (as a people) to a glorious future in a faraway country.
Collective rights over particular lands in a highly contested territory w ere thus
legitimised with the grant by a god in the distant past. It is not coincidental thatpeoples in the central highlands, the Maya area, the Mixteca, and the West,
articulated their foundational narratives around this them e (Navarrete 1999:247); for they lived within the most densely populated region of Mesoamerica
during the period to which such traditions belong. Indeed, the need to justify
territorial occupation and political dominance in part explains w hy m igration
narratives were cast in the same m ould over a large territory and across ethnolinguistic boundaries.
Rather than contributing to the enorm ous am ount of scholarly literature
dealing w ith the symbolic meaning, or the cultural and political significance that
1 Most of these Indian historians wrote at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginningof the seventeenth. S ee chapter six below.

169such narratives held for their indigenous creators in the pre-conquest era, I am
interested in analysing the importance they had for the colonial enterprise, anissue that has been rarely addressed.
Several authors have indicated that a European mediaeval im agery
served as one of the most im portant incentives in the carving out of thenorthern provinces of New Spain (e.g. Gandfa 1929: 63, Leonard 1944, Gil
1989a, Pastor Bodmer 1992: 106-107). But even w hen it is true that European
sources concerning the New World frequently m ention the Amazons, theFountain of Eternal Youth and the lost island of Antilla, such mediaeval figures
came up in isolation every time they were referred to in continental N orth
America and implied no organic relation between the particular undertakings
where they appeared. Thus, although often invoked in a num ber of contexts I
will analyse further down, they never achieved the quality of meaningful links
between actual experience and dream ed expectation that could have m ade
separate endeavours appear as one continued enterprise to the actors involved.
In contrast, the Azteca / Mexica m igration story articulated in one single
process, that culminated in the foundation of Nuevo Mexico, a series ofexpeditions carried out in separate geographical areas that shared nothing but anortherly position in relation to the Valley of Mexico, heartland of both theancient Aztec empire and colonial New Spain.2 It provided, with the location ofits starting and ending points, and the m ain stops and events along the route,the program m atic basis that the universe of fabulous referents brought from
Europe failed to supply.
Indeed, several accounts on the conquest of N ew Spain, w ritten by
Spanish authors throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, highlightthe place where the ancient Mexicans came from as one of the principal aims of
those expeditions tow ards northerly routes organised from Mexico city.

2 Note that in many colonial docum ents the term Mexican is applied to all the Nahuatl sp ea k ers
from the central highlands, including the Aztecs, actually the only ones who called th em selv es
Mexica.

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Furthermore, some authors even identify certain features of the landscape theysaw in the North as traces of the events occurred during the Azteca / Mexica
migration. To take tw o of m any possible examples: In his Historia de losdescubrimientos antiguos y modernos de la Nueva Espana, Baltasar de O bregon(1924 [c. 1584]: 10) wrote that Hernando Cortes and Antonio de M endozaintended to "discover the origin, coming, root and m ain of the ancient Culgua
Mexica, seriously suspecting that num erous Indians, tow ns and riches awaited
there to be subjected to our holy Catholic faith."3 In a similar vein, Gaspar deVillagra maintained in his book on the conquest of Nuevo Mexico (1989 [1610]:
82-85) that the army found clear vestiges indicating that a particular spot along
the w ay was the point where the native god Huitzilopochtli once appeared
before the w andering Aztecs.
Statements of this kind are not only present in this type of reflective texts,
composed several years after the narrated events with the intention to provide
generaloverviews

in

which

memoriesofpersonal

experiencearesupplemented with information from other sources. We also find them in allsorts of petitions, legal claims or attestations subm itted to the viceroyal orm etropolitan authorities in connection w ith ongoing or projected journeys. My
review of a fraction of such materials suggests that the legitimacy of thecolonial penetration in the N orth was anchored, to a large extent, in the imageof the Nahuas' primeval abode, and hence it was represented —and som etim es
lived— as a backward reconstruction in time and space of the route followedby the forefathers of the Aztecs and other Nahuatl speaking peoples, theprocedure being an "un-walking" of the ancestral way, a "de-migration".
The demonstration of this hypothesis requires a careful analysis of the
textual evidence produced in connection with those expeditions that brought
under colonial rule the territory located beyond the northern limits of the

3 In the Spanish text we read: "descubrir el origen, venida, raiz y tronco de los antiguos
culguas mexicanos, teniendo sospecha seria de gran numero de indios, poblaciones e riq u ez as,para sugetarlos al gremio de nuestra santa fe catdlica."

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ancient Aztec empire, which I do in chapter seven. Drawing out the scatteredpassages referring to pre-conquest migrations from such material is essential toelucidate how far Spanish strategies and expectations were m oulded after thisparticular motif. Also im portant is to determ ine which am ong different
versions of N ahua migration history could have actually served as the "basistradition" for the conquerors; that is, the particular body of narratives to which
the Spaniards concerned had access and the channels through which they
became acquainted with them, a subject I explore in chapter six.
Additional methodological implications that I briefly turn to examine
resulted from this investigation on the perform ative capacities show n byindigenous discourse in the colonial context.
N ahua pre-conquest traditions of ancestral origin seem to have acquired
renewed relevance for natives themselves as the penetration into the northadvanced. At least half the Indian-focused sources containing m igrationaccounts were elaborated betw een 1540 and 1600. It is precisely this period
w hen the subjugation of N ueva Galicia, N ueva Vizcaya, Sonora, and Nuevo
Mexico was achieved, thanks to the massive participation of Indians fromCentral Mexico. However, scholars who attem pt to understand the nature andsignificance of such traditions seldom look at Spanish-focused sources
associated with the exploration and conquest of those provinces; thereby
missing the fact that their use, in connection w ith the Indian-focused sources
they traditionally employ, can contribute to understand the cultural m eanings
that Indian communities attached to their wilful collaboration in the colonial
enterprise, as well as the cultural effects that such a collaboration produced
among Indians and Spaniards alike.
Consider the following fact: Nearly all the indigenous histories w ritten in
European script that dealt extensively with the Azteca / Mexica migration w ere
contemporaneous with the expedition that accomplished thedefinitive

establishment of the province of Nuevo Mexico and the first years of its

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existence; that is, from 1597 to 1631. Their authors came from the central
highlands, a region that contributed num erous "auxiliary troops" for theundertaking. Hence, migration accounts not only continued to fulfil the samefunction they had in pre-Hispanic times; that is, to define and defend thelegitimacy of the polities to which they belonged (Navarrete 2000: 69). If theyw ere brought about to support politico-territorial claims, their vindication
capacity was now also projected to the future as well as played out on the past.
This argum ent needs to be refined, of course. Meanwhile it clearly
illustrates the fact that the body of literature commonly used for theassessm ent of N ahua ancestral migrations m ust be studied in close relation
w ith the involvement of indigenous communities in the northw ard colonising
enterprise. Particular attention should be given to the rights and claims thatparticular Indian communities could derive from the new, ever-changing,politico-geographic m ap, according to the position each of them came tooccupy in relation to other competing Indian communities viz a viz the Spanish
overlordship. The systematic comparison between Indian and Spanish focusedsources therefore reveals a situation of cultural exchange and adaptation far
more deep and complex than we tend to assume.
Summarising: This and the following chapters provide evidence tosubstantiate several interconnected arguments. First, that native American
discourse, m ore than European mediaeval imagery, rendered the colonial
advance in the N orth coherent because several motifs, central to indigenous
accounts of ancestral migration, became not only the comm on idiom but also
the arena for the negotiation of rights and privileges to which different parties
involved aspired. Second, that playing the game in the term s provided by suchdiscourse, the Spaniards granted it with authoritative status and could therefore
appropriate indigenous ideas to m ould their own expectations. Third, thatindigenous interests and understandings not only w orked their w ay through a
modified Spanish consciousness but also had social consistency through Indian

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agency in itself, which means that the colonial encounter had a dialogicalcharacter at the level of both discourse and practice. Fourth, that culturalinteraction between Indians and Spaniards took the form of an uneven mixtureof

imposition,

resistance,collaboration,

borrowing,

revivalism,andm isunderstanding that, in the long run, worked in favour of European
domination.
The rest of this chapter deals with the principal them es of mediaeval
imagery I identified in Spanish-focused which refer to the conquest andcolonisation of northern New Spain, together with a brief review of academic
assessments on the topic, leaving for chapter six the Azteca / Mexica ancestralmigration as depicted in Indian-focused sources.

5.3.- M arvels and m onsters coming from Europe.
Traditions of ancestral origin held by Indians from Central Mexico often havebeen ignored by scholars devoted to the sixteenth century exploration andconquest of northern New Spain. This neglect is due in part to the widespreadassum ption that Spanish conquerors designated and thus assimilated the new
American reality with mediaeval terms, m any times acting on the basis ofimaginary geographies that coloured their vision with European m onsters andmarvels (Weckmann 1951: 132; Ladero Quesada 1994: 132). The following
quotation from Lewis Hanke exemplifies this line of interpretation, heavily
resting on the argum ent that fantastic beings and places, such as the Amazonsor the Island of Antilia, that populate early accounts on the Caribbean islands,
are also associated with later explorations in N ew Spain, Florida, and the SouthAmerican jungles:
The wealth of ideas and legends developed with such luxuriance during the
Middle Ages was transferred at once to America; this mediaeval influence
was especially marked during the early years [... when conquerors] soughtfor the Fountain of Youth or tried to locate —in the general region of
Nebraska and Dakota— the Seven Enchanted Cities which were believed tohave been established by seven Portuguese bishops who had fled there whenthe Arabs invaded the Iberian Peninsula. (Hanke 1959: 3)

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Other historians devoted to tracing the influence of European thought andinstitutions across the Atlantic sea have elaborated upon similar considerations(Bourne 1904, Sanchez Albomoz 1983 [1934]; W eckmann 1951 & 1984), coming
to the conclusion that one of the most powerful stimuli behind the enterprise of
conquest was the desire "to find confirmation for the existence of themarvellous" as it had been imagined in the Middle Ages, together w ith acrusading drive deeply seated in the Spanish society of that period, and a crude
ambition for precious metals. The argum ent is particularly prom inent in a
num ber of studies concerned, specifically, with the role of popular culture—literary and otherwise— in moulding the personal attitude of early Spanish
conquerors, as well as the w ay in which they perceived and portrayed America.
Some of these works are global overviews or general discussions; therefore,
they draw evidence from the whole continent (Gandfa 1929, Leonard 1992
[1949], Rodriguez Prampolini 1948, H ernandez Sanchez Barba 1960, Pastor
Bodmer 1992). Others are rather monographic accounts, focused on particularareas or concrete journeys generally regarded as outstanding examples of thisphenomenon (Olschki 1941, Ham m ond 1956, Leonard 1944, Gil 1989b).
More im portant to m y study, however, is the fact that this alleged
capacity of European culture to encode and condition conquering practice hasturned common place in nearly every academic approach to the history ofcolonial America, no m atter the particular aspect under study.4 Even w hen
rarely discussed at length, it is often posed to explain the colonists' conquering
drive and, to a certain extent, the institutional support they received. Thus thesearch for European fantasies is frequently m entioned in passing, mainly
through brief allusions to the most spectacular instances in which thecompelling force of popular chimeras is supposedly well established. I will not
discuss every possible expression of this academic consensus, neither do I

4 This theoretical position stands in heavy contrast to parallel studies of colonialism
elsew here which assum e that such non-dialectical agendas are impossible to sustain (e.g.
Comaroff & Comaroff 1991 & 1997, Rafael 1993, Said 1993)

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intend to build a comprehensive sample for each and every region in thecontinent. I will refer only to the key role attributed to mediaeval imaginationsin the carving out of the northern provinces of N ew Spain, sometimes looking
at the wider context by w ay of comparison.
Two thematic sources are singled out by m odem scholarship asconstitutive of the m ental baggage of sixteenth century conquistadors.5 On the
one hand, a series of legends and fantastic stories resulting from the struggle
against the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula. On the other, a mixture ofreferences taken from the fictional romances of chivalry, and the rehabilitationof themes from the classical world. Fernando Ainsa has recently suggested(1992: 45-47 & 80-83) that Europeans saw the discovery of America as thefulfilment of the prophecy contained in Seneca's tragedy, Medea, which
predicted that one day the earth's limits would be transposed, this being thereason w hy so m any fantastic places and beings described in classical andmediaeval literature were expected to exist side by side in the New World.
The Fountain of Eternal Youth that led Juan Ponce de Leon and
Hernando de Soto to explore Florida betw een 1512 and 1539,6 for instance, canbe traced back to an episode of a Greek story told by Hom er that tells how
Medea used the w ater from a certain spring to rejuvenate Eson, father of the
Argonaut Jason. The them e was popularised in the fifteenth century throughthe writings of Sir John Mandeville, who claimed to have discovered the Fons
Juventutis near a remote city he called Polombe (Gandfa 1929: 49-56;
Weckmann 1951: 133; Olschki 1941; Ramos 1988: 399-400; Pastor Bodmer 1992:
106).
Similarly, Amazon related references found in colonial chronicles anddocuments associated with various journeys throughout the continent, from
5 The notion of mental baggage w as coined by Lucien Fevre to designate the body of concepts
and responses to the world that corresponds to each particular civilisation, which is notuniversally valid for all times and societies and does not necessarily change according tolinear progress (Chartier 1995: 18-19).
6The events are told by Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo (1959 [1535-1557]: book xv, ch. x i),
Antonio de Herrera (1945 [1615]), Garcilaso de la Vega (1982 [1605]), and Francisco Lopez
de G6mara 1941 [1552]: ch. civ).

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Colum bus in the Caribbean (1492-1494) through Hernan Cortes and N uno deG uzm an in N ew Spain (1521-1540) to Pedro de Valdivia in Chile (1539) andFrancisco de Orellana in the heart of South America (1541)7, also belong to along standing set of European traditions. Since antiquity, Greeks reported thata tribe of warlike wom en called Amazons existed in Asia Minor. They persisted
throughout the Middle Ages, always on the margins of the w orld know n to theEuropeans, in the writings of travellers like Mandeville, Marco Polo and Pedro
Tafur. At the beginning of the sixteenth century they were incorporated into a
couple of popular chivalry tales, Las Sergas de Esplendidn and Lisuarte de Grecia,
that provided the story after which the peninsula of California was nam ed(Davidson 1910; Putnam & Priestley 1917: 293; Leonard 1944: 562-564 & 1992
[1949]; Portillo y Diez de Sollano 1947: 121-128; Rodrfguez Prampolini 1948;
W eckmann 1951:132; Gil 1989a: 70-82; Pastor Bodmer 1992:153-168).
Finally, the island of Antilla that gave its nam e to the Caribbeanarchipelago appears in several fourteenth and early fifteenth century European
maps. It seems to have derived from Plato's tales on the Atlantis b ut it was later
fused w ith a legend according to which, around the year 734, w hen the M oors
entered Spain, seven Portuguese bishops fled w ith their people and sailed to an
island where each founded a city (Gandfa 1929: 9-17 & 59-61; Clissold 1961,
M ora 1992: 34-36).
Applied to the study of the area herein concerned, the "mediaevalist
hypothesis" has resulted in a general disregard for the fact that Spanish
conquerors saw in N ahuatl myths of ancestral origin the prom ise to accomplish
their ow n particular ambitions. The problem is not simply leaving a prim ary
source of pursuable illusions virtually unexplored. Excessive emphasis on
m ediaeval imaginations has obscured the importance of indigenous politico-

7 Most of th ese people wrote their own accounts of the events they steered , w hether in th eform of letters or as formal reports. Chroniclers and historians such a s Herrera andFernandez de Oviedo also wrote extensively on them. The only first-had account on the
expedition led by Orellana, however, was written by friar G aspar de Carvajal (Gil 1 9 8 9 b :1 5 1 -1 5 3 ).

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territorial interests —em beddedin those

N ahua traditions— forthedevelopm ent of the colonial enterprise at a regional level. It is true that the
Amazons and the Fountain of Eternal Youth were sought, respectively, during
the early exploration of California and Florida. It is also possible that, as Gandfa(1929: 63) and Pastor Bodmer (1992: 106-107) maintain, Spanish explorers w ho
w ent after the seven cities of Cibola that Marcos de Niza described, had thecities supposedly founded by the famous Portuguese bishops in mind.
Nevertheless, beyond Mexico to the N orth as I noted above, these motifs did
not provide a program m atic basis for the conquering enterprise because,
how ever repeated, they were often restricted each to a single line of
exploration, working at best as individualised obsessions even w hen they m ay
have occasionally triggered expeditionary action.
The same probably holds true at the continental level, at least for certain
them es regularly played upon during the first stage of the conquest, like the
Antilla or the Amazons that lost their cohering pow er quickly. Either they
faded aw ay or became localised under the influence of native traditions; or they
rem ained as ready m ade images at the back of individual consciousness, only
being brought back to life sporadically in a w ide variety of disjointed contexts.
The quest for El Dorado, a gold-rich civilisation sought betw een 1529 and1617 in the Colombian Amazonia and Guyana —first in the regions of
Guatavita and Cundinamarca, and then along the Amazon and Orinoco
rivers— exemplifies the displacement of European fantasies by local indigenous
traditions. It seems indeed that the Spanish belief in the existence of a goldenlake w here a local chieftain, El Dorado, covered his body every day with agolden film which he rem oved at night, derived from a 1527 second handreport on the ceremony preceding the investiture of each new cacique am ong
Chibcha Indians from the north-west of present-day Colombia. During thecerem ony —which had disappeared before the end of the fifteenth century
w ith the virtual extermination of its practitioners at the hands of Muysca

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Indians from Bogota— the cargo of a huge balsa raft laden with gold andemeralds was jettisoned in the centre of lake Guatavita to propitiate the spirits,
while the gold-dusted cacique bathed himself in its waters. Thus although it has
been noted that the legend of El Dorado m ay also be originally related to such
topics as the golden Quersoneso and the gold from Sudan (Bernard &Gruzinski 1996: 499), it was the native story of the Guilded Man w hat
Europeans became obsessed with.8 Similarly, the eventual consignment ofEuropean notions of Amazon-like w om en to the South American jungles, could
well be related to the presence of comparable stories am ong the Kalina and the
Xikrin Indians from Surinam and central Brazil, whose traditions, according tovarious authors, also spoke about aggressive whole-female tribes (Jara 1986;
Sued-Badillo 1986).
Having said this, I take the gradual disappearance of the Amazons from
New Spain by way of example. Then I turn to the them e of the Seven bishops
as it has been unanim ously (and mistakenly) considered the fundam ental bu t
concealed motivation behind the early exploration of present-day N ew Mexico.

5.4.- New Spain and the Amazons
In 1510 Garcirodrfguez de Montalvo published in Seville Las Sergas deEsplendian (deeds of Esplendian), a continuation of a popular Portugueseromance that he had translated and published under the title of Amadis de Gaula(Amadis from Gaul) two years before (Putnam & Priestley 1917: 294-295). The
novel was a typically mediaeval story, telling the adventures of the son of thegreat Amadis, both prototypical knights who devoted their lives to the fightfor Christendom and the defence of all sorts of honourable causes. Chapters
157 to 178 take place in an island called California, populated by a tribe of
Amazons ruled by Queen Calafia and celebrated for its abundance of gold and
8 Modern literature on El Dorado is abundant. For this brief account I only used the nowclassical monograph by Demetrio Ramos (1988 [1973]), and the studies by Hand (1976: 5 0 51), Gil (1989b), and Ainsa (1992: 121-125).

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jewels. The episodes narrate how the Queen, who had joined efforts w ith theking of Persia and the rest of the pagan princes to capture C o n sta n tin o p le,
w as defeated in personal combat by the superior skill of Am adis and thebeauty of Esplendian, who had travelled to California in response to her own
defiance (Leonard 1944: 564-565). The popularity that both novels achieved was
so enorm ous9that a num ber of subsequent romances carried the cycle throughsuccessive descendants of Amadis; only one of which, Lisuarte de Grecia (1514),
spoke about Queen Calafia again.
The existence of Amazons in the New W orld had been reported by
Colum bus nearly tw enty years before Montalvo wrote his novel, both in his
Epistola Insulis Nuper Inventis, and in a letter addressed to the m onarchs on
February-M arch 1493.10 Columbus mentions the island of M ateunin (orMartinio), supposedly populated only by wom en who had male, rather thanfemale occupations.11 Nevertheless, it was not through Columbus himself thatthe them e became so inextricably associated with mainland America, but
through the hyperbolic m anner in which Montalvo used the Admiral's exotic
reports to frame his book in the contemporary context, thus capitalising —as
Irving Leonard (1944: 565) convincingly suggests— "on a recently renew edinterest in an ancient legend":
Know ye that on the right hand of the Indies there is an Island called
California, very close to the earthly paradise, and inhabited by black women
without a single man among them, for they live almost in the manner of
Amazons [...] Their weapons are all of gold as well as the trappings of thewild beasts which they ride after taming, for there is no other metal on thewhole island, (quoted by Leonard 1944: 565)

9 New editions of Esplendian were m ade in Toledo (1521), Salam anca (1525), Burgos (1 5 2 6 ),and Seville (1526). Leonard (1944: 566-567) observes that theperiod coincides with theconquest of Mexico by Hern£n Cort6s and the first expeditions he sent to locate gold andsilver mines, som etim es giving further instructions about the verification of rum ours
concerning Amazons.
10 Partially reproduced by Lunenfeld (1991: 39,136).
11 As several authors have pointed out, his conviction to have arrived in Asia probably
predisposed Columbus to interpret things he saw and heard in this manner. His will to findconfirmation for the standard geographical knowledge of the period, embodied in tales ofprevious travellers like Marco Polo and in various trea tise s on cosm ography that he w as
familiar with, particularly Pierre D'Ailly's Imago Mundi, w as discussed in detail by S. E
Morison (1942) and E. O'Gorman (1984 [1958]). More recent asse ssm e n ts on the perceptions
and interpretations that Columbus and others gave to the American reality include Todorov(1984), Hulme (1986 & 1994), Greenblat (1991), and R abasa (1993).

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If Columbus' reports on Amazon-like natives were thus picked up in Europe
by Montalvo, and, some years later, by the first historian of the N ew W orld,Peter M artyr (Martir de Anglerfa 1964-1965: I, 408 & II, 631), they disappeared
from his own accounts after reaching the gulf of Paria, in Venezuela, during histhird voyage (Mason 1986: 57). Perhaps this was due to the unexpected
appearance of unequivocal signs suggesting the proximity of an enorm ous
m ass of land —that which today we know as South America; an event thatchallenged Columbus' Asiatic interpretation and m ade him consider the
possibility that he was actually near to the Terrestrial Paradise.
This is not the place to describe the process by which Columbus' Asiatic
theory was finally discarded. Note simply that once the identity of the lands hediscovered was established as an entirely New World, and from the m om ent aperm anent hold on the Caribbean islands was achieved at the turn of the
century, Amazons reappeared along the subsequent exploration of them ainland mass to the North, East and South. But contrary to the argum ent that
Irving Leonard developed and other authors have repeated ever since (e.g.
W eckmann 1951: 132, Pastor Bodmer 1992), their im portance as guidelines in
the area that w ould later become N ew Spain was rather secondary, while theiractual existence was more controversial than these authors m ake it appear.
The paradigmatic value that chivalrous literature acquired for Spanish
adventurers travelling to the N ew World is clearly attested in N ew Spain by
two well known incidents. First, the multi-quoted declaration of Bernal Diaz delCastillo stating that upon their arrival conquerors thought that the Valley of
Mexico was "like the enchantments they tell of in the book of Amadis" (Dfazdel Castillo 1982 [c. 1555]: 151).12 Second, the fact that the peninsula ofCalifornia derived its name from the story of Queen Calafia (Weckmann 1951:132) in a peculiar way.

12 Diaz del Castillo wrote his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espana around
1555 but it was not published until 1632.

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More than blind belief for the marvels of Amadis, Dfaz del Castillo's
statem ent indicates that the cycle provided conquerors w ith conceptual tools
for the assimilation of novelty; and, more importantly, that in bestow ing theirdescriptions w ith an exotic yet familiar imprint, it became an efficient means totransm it the sense of strangeness they experienced to other people w ho did notcross the Ocean. As Greenblat explains:
In the face of the undreamed, and consequently in a crisis of representation,
Bernal Diaz turns to the language of mediaeval romance, with its dream
images, its magical castles and temples, its rhetoric of amazement [...] Theabsolutely other cannot be conveyed at all, cannot perhaps be even perceived,
but the romance can at least gesture towards this other, marked with thesigns of fantasy, unreality, enchantment (Greenblat 1991: 132-133)
The problem here is indeed one of "representation". W hat the cycle of A m adis
provided w as neither programmatic goals nor objects of belief but m etaphors.
The

same can be applied to the chivalrous reference in the nam ing of

California, although in this case Montalvo's novel seems to have had a m ore
instrum ental value.
In his Fourth letter to the king (October 15,1524) H em an Cortes reported
that in the province of Cihuatlan one of his captains received news from local
caciques concerning a nearby island, rich in pearls and inhabited only by
wom en, whose practices he described in the same term s as classical sources
described those of Amazons:
And as part of his report concerning those provinces he brought news of avery good port they found in that coast [...] and he also brought me a reportfrom the lords of the province of Ceguatan, who are firmly convinced that
there is an island populated only by women, with no single man, and thatfrom time to time these women receive men from the mainland to haveintercourse, and those who result pregnant if they have girls they keep thembut if they have boys they send them away [...] They tell me as well that [theisland] is rich in pearls and gold: I will work, when I get the opportunity,
towards finding out the truth and I will make a lengthy report about it.13

13 “Y entre la relacion que de aquellas provincias hizo, trujo nueva de muy buen puerto que enaquella costa se habia hallado [...] y asimismo me trujo relacion de los senores de la provincia
de Ceguatan, que se afirman mucho haber alii una isla poblada toda de m ujeres sin varon
ninguno, y que cierto tiempo van de la tierra firme hombres, con los cuales han acceso, y lasque quedan prenadas, si paren m ujeres las guardan, y si hom bres los echan de su compama[...] Dicenme asimismo que e s muy rica de perlas y oro: yo trabajare, en teniendo aparejo, desab er la verdad y hacer dello larga relacidn a V.M.” (Cortes 1960: 184)

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As I pointed out in chapter four, Cortes prepared the m aritime exploration of
the western coast nearly as soon as his m en reached the Pacific Ocean, during
the conquest of Michoacan and Colima14 by Cristobal de Olid and Gonzalo de
Sandoval (1522-1523) from which this report derived (Davidson 1910: 28, Sauer
1948). His principal intentions were to locate the m outh of the Strait of Anian(or the Strait of the Bacallaos), a maritime passageway allegedly leading to the
Atlantic Ocean (Gil 1989a: 315-318), and to find suitable ports and routes fortranspacific navigation. We m ay assume that he also aimed to verify the story
concerning the "women-only-island" of native reports, which resonated with
Montalvo’s fabled island of California.
The circumstances attending the discovery and nam ing of the peninsula
we today know under this name have been the object of num erous studies.
Ever since Edward Eversett Hale proposed in 1862 that the source of the
toponym was Montalvo's novel Las Sergas de Esplendian the thesis has been re­formulated with different emphases. Most authors (Davidson 1910, Leonard
1944 & 1949, Rodriguez Prampolini 1948, Rfo 1990) maintain that conquerors
who dream t of Esplendian's and Amadis' adventures w ere misled to believethat the island of Santa Cruz, as Cortes and his m en called the peninsula fromMay 1536 on, was in fact the fantastic realm of queen Calafia. Nevertheless, a
few others like Putnam & Priestley (1917: 293-313, 351-354) and Portillo y Diezde Sollano (1947: 111, 119) argue that, despite the substantial evidence
indicating that conquerors were indeed familiar with the novel and applied thelegendary name to the peninsula, there is no convincing basis for the thesis thatthey believed it to be such a place.15 Let us then quickly review the facts.
In June 1523 Cortes obtained a royal perm it to carry out his navigation
program m e along the Pacific coast. In 1525 he was even instructed to send
14 In pre-conquest tim es Colima was split into different political units. One of them occupied
the broad valley of Cihuatlan and apparently had an urban character and excelled in the qualityof its weaving, cotton being one of the most important crops (S auer 1948).
15 Both Portillo y Diez de Sollano (1947:130) and Putnam & Priestley (1917: 3 5 3 -3 5 4 )considered it much likelier that the name derived from a m isheard native word in one of th e
several languages spoken locally that may have sounded similar to the one the novelist used.

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some ships to the Moluccas, but the Crown soon opposed to his maritim e
activities as the expedition he entrusted to the command of Alvaro de Saavedra
failed to reach the islands. Four years later, however, after negotiating
personally w ith the monarchs, Cortes signed a capitulacion (October 1529) todiscover the islands of the Mar del Sur. Between 1532 and 1539 he organised
five expeditions, the second of which, led by Diego de Becerra and H ernando
de Grijalva in 1533, confirmed of the existence of a large, pearl-rich island—which later turned out to be a peninsula— near the coast of Cihuatlan. In
1535, excited by this discovery, Cortes led a third expedition himself, but the"island" resulted bare and almost deserted. Consequently his projects to explore
the peninsular shoreline dwindled out with the fifth expedition he organised,
this tim e led by Francisco de Ulloa between 1539 and 1540 (Portillo y Diez deSollano 1947:141-152, Rfo 1990).
Although it is impossible to determine the precise date w hen people
began to call this land mass California, the report by Francisco Preciado on
Ulloa's voyage already used the name as customary (Rio 1990: 17-19).
According to Portillo y Diez de Sollano (1947: 114-119), however, this evidence
is unreliable because the original document is lost and the only version that weknow today is the Italian translation published by Ramusio in the decade of1550.16 Thus the first unequivocally docum ented use of the name for the
peninsula corresponds to Juan Paez' 1542 Relacion regarding Juan Rodriguez
Cabrillo's maritime voyage. Other than Preciado's report, the only testimonialaccount we have on Ulloa's expedition was written by Pedro de Palencia, w ho
consistently uses the name Santa Cruz instead of California. Therefore Portillo
believes that Preciado's Italian translator substituted the docum ent's original
designation of Santa Cruz for California, in order to m ake clear a reference to aplace that had already changed its name by the tim e he was making thetranslation.
16 Delle Navigatione e Viaggi, Venice: 1550-1556.

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The fact is that neither Cortes nor anyone in his service ever used thenam e California, and apparently they did not use the term Amazons either.
This suggests that even when the Spaniards eventually adopted the story of
Esplendian as a means to identify the female-populated, pearl-rich island ofindigenous reports, they did not plan their w estw ard maritim e adventures tosearch for queen Calafia and her Amazons. On the contrary, they took over the
toponym only after they discarded the native reference as a legend. Like Dfazdel Castillo did with the book of Amadis, they used the reference in am etaphorical sense because the island it was m eant to identify stood on theright hand side of New Spain, just as fabled California stood "on the right handof the Indies."
W omen living without m en appear in docum ents concerning the
exploration and conquest of Nueva Espaha at a very early date. The report that
Juan Dfaz wrote on Juan de Grijalva’s expedition (1517) along the shorelinefrom Yucatan to the N orth contains the first of such references.17 The trip it
describes was the second ever along that coast, the first having been led by
Francisco H ernandez de Cordoba one year earlier. Dfaz' report was publishedbetw een 1520 and 1522 in Italian, Latin and German. Although an extensive
sum m ary of the text is contained in Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's Historia
General y Natural de las Indias (1959 [c. 1535-1552]:),18 the original manuscript islost and all the Spanish versions we have today are translations from the 1520
and 1522 Italian editions. Amazons only appear once at the beginning of D iaz'
report, w hen the arm y "found a tower on a tip of the land that is said to be
inhabited by wom en who live without men". The Italian version says
imm ediately that "we believe they shall be from the stock of the Amazons,"19

17 Itinerario de la armada del Bey catolico a la isla de Yucatan, en la India, en el ano 1518, enla que fue por comandante y capitan general Juan de Grijalva (in Vazquez 1988: 37-57).
18 The first part was published in Seville in 1535 and book XX of the second part in 1552. The
complete m anuscript was only published in 1851.
19 "Y anduvimos por la costa, donde encontramos una muy herm osa torre en una punta, que se
dice estar habitada por mujeres que viven sin hombres, creese que ser£n de la estirpe de las
Amazonas" (Juan Diaz Itinerario de la armada... In Vazquez 1988: 42).

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but this seems to be an addition by the translator because Oviedo, who follows
the original closely, does not include a similar comment (Vazquez 1988:42n).
Three documents related to Hern&n Cortes' performance m ust also be
broached. First, the instructions that he received from governor Diego
Velazquez before leaving Cuba (October 23, 1518),20 which are m ostly
dedicated to military and administrative issues aimed at establishing the rules
to be followed by all during the journey but also contain items outlining the
expedition's m ain goals. The most im portant among these are the following: A)
to search for Juan de Grijalva and Cristobal de Olid w ho had sailed to explore
Yucatan earlier that year and had not yet returned; B) to inquire about —and
rescue if possible— six Spaniards from a lost ship that, according to the Indian
Melchor captured in 1517 by Hernandez de Cordoba, had been m ade prisoners
by local caciques several years back; C) to gather general information andobtain gold samples via barter exchange (Martinez 1990-1992: I, 47-48 & 53-54).
The brief and only reference to Amazons in the entire docum ent is in fact partof a passage of no more than ten lines altogether. It requests the verification ofvarious fantastic rum ours spread by Melchor and another Yucateco Indian that
Cortes was taking along in his army:[In every island you visit] you will try to find of an informant who will give
you news about other islands and other places, as well as the nature andcustoms of their inhabitants; and also why does people say that there arepeople with large and wide ears, and others with dog-like faces, and you will
also inquire where and in what direction are the Amazons, who dwell nearby
according to the Indians that you are taking along.”21
Another occasion w hen Amazons are associated with Hernan Cortes derives
from indigenous reports, quoted above, concerning a women-only-tribe that
Gonzalo de Sandoval (or someone in his service) gathered in the province ofCihuatlan. As we saw before, Cortes included a brief account of the incident in
20 Instrucciones de Diego Velazquez a Hernan Cortes, Isla Fernandina, October 23, 1 5 1 8(M artinez 1990-1992: I, 47-56).
21 "tratareis de haber lengua de quien os podais informar de otras islas e tierras y de lam anera y nulidad de la gente della; y porque diz que ay gente de orejas grandes y anchas, yotras que tienen las caras como perros, y ansimismo donde y a que parte estan las am azonas,
que dicen estos indios que con vos llevas, que estan cerca de all \" (Martinez 1990-1992: I,
5 6 ).

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his Fourth Letter to the King, promising that he w ould try to find out as m uch as
he could about those women. Therefore, w hen he sent Francisco Cortes tofurther explore that region his instructions required him to ascertain the truthof such rum our.22 Among the documents produced in connection w ith thisparticular undertaking, there is a coat of arms that the Queen granted to acertain Jeronimo Lopez (June 26,1530) for feats perform ed "while searching for
the Amazons in the said journey."23
Cihuatlan and thestories

about

women-only-tribes

thatnativeinhabitants disclosed to their European invaders continued to attract theattention of Spanish soldiers during the conquest of Nueva Galicia by N uno deGuzman, a circumstance that scholars commonly use as evidence to prove thepiloting functions fulfilled by Amazon beliefs in N ew Spain.
It is certainly true that in a report he sent to the king from Omitlan, dated
on 8 July 1530, Guzm an asserted that after reaching the province of Astatlan hew ould "go in search of the Amazons, whom they say are ten days away," living
either in the sea or an arm of the sea, and w hom they also say "to be rich andfeared by the m ainland inhabitants as if goddesses".24 It is also true that various
m en in his army confirm that they also pursued this goal after having received
similar reports once in Astatlan.
The First Anonymous Relacion on the conquest of Nueva Galicia, w ritten by aparticipating soldier says, for instance, that in Astatlan the army received plenty
news about the Amazons, called Ciguatan in the native language,25 as well asother news concerning m any neighbouring provinces rich in gold. According
22 The instructions that Francisco Cortes received for this expedition are reproduced in
CODOINAO: XXVI, 153)
23“... en dem anda de las am azonas en la dicha en tra d a” (Sauer 1948: 20, Leonard 1 9 4 4 :578). The docum ent is reproduced in Paso y Troncoso (1905: II,).
24 "Ire a la provincia de Astatlan, que dicen que es cosa muy grande [...] y de alii, m ediante su
gracia, ir§ en busca de las am azonas que me dicen estan diez jornadas; unos dizen que havitan
dentro de la mar, y otros que estan en una parte de un brazo de mar y que son ricas y tem idas
de los havitantes de la tierra, por dioses [...] Traen arcos y flechas y rodelas, com unicanse
cierto tiem po del ano con los vecinos, y lo que nace, si e s baron, dicen que lo matan" (Razo
Zaragoza 1963: 58, also quoted by Leonard 1944: 578, and Weckmann 1951: 132).
25 Cihuatlan is a Nahuatl word meaning indeed "place of women" (Federico N avarrete, verbal
communication). We do not know however what exactly did the reference to a place of womensignified.

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to this account m any the women from Ciguatan, who were very different fromany other they saw before, were taken as prisoners "and later it was know nthrough the interpreters that [they] said to have come [to that land] by sea,
having kept such an order in ancient times that they had no husbands [...] but,from time to time, m en from the vicinity entered with them and those w hobore sons buried them alive while they kept and brought up their daughters,
though in recent times they stopped killing the boys" (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 300,
303-304).26 Also Gonzalo Lopez declares that from Tepic he was sent "to search
for the women" (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 93-94), and Juan de Samano confirmsthat the entire arm y w ent from Astatlan to the province of the Amazons, which
he describes as a tow n "where plenty of w om en and very few m en w ere
found" (Razo Zaragoza 1963:145).27
W hether Amazons could actually be found in Cihuatlan was always acontroversial issue. Pedro Carranza, for example, noted that although somesoldiers believed that Cihuatlan (Capuatan) was a women-only tow n because
m any m ore wom en than m en were found, this could not really be confirmed
because the Spaniards did not have an interpreter.28 Cristobal Flores m ade asimilar rem ark but he denied categorically that those wom en were Amazons,
asserting instead that they were ordinary women. If the arm y found so few
m en am ong them it was because, at the time, they were preparing themselvesto confront the Spaniards in war.29 Finally, Fernandez de Oviedo, w ho heard
the story from a certain Francisco Arceo, observed that this was the same tow n

26 “D espues por las lenguas se supo que estas m ujeres decian haber venido por la mar, yantiguam ente guardar entre si tal orden que no tenlan maridos [...] m as antes de cierto tiem poen cierto tiempo venlan los com arcanos a entrar con ellas, y las que prenadas quedaban yparlan hijos los enterraban vivos, y las hijas criaban, y que de poco tiempo a esta parte nom ataban los ninos..."27 "hablan hallado en 61 mucha copia de mujeres y muy pocos hombres." There is anothersimilar reference in the Second Anonymous Relacion (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 321-322).
28 “y alii en Capuatan, se hallo cuando fue el m aestre de campo, mas m ujeres que hom bres,
por donde se tuvo que era pueblo de m ujeres, como se decla, y no se averiguo porque nollevaba lengua que los entendiese” (Pedro Carranza's Relacion, in Razo Zaragoza 1963: 173).
29 “En este pueblo y en otros que se corrieron al derredor no se hallo sino m ujeres, y muy
poco o casi ningund varon, y por esto se presumid m as ser las m ujeres de que se tra ia
noticia; y la cabsa porque no se hallaron varones entre ellas, era porque se andaban
acabdillando los varones para nos dar guerra en cierto cabo” (Cristobal Flores' Relacion, inRazo Z aragoza 1963: 202).

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of w om en that a captain in the service of H ernando Cortes —either Sandoval
or Francisco Cortes— had found long before, which also bore the nam e
Ciguatan. Then, following the testimony by Gonzalo Lopez, Oviedo declaredthat the place was a well established tow n with good buildings and streets,
where a great num ber of women, dressed in white, long shirts said to live on
their ow n and to bring m en only a few m onths every year. Nevertheless, heconcluded, "I later found Guzman in Spain and he said it is not true that they
are Amazons or that they live without men" (Razo Zaragoza 1963: 265-267).
From this brief review we may conclude that even w hen Amazon-likewom en and the supposedly rich island they inhabited were indeed sought andsuspected to exist during the conquest of New Spain, the interest was short
lived and volatile. Furthermore, despite the peninsula of California being
nam ed after Montalvo's re-working of the classical theme, and notw ithstanding
the coat of arm s granted on the basis of their supposed search, references totheir existence not only faded away completely after N uho de Guzman, they
were in fact never posed as the m ain goal pursued by any given expedition. On
the other hand, it is im portant to insist that, like in South America, it was a local
indigenous belief —that of the Cihuatlan wom en— rather than the European
stories which m ade conquerors so interested in the them e of an "all female
tribe."

5.5.- The island of Antilla and its seven bishops.
Throughout the twentieth century many historians have considered that just as
the Amazons configured the early exploration of California, the mediaeval
legend of the seven w ondrous cities founded by Christian fugitives across the
Ocean after escaping from the Moor invasion of the Iberian peninsula,configured Vazquez de Coronado's and subsequent journeys into the area thatlater became Nuevo Mexico. Standard academic views propose that the
Spaniards who explored and conquered the northern part of America w ere

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moved to engage in the enterprise because, among other things, they expected
to find these cities. The argum ent is as follows:
Long before Columbus arrived in America, several Europeans had tried
to reach the unknow n island nam ed Antilla that figured in the cartography ofthe period; it was sometimes identified as the place where the fugitive bishops
settled down. W hen the Caribbean islands —initially expected to include
Antilla— proved to house no Christian peoples, Spanish conquerors w ere
ready to seek for the Seven Cities elsewhere. And after Cabeza de Vaca andMarcos de Niza spoke about wealthy cities to the north of N ew Spain they
were even prepared, after all, to accept they might be located on mainland, notnecessarily on an island (e.g. Gandfa 1929, Sauer 1932, Hodge 1937, Jimenez
Moreno 1958: 49, Clissold 1961, Beck 1969, Petersen 1980, Pastor Bodmer 1992:
105, Mora 1992: 34, Bernard & Gruzinski 1999: 346).
Scholars often quote the official chronicler of the Indies, Antonio de
Herrera (1945 [1615]: I, 204) to support this theory of delusion:Ancient navigation charts depicted some islands amidst the seas, specially an
island called Antilla, which they located nearly two hundred leagues west of
the Canary islands and the Azores. This island the Portuguese thought to be
the island of the Seven Cities, so famous and craved after that many greedy
people has been led into delusion, spending [in the attempt to find it] a lot ofmoney without any profit. Thus dreaming, the Portuguese say that thisisland of the Seven Cities was populated by fellow countrymen, in the time
when Spain was lost, under the reign of King Don Rodrigo; when fleeing
from that [Muslim] persecution, seven Portuguese bishops embarked withplenty of people and arrived in the said island of Antilla, where each foundeda town. Then, in order to prevent people from turning back they set the boats
afire. [The Portuguese also say] that in times of Infante Don Enrique dePortugal, a ship that had sailed from Portugal was caught in a storm and did
not stop until reaching that island. People living there took the sailors to thechurch to find out whether they were Christians and performed the Roman
ceremonies; and when they learnt they did, they pleaded them to stay [...] but
the sailors were afraid to have their vessels burnt and be retained, so they left
for Portugal very happy [...] and never returned to that kingdom once they
had left.
30 "En las cartas de m arear antiguas, se pintaban algunas islas en quellos m are s,
especialm ente la isla que decian de Antilla, y la ponian poco m as de doscientas leguas alponiente de las islas de Canaria, y de las azores, la cual estim aban los portugueses, que era laisla de las Siete Ciudades, cuya fama y apetito ha hecho a muchos, por codicia, desvariar, ygastar m uchos dineros, sin provecho. Y segun s e sueha, dicen los portugueses que e sta isla delas siete ciudades fue poblada de ellos, al tiempo que se perdio Espana, reinando el rei Don
Rodrigo; porque huyendo de aquella persecusion, se embarcaron siete obispos, y mucha gente,y aportaron en aquella isla, adonde cada uno hizo su pueblo; y porque la gente no pasase a
tornar, pusieron fuego a los navios; y que en tiempo del Infante don Enrique de Portugal, con

Judging from various documents it seems unquestionable that during theearliest phase of exploration in America several people, on both sides of theAtlantic, thought of this legend, popularised in Castile by a chivalrous novel
titled Cronica del Rey Don Rodrigo y la destruccion de Espana (Phelan 1970 [1956]:
70). Friar Bartolome de las Casas asserts, for instance, that according toColum bus a Portuguese vessel arrived in 1460 at the island of Antilla and wasreceived by Christian people (Historia de las Indias, Book I, chap. XIII31). The
Admiral's son, Ferdinand Columbus, also mentions the story in his father'sbiography (Historia del Almirante Cristobal Colon, quoted by Gandfa 1929: 17);
while Francisco Lopez de Gomara claims in his Hispania Victrix (Saragosa 1553)
that Colum bus had tried to locate the Antilla (Gandfa 1929: 17). In fact it is his
Historia de las Indias (1552) that gives the clearest indication that, in the years
immediately succeeding the first contacts with would-be N ew Spain, somepeople did believe they were near the Island of the Seven Bishops. H e declares,
despite his ow n scepticism, that certain soldiers considered the brass crosses
H ernandez de Cordoba had found in Yucatan as evidence to the fact that m any
Spaniards had been there "during the destruction of Spain by the Moors in thetime of king Don Rodrigo" (quoted in W agner 1942: 42). Furtherm ore, w hen
governor Velazquez sent H ernan Cortes to follow the shoreline of Yucatan, hem ay have been expecting to confirm the legend, as the twelfth item of his
instructions requested the captain to find out the m eaning that indigenous
people gave to the symbol of the cross:
In the said island of Santa Cruz on top of certain tombs and burials manycrosses have been found; and since it is said that natives revere them you willinquire why they have them and whether it is because they have heard fromGod Our Lord before.’’32
tormenta, corrio un navio que habia salido de Portugal, y no par6 hasta dar en ella, y los de laisla llevaron a la gente del navio a la iglesia, por ver si eran christianos y hacian las
cerem onias romanas; y visto que lo eran les rogaron que estuviesen alii, hasta que viniese su
Senor, pero los marineros temiendo que les quem asen el navio, y los detuviesen, se volvierona Portugal muy alegres [...] y salidos del reino nunca m as volvieron."
31 Written between 1527 and 1566, this chronicle w as first published only until 1875-1876.
32 “Porque en la dicha isla de Sanata Cruz se ha fallado en m uchas partes della e encima deciertas sepulturas y enterram ientos, cruces, las cuales diz que tienen entre si en mucha
veneracidn, trabajareis de inquirir [...] la significacion de porque las tienen, y si las tienen
porque hayan tenido noticia de Dio Nuestro Sehor” (Martinez 1990-1992: I, 51-52).

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After Cortes established the Spanish domination over the form er Aztec
Empire, however, individuals exploring the N orth do not seem to have been
particularly interested in the Seven Bishops. Nothing in H errera's allusion of
the m oney w asted because of this fantasy indicates that he was referring to
explorations by Vazquez de Coronado or other conquerors in the area. It
rather refers to maritime expeditions contemporaneous, or prior to, Columbus.
The same holds true for a paragraph by Mendieta cited by Phelan (1970 [1956]:
69-71) to support the assertion that the Antilla was actively sought in the N ew
World:
I could rule with little help [...] a province of fifty thousand Indiansorganised and arranged in such good Christianity that it seemed as if thewhole province were a monastery. And it was just like the island of Antilla of
the Ancients [...] which is located not far from Madeira. In our times it has
been seen from afar, but it disappears upon approaching it [...] They saythat on this island there are seven cities with a bishop residing in each one
and an archbishop in the principal city. The strange thing is that it seems to
the author of the history of the Gothic kings {Historia del Rey Don
Rodrigo...) [...] that our Lord would be served by having this island
discovered and placing it under the obedience and bosom of the Catholic
Church. It would be equally appropriate to ask of our Lord that the Indians
be organised and distributed in islands like those of Antilla; for they thenwould live virtuously and peacefully serving God, as in a terrestrial paradise.
Fifteenth century efforts to locate the island of the Seven Cities are indeed well
documented. In a letter addressed to the Monarchs dated July 25, 1498, therepresentative of Spain in London, Pedro de Ayala, reported that up to fourships seeking to find the islands of Brasil and the Seven Cities had set sail every
year betw een 1491 and 1498, sponsored by the inhabitants of Bristol (Gandfa
1929:14, 61). We also know that Juan II King of Portugal granted several chartsand licenses to private petitioners with he same purpose. In 1474 and 1475
Fernao Tellez, for instance, received rights over any populated and cultivatedland he m ight find while exploring the so called "Isla de las Flores", previously
discovered by Diego de Tieve, including that of the Seven Cities but excluding
those in the seas of Guinea (Gandfa 1929: 11-12). The m ost famous expeditionof this sort, launched by the Portuguese king was to be led by Fem an Duolmo,
under a license issued in 1485. We ignore w hether he actually m ade the192journey, but documents containing details of its preparation testify that
resources w ere indeed invested in the enterprise (Pastor Bodmer 1992: 107;
Mora 1992: 35). Finally, one year later the same m onarch commissioned
navigators van Olmen and Juan Alfonso del Estreito to find out w hether theisland of the Seven Cities was the same as that of Antilla (Mora 1992: 35).
It has been said that mediaeval beliefs in the existence of w ondrous
islands deep in the Ocean —which according to L. W eckmann (1976: 203) w ere
not exclusive or novel to Columbus— derived from the story about the lost
continent of Atlantis that Plato registered around the year 360 B.C. (Mora 1992:
34). In his dialogues Timaeus and Critias the philosopher described Atlantis as
the seat of an advanced civilisation, ruled by descendants of Poseidon and amortal wom an, that having lived for generations a simple and virtuous life,
became deeply corrupted by greed and power. As a punishm ent the continent
disappeared swallowed by the sea, leaving no trace except for an impassablebarrier of m ud and a num ber of unreachable islands. Such ideas about the
Ocean imperviousness tumbled down as new geographical inform ation
spawned from incipient, extra-M editerranean navigation in the late Middle
Ages. Nevertheless, map-makers recording the knowledge thus generated, still
depicted rem inders of the lost continent amidst the Ocean. The im aginaryisland that bore the name of Antilla, first represented in the m ap of Pizigani(1367), could have been related to the Atlantic legend. In the fifteenth century it
appeared again in the Portulano (1424), and was later included in the m aps ofthe following cartographers: Bedario (or Bedrazio 1434/1435), A ndrea Bianco(1436), Fra M auro (1460), Bartolome Pareto (1475), Gracioso Benicasa (orBenacaza, 1463/1476?); Ortelius, Mercator, and Toscanelli (1484) (Gandfa 1929:
9; Junquera 1989:14; Mora 1992: 34).
Cartographic representations of Antilla and the story of the Seven
Bishops escaping by sea from the Moors fused into a single legend tow ards theend of the fifteenth century , its credibility enhanced, as we have seen, by the193alleged existence of fairly recent testimonial accounts. The oldest existing
docum ent containing a complete, explicit association of both legends, theMappaemundi of Martin Behaim, was drafted in 1492 with information "all taken
very carefully from the books of Ptolemy, Pliny, Strabo and Marco Polo," fromthe reports of Sir John Mandeville on certain countries that "Ptolemy ignored,"and from reports on the most "recent discoveries m ade by order of King Juanof Portugal in the year 1485."33 Accompanying an island in the w estern extrem eof the Ocean, Behaim wrote an inscription that m ight be the source of thepassage by H errera quoted above:
In the year 734 after our lord Jesus Christ was bom, when all Spain was
subjugated by the heathens that came from Africa, the said island Antillacalled Septe Citade was populated by an Archbishop of Porto, in Portugal,
and other six bishops, with a number of Christians, men and women, who
had left running away from Spain with their livestock and goods. In 1414
the ship that approached it most closely was a Spanish vessel.34
According to Enrique de Gandfa (1929: 60) we can trace this identification to them ap of Benicasa, which records seven names beside the island of Antilla —Ana,
Antioul, Anselli, Anseto, Ansolli, Ansoldi, and Cori— that m ight correspond tothe cities of the Seven Bishops.
Historians have seen the search for the Seven Cities of Cibola, firstreported by Marcos de Niza and quickly adopted as a prim ary goal for
exploration, as the transposition, on the part of the Spaniards, of the
expectations they had built around the them e of the Seven Bishops.
Furtherm ore, some even claim that a vague resemblance betw een this m otif
and the N ahua m yth of origin in Chicomoztoc (The Seven Caves) set off a
pow erful fantasy that repeatedly prom oted expeditionary action. The problem
is that, except for the numerical coincidence, no sound evidence to support theargum ent is ever provided.
33 Behaim (also known a s Martin Bohaemus), w as a m em ber of the board constituted by thePortuguese King Juan II to develop the art of navigation. This information is provided in thenotes written on the globe itself, presently kept in Nuremberg (Gandia 1929: 18).
34 "El ano de 734 despues del nacimiento de Nuestro Sehor Jesucristo, en que toda la Espana
se sujeto a los paganos que vinieron de Africa, dicha isla Antilla llamada Septe Citade, fue
habitada por un Arzobispo de Porto en Portugal, y otros seis Obispos, con un numero deC hristianos, hom bres y m ujeres, que habian pasado huyendo de Espana con su s ganados ybienes. En 1414 el que m as se arrimd fue un navio espanol" (Gandia 1929: 59-60).

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The association between the cities of the "Seven Portuguese Bishops" andthe Antilla was such a widespread cultural them e in late mediaeval Europe thatit frequently found textual articulation, as the previous review clearly shows. If
the them e had been as significant in northern New Spain as it was for early
Atlantic navigation, or for the initial exploration of the Caribbean, textual tracesin the sources would be available in a comparable way. Thus the hypothesis
about the particular phenom enon of delusion supposedly transpiring in thequest for Nuevo Mexico is merely the result of academic speculation and cannot
be m aintained in the face of the evidence.
A brief examination of academic literature on New Mexico's colonial
history will show that the argum ent, formulated in 1929 by Enrique de Gandfa,
has been uncritically repeated ever since to sustain the assertion that Spanish
conceptualising strategies subsumed everything American into ready m ade
images brought from Europe.
Gandfa analysed the m ain legendary themes registered in chronicles andother contem porary accounts concerning the N ew World in a well docum ented
historical survey. He traced each motif to an ultimate European source, basedon the premise that Europeans in the Middle Ages attributed particular value tothe authority of Greek and Latin wise men, whose cosmographic ideas codified
the Orientalist obsessions prevalent at the time America was discovered. In
some instances he also noted the influence of Native American beliefs. Thus hefound three original inspirations capable of inducing the legend of the Seven
Cities of Cfbola: First, the legend of the seven bishops fled from Portugal;
second, the N ahua m yth of origin in Chicomoztoc (Seven Caves); and third, theappearance of the Pueblo villages seen from afar by Marcos de Niza (Gandfa
1929: 62-63, 68). He believed that since the N ahua m yth of origin described
wealthy lands in the vicinity of Chicomoztoc, a place supposedly located in thesame direction w here the seven cities that Niza reported also stood, theSpaniards were soon convinced that the Seven Caves of the N ahua ancestors

195

and the Seven Cities of the Portuguese Bishops were the same place that Niza
had actually seen.
To support the first point of his argum ent, Gandia quotes H errera’s
passage concerning the story of the Seven Bishops and m entions some of them aps depicting the Antilla or the Island of the Seven Cities, both prior toColumbus' first voyage and after.35 The maritime expeditions launched by the
inhabitants of Bristol and the Portuguese crown in the fifteenth century also
appear as crucial evidence in his analysis. Nevertheless, this only proves thelegend was relevant before the Spanish accession to the Aztec em pire's
heartland; that is, during the Caribbean phase of conquest but not afterwards.
As for his second and third points, Gandfa quotes, first, Geronimo de
M endieta's assertion (1997 [1596]: 59-60 & 394-395) that Niza's journey was
aimed at verifying rum ours that Franciscan friars had gathered in 1538
concerning a populous land where people were dressed and had multi-storiedhouses. Then he brings up an incident from Vazquez de C oronado's
subsequent expedition, told by Lopez de Gomara. According to this author, atthe village of Tiguex the expeditionaries heard tell of the country of Quivira,ruled by a king called Tatarrat, bearded, white headed and rich, w ho prayed in
the prescribed hours and worshipped a golden cross and the image of a
wom an.
Gom ara's fragm ent indeed testifies to the fact that Spanish conquerors
believed there were Christians living beyond Cfbola. However, none of thereports w ritten throughout or shortly after the expedition m entions kingTatarrat or the worship of a cross or woman, although they all m ention thehigh expectations the news of the rich country of Quivira raised.36 The only
35 After the discovery of America, the Antilla appeared in the mappaemundi by Jan Ruysch(1508) and in the globe by Schoner (1523) (Gandia 1929: 9).
361 refer to the following documents: A letter from Vazquez de Coronado to the king dated a t
Tiguex on October 20, 1541; Relacidn del suceso de la jornada que Francisco Vazquez hizo en
el descubrimiento de Cibola (1541); Traslado de las nuevas y noticias que dieron sobre el
descubrimiento de una cibdad, que llamaron de Cibola, situada en la tierra nueva (1 5 4 1 ); andRelacidn postrera de Slvola (1541). The sam e goes for the complete account of the jo u rn eythat Pedro C astaneda Ncijera, a participating soldier, wrote between 1560 and 1565 under
the title of Relacidn de la jornada de Cibola. All reproduced by Mora (1992).

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docum ent by a participant that suggests the Spaniards expected to findChristians in the area is the Relacidn by Captain Juan Jaramillo. He states thatw hen the arm y reached the immediacy of "Harache and Quibira," Vazquez deCoronado wrote a letter "to the governor," w hom "we thought was a Christian
from the armies lost in Florida as we were led to believe by the w ay in which
the Indian [guiding us] described his governmental order and civility."37
We cannot affirm, of course, that Gomara did not use testimonies, oral or
written, containing news about Tatarrat and his praying habits, but the incident
that Gandfa interpreted in his particular way seems to have had a different
m eaning for the Spanish soldiers involved. Rather than thinking they w ere
near the cities founded by the Portuguese Bishops, Vazquez de C oronado andhis m en were certain —attending to Jaramillo’s comment— that the country
their Indian informant described, rich in gold and silver and ruled by a refinedand powerful king (Castaneda Najera 1992 [1596]: 88; Vazquez de C oronado(1541, in M ora 1992: 173-174), had already been discovered by Spaniards w hom ay have survived one of the disastrous attem pts to conquer Florida thatpreceded their journey: Juan Ponce de Leon in 1521, Lucas Vazquez de Aylldn
in 1526, and Panfilo de Narvaez in 1528. W hat Jaramillo's testim ony indicates isthat in the eyes of the Spanish soldiers the lifestyle of Tatarrat w as that of a
Christian. Reason why they concluded that he was a surviving conqueror w ho
had m anaged to integrate into the native society and become a local ruler,
instead of attem pting a return to the Spanish world. After all a similar incident
had already occurred in Yucatan. Gonzalo Guerrero survived a shipwreck in
1511 and was a slave among the Mayas, but in 1519 he rejected Cortes' offer tobe rescued because he had m arried a daughter of the lord of Chactemal, from37 "y escribib aquf una carta el general para el gobernador de Harache y Quibira, teniendoentendido que era cristiano de las arm as de la Florida, perdidas, porque la m anera delgobierno y policia que el indio habia dicho que tenia, nos lo habia hecho creer" ( Relacidn que
dio el capitdn Juan Jaramillo de la jornada que hizo a la tierra nueva, de la que fue general
Francisco Vdzquez de Coronado (1541, in Mora 1992: 194).

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w hom he begot three children, and he held a position as military advisor to hisfather in law (Thomas 1993:164).
Gandia was not the first to suggest an association betw een Cfbola andthe Seven Bishops. Other scholars preceded him, such as Adolph F. Bandelier(1890), E. G. Bourne (1904), Frederick W. Hodge & T. Lewis (1907), and H erbert
E. Bolton (1916), yet his contribution was to furnish the argum ent w ith a proper
follow-up of the sources. He linked the legend with late mediaeval navigationand early American exploration and, w hat is more im portant, asserted that theSeven Bishops were primarily sought in New Mexico because the Indian m ythof Chicomoztoc w orked as a confirmation, to which Marcos de Niza's
description of Cibola was later added.38
M any works devoted to the Spanish exploration of the Greater
Southwest w ritten in subsequent years continued to maintain that soldiers
found in the legend of the Seven Bishops one of their m ain inspirations (Bolton
1949, H organ 1963: 151-160, W agner 1934, W eckmann 1951: 133, H am m ond
1956: 5-7). M oreover, shortly after Gandfa published his book, Robert Ricard
developed the thesis further in two articles aimed at dem onstrating that, in fact,
the mediaeval legend found its w ay into the conqueror's im agery through theblack slave that Niza took along as guide (Ricard 1929 & 1936). He argued thatbeing himself a Moor from the Arab city of Azamor, occupied by thePortuguese between 1513 and 1542, Estevanico was acquainted w ith the legend,
though he was not the only possible vehicle since Portuguese influences in N ew
Spain are well documented.
More recently several authors (Chavez 1968:11-12; Udall 1987: 64; W eber1987 & 1992: 24) have elaborated on the idea that north-w estw ard colonial
penetration was carried out by gold thirsty Spaniards, w ho seized upon the oldm yth of the Seven Cities. On its part, Fernando Ainsa has recently (1992: 161166) established a link between the Seven Cities of Cfbola and the City of the
38 A hint of this hypothesis had been posed by Bandelier (1890: 6ss) but not strongly argued.

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Cesars (Ciudad de los Cesares), derived from the legend of Prester John w ho
supposedly founded a Christian enclave beyond the barrier of Islam. Someeven consider, following Gandfa, that a mixture of the legend of the Seven
Bishops, information by Cabeza de Vaca and Marcos de Niza about the Seven
Cities of Cfbola, and the Aztec m yth of origin in Seven Caves, was the basis forthe belief in the Great N orth riches that eventually came to conform the idea of
Nuevo Mexico (Clissold 1961: 75-76; Junquera 1989: 14; Cutter 1992: 14-15; Mora
1992: 34-36; Pastor Bodmer 1992:106-109).
If one takes the trouble to compare the list of sources these authors use
to sustain their argum ent one realises that they are ultimately basing
themselves on Gandfa, directly or indirectly, or the earlier scholars who laid thefoundations for the history of the N orth American Southwest (Bandelier,
Bolton, Hodge). The evidence upon which all this interpretation edifice rests istherefore reduced to that I briefly analysed above, with some additions such as
Niza's report and a few other sixteenth century documents that do not
explicitly m ention the Portuguese legend, let alone its association with
Chicomoztoc.
In conclusion, the uncritical repetition of the "mediaevalist hypothesis"
analysed in this chapter has obscured the importance that native discourses
held for the colonial enterprise. For even those authors w ho consider the
possibility that Spanish explorers relied on indigenous m yths in conceptualising
the unknow n territory limit themselves to suggesting that the m yth ofChicomoztoc served as a confirmation for the European fables through which
the Spaniards had already formulated their image of the land.

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CHAPTER SIX
WE ALL CAME WALKING FROM THE NORTH: TRADITIONS OFANCESTRAL ORIGIN AMONG NAHUASThis chapter draw s a general picture of the traditions of ancestral origin thatCentral Mexican N ahuas held in the late pre-conquest era, focusing particularlyon the m igration of the Azteca/Mexica1 from Aztlan, their original hom eland,
to Tenochtitlan.
This topic has been thoroughly studied by historians, archaeologists andanthropologists w ho have long debated the status that indigenous m igration
stories —as they are contained in Indian-focused sources— should be accorded,
for tw o principal reasons. On the one hand all N ahua groups living in Central
Mexico in the contact period —and other groups elsewhere in Mesoamerica—
claimed a foreign ancestry. On the other, the narratives they produced to trace
their ancestors' journeys to their places of definitive settlem ent w ere
suggestively similar and included a num ber of clearly mythical episodes.
M oreover, the som ewhat twisted correspondences betw een these narratives
recall the type of structural transformations that Levi-Strauss em phasised in his
interpretation of m yth (1981 [1971]: 626-646, 1976a [1973]: 21-24, 1976b [1973]).
Take the city of Tollan (also spelt Tulan or Tula) by w ay of example: m entioned
in almost every tale, Tollan is indistinguishable from the point of departure inMaya sources whereas in N ahua documents it appears as a clearly distinct
stopover, albeit in divergent positions.
W hether and to w hat extent migration narratives convey empiricalinformation about the past, or w hether we should take them as primarily
1T hese two nam es designate the sam e people in most modern literature and popular culture.
The usage is however incorrect. The people who founded Mexico-Tenochtitlan and lived in it
until the Spanish conquest, i.e., the group leading the so-called Aztec empire was called
Mexica. Azteca w as only the name of the Mexica ancestors in their original homeland andduring the first stage of their migration. I will keep the indigenous convention using the te rm
Azteca only when I refer to the Mexica ancestors before the moment when, according to th e ir
own stories, their tutelary god instructed them to drop their original nam e.

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symbolic, is a complex issue I do not intend to analyse in any depth. Although I
will briefly refer to some lines of interpretation proposed in this respect, I aimneither to achieve an accurate reconstruction of the sequence of incidents that
may have taken place during actual migrations, nor to decode the symbolicm eanings attached to particular migration narratives. My purpose is m erely todisplay the universe of themes from local knowledge that Spanish individuals
borrow ed to formulate their own enterprise of conquest.
N ahuas are the Mesoamerican linguistic group best represented in theextant docum entary sources due to the hegemonic position they had attainedby the time of the Spanish conquest and the key position they consequently
occupied in the colonial regime. Not only their historical discourse nourishedthe conquerors' imaginations; the political, commercial, and tributary netw orks
they consolidated before the conquest w ere taken over by the new m asters, ofw hom they even became fundamental allies, contributing w ith valuable
information and warrior troops to the subjugation of other native peoples.
Furthermore, the Spaniards readily adopted their tongue as a lingua franca form any cross-ethnic dealings, as missionaries, confronted with extreme linguistic
diversity, realised the importance of prom oting a common language other thanCastilian.2 For, if the natives' incorporation as obedient subjects of the Spanish
C row n and faithful members of the Catholic Church was to succeed, theyneeded to understand the word of God and the King's orders;3 as well as thetalk of m any different peoples who had suddenly turned into countrym en w ho
were unable to comprehend each other.
The governm ental decision to privilege Nahuatl speech —a 1570 royalcharter declared it the "official language for general use among the Indians" and2 The system atic study of native languages began in the decade of 1530 in the Franciscancolleges in Tiripitio and Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. By the end of the sixteenth ce n tu ry
grammatical rules and lexicons existed for several languages. Among them Nahuatl received
the m ost prolonged and fruitful attention, reflected in the trea tise s and dictionaries byAndres de Olmos (Arte para aprender la lengua mexicana, 1547), Alonso de Molina( Vocabulario de la lengua castellana y mexicana, 1555), and Antonio del Rincon (Arte de lalengua mexicana, 1595) (Hern&ndez de Le6n Portilla 1997: 189-190).
3 Later on in the Philippines a similar consideration drew the Spaniards to study and prom ote
the use of the most widespread native language: Tagalog (see Rafael 1993).

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further decrees favouring its learning and teaching followed until 1592 (Urquijo
Durazo 1997: 165-166, Guzman Betancourt 1997: 33-35)— certainly derived
from its already being a widespread language. Over 90% of the population ofCentral Mexico at the contact period spoke N ahuatl either as m other tongue or
as a second language, according to calculations based primarily on sixteenth
century Relaciones Geograficas(Harvey 1972: 313-314). On the other handseveral groups in regions beyond the control of the Aztec empire, like Jalisco
and Nayarit, w ere partially bilingual before the area became heavily
nahuatized tow ards the end of the century. Thus the colonial policy of linguistic
acculturation, as H arvey rem arked, only intensified a process that was alreadywell under way before the European invasion, sometimes resulting in thereplacement of the vernacular with Nahuatl rather than w ith Castilian,particularly in remote places, away from the circuit of regular Spanish activity.
This

continued

trend

of

Nahuatlspeechexpansion,

and

the

corresponding settlement of native peoples from the central highlands innorthern localities during the early colonial period, pose interesting questions
regarding other cultural and political continuities, evident in particularly
persistent forms of indigenous discourse.
A key argum ent in this chapter is that N ahua m igration traditions
renovated their ideological pertinence as the Spanish colonisation of the N orthprogressed. In the pre-conquest era the N ahua population of Central Mexico
was organised in relatively small, lineage based socio-political units that Spanish
sources address under the interchangeable labels of "peoples" (gentes/pueblos),"nations" (naciones), "tribes" (tribus), or "lineages" (linajes). These units —calpolli(pi. calpoltin) or altepetl (no plural form) in Nahuatl documents— had separate
identities, predicated each upon a specific historical m em ory that linked thegroup in question to a particular tutelary god and displayed a particularm igration story. That indigenous authors continued to write profusely on this
topic, even at the beginning of the seventeenth century —w hen the Spanish

202

advance reached its northernm ost limit— indicates that far from disappearing,
old rivalries, loyalties and alliances persisted in the colonial regime, as
indigenous communities resorted to their parochial, exclusive identities tonegotiate an advantageous position in the new power structure.
Attending to the fact that N ahua participation in the quest for N uevo
Mexico ran apparently along the lines of pre-conquest political articulations andconsidering that, in any case, the migration narratives that conquerors knew
expressed the interests of different communities within a well established arenaof pre-conquest regional politics, I will address a couple of general issues afterrevising the sources and before turning to examine the Azteca/Mexica
m igration proper. First, the insertion of N ahua traditions of ancestral origin in
the wider Mesoamerican context; and secondly, the definition of collective
identity and group affiliation among the central highland Nahuas at the tim e of
the Spanish intrusion.
6.1.- The sources.
Indigenous accounts of ancestral history have come to us in three distinct typesof documents: 1) pictorial manuscripts —usually called mapas, lienzos, or codicesdepending on their formal characteristics— painted by specialised indigenous
scribes before the conquest, or their descendants in colonial times; 2) chronicles,
histories and general surveys written in Nahuatl or Spanish w ith alphabetic
script, sometimes combined in bilingual texts; 3) hybrid docum ents that reunite
alphabetic and pictorial elements in different fashions.
Most of these materials, particularly those referring to N ahua past, w ere
physically produced in the colonial period (sixteenth andseventeenth

centuries),4 however, m any derive directly from indigenous traditions and4 Only fifteen of the approximately 500 pictorial m anuscripts known at the present time a reof indisputable pre-conquest elaboration. All fifteen come from areas outside of the A ztec
heartland; that is, the Maya area, the Mixteca, southern Puebla, w estern Oaxaca, and th e
Gulf C oast (Quinones Keber 1995: 107).

203

reflect local knowledge current before the Europeans' arrival.5 Some arecolonial copies or glosses of pre-Hispanic prototypes that were later lost or
destroyed; others seem to be accurate transcriptions of the recitations that
accompanied native traditional "public readings" of pictorial records.6 Yet as
Federico N avarrete contends (1997: 155-156), excluding the few pre-conquest
codices that survive today and perhaps a couple of early colonial pieces that
preserve indigenous stylistic conventions mostly untouched, they all resulted
from the combination of W estern and Indian traditions. Frequently produced
under the official request of governm ental authorities, their composition
involved the collaboration of native informants, Spanish missionaries,
European, Mestizo and Indian wise m en or administrators.
Bearing in m ind the risks entailed in using a docum entary corpus inwhich so m any different interests and loads of cultural baggage converge, I will
extract from it the principal episodes of the Azteca/Mexica m igration toestablish w hat m ight have been the "basis-tradition" that N orth-going Spanish
conquerors built upon. Even w hen the multiple versions of the story w e know
today share the same episodic core, they only resemble one another in a
general level. Therefore m y own reconstruction will bring together episodes
that m ay appear in some versions while being omitted in others.
Most of the sources I draw upon are specifically devoted to narrating
Mexica past. Nevertheless, I also employ historical records related to nonMexica N ahua groups, as once the expansionist drive of Central Mexico-based
5 The practice of recording history in Mesoamerica goes back to the fourth or fifth c e n tu ry
BC. The most ancient historical records known to us come from O axaca and the Maya area.
They are glyphic texts —integrated into public buildings in the form of sculpture and m uralpainting, or as decoration in ceram ic artefacts— that com m em orate particularly im portant
religious cerem onies and military conquests and also record the nam es, births, m a rria g e s,enthronem ents and deaths of m em bers of the local ruling elites. The type of link existing
between this memorial practice and later historiographical developm ents, where paint, paper
and animal hide becam e the privileged media, is not clear. N evertheless, both the Mayans andthe Mixtecs developed complex writing system s between the third and tenth centuries of ourera, and by the Post-Classic period more or less reduced devices serving a s maps and sc ro lls
were generally used throughout Mesoamerica to keep record of historical happenstance,
tribute paym ents, religious cerem onies, calendar calculations, and other issues (M artinez
Marin 1996: 397-408, Brotherston 1995: 10-20, Boccara 1997: 63-64, Thouvenot 1 9 9 7 :
7 3 -7 4 ).
6 For a discussion of how these documents were "read" see N avarrete (1999: 2 3 8 - 2 4 1 ,2000 & 2000a).

204

conquistadors bridged the limit of the ancient Aztec domination to the N orth,
the Spanish category "Mexicanos " often embraced all Nahuatl speaking peoples
living in the valley of Mexico, who claimed a common origin in Chicomoztoc.
Furtherm ore, due to this very claim, non-Mexica, N ahua traditions containim portant references, sometimes even long passages on Mexica history. Such isthe case of the work by Domingo Chimalpahin, as well as certain global
accounts, like the Anales de Cuauhtitldn, considered by M artinez M arm (1976:
127) as the first indigenous history of the valley of Mexico as a whole. Finally I
will make brief reference to three documents from the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley as
they too describe the prim ordial place of origin: Chicomoztoc.
My selection is based, essentially, in four scholarly works: Carlos
M artinez M arin's (1976) survey of Mexica migration historiography, Doris
Heyden's (1989) analysis of Mexico-Tenochtitlan foundation m yth and symbol,
Elizabeth Hill Boone's analysis (1994) of Aztec historical manuscripts, andGordon Brotherston's (1995) study of Mexican indigenous codices preserved in
British collections. I also cross checked m y sample with the indexes by Aldna
Franch (1955), Carrera Stampa (1965), Glass & Robertson (1975), and Gibson &G lass(1975)7
Spanish soldiers and settlers who journeyed across the N orth in thesecond half of the sixteenth century probably ignored most of the sources I rely
upon, either because they were produced in the central highlands after or
during that period, or because they had a very restricted circulation; not tom ention that m any conquerors were illiterate or had poorly developed reading
habits. Yet if it is very likely indeed that migration stories became familiar tom ost soldiers by w ord of mouth, we have no means, other than such material,
to follow the traces left by an oral tradition to which no direct access is now
7 In his recently approved doctoral thesis, Navarrete (2000) analyses the m igration
narratives of the native inhabitants of the valley of Mexico in detail. Some of the sources hestudied are lacking in my sample because I am essentially interested in identifying the m ost
widespread indigenous views on Mexica past current in the contact period, while he aimed a tcomparing all the presently known migration histories of the different groups who lived in thevalley of Mexico before the Spanish conquest.

205

possible. Furthermore, the oral versions of N ahua migrations that N orth-going
conquerors knew m ust have been substantially similar to those we can read
today in the codices, chronicles and treatises they ignored, as indicated by thefrequent b u t inexact correspondence existing between relevant passages
contained in both Indian and Spanish-focused sources.
Keeping these general points in m ind let us now review the sources that
constitute m y sample, starting with those in indigenous iconic writing.
M odern studies on Mesoamerican pictorial documents often m ake a
W estern-based twofold distinction betw een "profane paintings" devoted tom undane issues, and "religious or sacred paintings" dealing with the cosmic
order, calendars, rituals, and deities. Nevertheless, Gordon Brotherston
dem onstrated recently (1997: 84-109) that m ost codices traditionally categorised
as ritual or sacred also recorded specific information about geography, politics
and history; whereas the internal coherence of the annalistic accounts andterritorial depictions normally seen as "profane" frequently rests on theritualised image of the cosmic order.8 Therefore the "logic of reading" thatgoverns the structure of these documents is a much better analytic instrum ent
than any classification based on the sacred/profane distinction, which iscompletely alien to indigenous culture. In this sense m ost of the codices or
sections of codices I employ9 are of the kind that Brotherston term s
xiuhtlapohualli; that is, annals organised as year-by-year accounts of events.10
8 Indigenous peoples classified their pictorial records in different kinds. In the Nahua area theprincipal genera seem to have been the tonalamatl (record of the 260 day ritual cycle), thexfhuitl or ilhuiamatl (distribution of the feasts through the 365 day calendar), theteoamoxtli (book of the gods), the tlacamecayoamatl (lineage-record book), the tlal&matl(land-record book), and the xiuhamatl (year-count book or annals) (Martinez Marin 1 9 9 6 :410-412). The most influential scholarly classifications elaborated in the first half of thetwentieth century began from this taxonomy and created overall categories based prim arilyon them atic content and geographic provenance (Alcina Franch 1955). Later indexes by
C arrera Stam pa (1965) and Glass & Robertson (1975), more interested in providing acomplete catalogue with individual item descriptions, placed more em phasis on dates of
elaboration, d egrees of European stylistic influence and other formal characteristics.
9 Although colonial codices kept many indigenous record-keeping conventions late six teen th
century exam ples represent a combination of diverse pre-conquest book genera. Of th ese
docum ents I usually consider only the annalistic section.
10 Hill Boone (1994: 55-68) divides these docum ents in two groups. One com posed by item sthat follow what she calls a res gestae narrative modality —primarily from the M ixteca
region—focused on important events and their participants; another composed by prototypicalyear-count annals, organised around a continuous flow of individually represented years as
the principal axis on to which only significant events are correspondingly signalled. Both206

Ten pictorial manuscripts dealing extensively with Azteca/Mexica history
exist today but only eight contain full accounts of the migration period. The
best know n is the Codex Boturini or Tira de la Peregrination, a screenfold ofnative paper that recounts the migration of the Mexica from Aztlan to theperiod of their subjugation to Cocox, ruler of Colhuacan.11 Form erly
considered of pre-conquest elaboration it is now regarded as early colonial.12
The docum ent follows the classical pattern of a continuous stream ofindividually represented years, w ith a line of footprints indicating m ovem ent inspace as well as reading direction. However, according to Donald Robertson(1994 [1958]: 83-84) the fact that historical events are portrayed at specified
locations, between lengthy blocks of year-sign groupings (fig. 1), reveals thepost-conquest editing of a precolumbian prototype closer in form at to later
screenfolds such as the Codex Mexicanus and the Tira de Tepechpan that preserve
the linear format of the year-sign axis (fig. 2).
The extensive historical section of Codex Mexicanus (plates 18-87 as
num bered in the facsimile edition by Mengin, 1952) portrays the complete
Azteca/Mexica migration and continues to record over seventy years of
Spanish colonial history, covering a wide range of non-historical indigenous
and Christian subjects as well. Dating the entire piece is difficult as it waspainted by several artists at widely scattered moments. Nevertheless, a single
scribe seems to have draw n the annals up to the year 1574, while other tw ohands are noticeable in the fragment covering the rem aining years to 1593
(Robertson 1994 [1958] : 122-123). In contrast, the Tira de Tepechpan —painted
around 1596 according to Carrera Stampa (1965: 212)— is exclusively devoted

groups, however, are linear accounts displayed along the axis provided by the succession ofyears within the secular cycle of fifty two years. Therefore they contrast with spaceoriented representations of history and with the cosmogonic books or teoamoxtli that, as
Brotherston rightly argues, dictate an entirely different "reading" order.
11 For general descriptions of this manuscript and its editions se e Robertson (1994: 63, 8 2 84), G lass & Robertson (1975: 101), and C arrera Stam pa (1965: 174-176).
12 Orozco y Berra, Jo se Fernando Ramirez and Paul Radin deemed it pre-conquest but thestylistic analysis by Jim enez Moreno established it a s colonial (Robertson 1994 [1958]: 82 ).
Still, it is the earliest example we have of a "year-count" book.

207

to the narration of historical happenstance.13 An interesting example of how
Mexica-Tenochca history was regionally an im portant point of reference, thedocum ent —covering the period 1298-1590— shows synchronically the tow n of
Tepechpan's history, represented above the row of year-signs, and thecorresponding fraction of Mexica history, portrayed below the row (fig. 2).
Codex Aubin, like Codex Mexicanus, is diverse in content and authorship.
Painted between 1576 and 1608 (Glass & Robertson 1975: 88-89, Carrera Stampa
1965: 213-219), it includes a lengthy section of annals covering the m igration
period and the post-foundation history of Tenochtitlan until 1591, w ith tw oadditions, 1595-1596 and 1597-1608.14 Codex Aubin,

however, is far m ore

influenced by European models. It is painted on European paper bound like a
book

and

combines

pictorial

records

withNahuatlalphabetic

texts.

Nevertheless it preserves the year-sign axis, blocking together individual years
to create, like the Codex Boturini, large units of uneventful time (fig. 3). Verysimilar in format and content is a late seventeenth century manuscript know n
as Histoire Mexicaine depuis 1221 jusqu 'en 1594 (1998). Starting from Aztlan andfinishing in 1573, it is a copy of an older prototype lost today.15 Except for the
year-signs and a few episodes painted in the traditional m anner, m ost of its
information comes in the form of Nahuatl texts. Heavily acculturated in style,
Codex Azcatitlan is also painted on European paper and bound like a book but
has no alphabetic text except for a few glosses.16 Furtherm ore, despite its
European shape and pictorial style it has a completely indigenous structure as it
consists of an uninterrupted "year-count" which follows the Mexica from Aztlan
to Tenochtitlan and then continues until the first decade of Spanish domination.

13 Published in a facsimile edition by Xavier Noguez (1978).
14 The original manuscript (also known a s Codice de 1576) is lost but three sixteenth c e n tu ry
copies exist, one in the British Library m anuscripts section.
15 Also known a s Fonds Mexicain 40 after its location in the National Library of France(Medina G onzalez 1998: 26).
•6 Preserved in the National Library of France, this manuscript was first published by Robert
Barlow in 1949 and has been recently reproduced in a facsimile edition (Codex Azcatitlan
1 9 9 5 ), introduced and annotated by Michael Graulich, which contains the com m ents th a t
Barlow wrote for his own edition.

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Carrera Stampa (1965:183) dated it at around 1530 but later studies affirm thatit rather dates from the last third of the sixteenth century (Graulich 1995:16).
The two rem aining pictorial manuscripts in my sample that containannals concerning the Azteca/Mexica m igration are the Codex Telleriano
Remensis, painted in Mexico between 1549 and 1563,17 and the Codex Vaticano
Rios, presum ably painted in Italy between 1566 and 1589.18 They are so closely
related that scholars have long considered Codex Vaticano to be a copy of Codex
Telleriano. Eric S. Thompson argued in 1941 that both could have rather derived
from a common original lost today, which Robert Barlow called Codex
Huitzilopochtli. Nevertheless, Robertson (1994 [1958]: 108-109) discarded thistheory in 1959 due to the fact that their content is too varied to reflect a single
earlier prototype.19 The consensus today is that the Codex Telleriano Remensis isa synthesis of several prototypes all done before 1549, whereas the Codex
Vaticano Rios is a copy of the Telleriano by friar Pedro de los Rios. Preceding
the annals, which emphasise the history of Mexico-Tenochtitlan over them igration period, both documents include sections on ritual calendars andpublic religious ceremonies.
Two Mexica pictographs that do not follow the "year-count" pattern
rem ain to be mentioned. One is Codex Mendoza, painted betw een 1541 and 1550
(1549 according to Carrera Stampa 1965: 180) by order of viceroy M endoza to
be sent to the king of Spain (Robertson 1994 [1958]: 94-96) .20 The document,that records the conquests of the three polities whose alliance constituted the
Aztec empire, also contains the annals of Mexico-Tenochtitlan to the rule of
17 The y ears 1562-1563 traditionally given for the completion of the m anuscript (C a rre ra
Stam pa 1965: 203) are only valid for the Spanish glosses, not the pictorial re p re se n ta tio n ,which according to Robertson should be dated at two different moments. A first campaign ofwork carried out by one single scribe ended in 1549, while the last y ears up to 1562 w e redrawn by one of the hands that glossed the manuscript, thus representing a twelve y e a rs
later addition (Robertson 1994 [1958]: 110-111).
18 Also known a s Codex Vaticanus A or Vaticano Latino 3738. These dates are provided byRobertson (1994 [1958]: 111) but C arrera Stam pa (1965: 207) prefers 1563-1570. The
glosses, hand written in Italian, are almost identical to those in the Codex Teileriano.
19 For a discussion of the so-called Codex Huitzilopochtli and its relation with codices
Vaticano Rios and Telleriano Remensis see Robertson (1994 [1958]: 110-111) and Glass &R obertson (1975: 136-139).
20 It never reached Spain because it fell in the hands of French pirates.

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M octezuma II, an index of the tribute paid by subject peoples, and a few
conventional depictions of the daily life of an individual from birth to old age.
Finally, w e have the Mapa Siguenza,a cartographic historyof theAzteca/Mexica m igration painted in a single panel, m ost probably in thesixteenth century (Hill Boone 1994: 60 & 1991: 123-124). Although in the valleyof Mexico historical manuscripts based on place rather than time signs areusually associated with a school of painting centred in the area of Tetzcoco(Robertson 1994 [1958]: 63,134), the Mapa Siguenza no doubt comes from the
Mexica core area (Carrera Stampa 1965:176-177).
Of the three Non-Mexica pictorial manuscripts I employ, tw o are closely
related: the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2(in Yoneda 1991) and the Historia

Tolteca-Chichimeca (HTC 1989 [c. 1533]). Both recount, with great similarity, them igrant history of the peoples established in Cuauhtinchan and other tow ns in
the valley of Puebla (Yoneda 1991: 15, Pohl 1994: 145-147). The Historia ToltecaChichimeca

is a "year-count" with pictorial representations and extensive

N ahuatl texts, that begins w ith the peopling of the city of Tula and ends tw enty
six years after the Spanish conquest.21 According to Henry Nicholson (1971: 55)
its draw ings were probably copied from pre-Hispanic docum ents while thetexts represent faithful transcriptions of the corresponding oral recitations. The
m igrationof theTotomihuaquefrom

Chicomoztoc

Cuauhtinchan is told in the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2.

toCholulaandPainted som etim ebetw een 1533 and 1563 (Yoneda 1991: 74) it is part of a wider group ofCuauhtinchan maps, today dispersed in several collections (Leibsohn 1994: 164,
Yoneda 1991:19).22 The last non-Mexica codex in m y sample is the Rollo Selden,
a native paper strip painted in the early colonial period that traces the

21 I hereby use the edition by Kirchhoff, Guemes and Reyes Garcia (1989).
22 For a detailed description and follow-up of this corpus s e e Yoneda (1991).

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migration of a Chichimeca group from Chicomoztoc to the Coixtlahuaca
Valley, in western Oaxaca.23
As I said, a num ber of textual sources in Latin script narrate the events
portrayed in these pictorial manuscripts. Some, like the Anales de Tlatelolco (1948[1528-1532]), the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas (HMP c. 1547, inGaribay 1965: 23-66) and the texts contained in the Codice Chimalpopoca (1992[1558-1570]), are first generation copies of pre-conquest codices; others arelater derivations cast along the conventions of European narrative presentation(Hill Boone 1991:123, Duverger 1983: 20).
I will first refer to a group of five documents which focus on
Azteca/Mexica history, generally known as the "Cronica X

group" after thenam e that Robert Barlow (1945) coined for the hypothetical single m anuscript
which he suggested was behind them all. Their content is so closely related that
their origins and relationships have been debated ever since the nineteenth
century, it having also been suggested that one can identify the Cronica X witha w ide oral tradition rather than with a single lost prototype (Couch 1991: 111).
The so-called Tovar (or Phillips) manuscript —which I did not consult— and"treatise I" of friar Diego Duran's Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana e islas dela Tierra Firme (1579-1581) seem to derive from the same original Nahuatl text.
It has been suggested that the form er is a straightforw ard translation by theJesuit friar Juan de Tovar whereas the piece by Duran, though largely copiedfrom a Spanish version of the Nahuatl prototype, was expanded by the friar
himself. The other three documents in the group are the Cronica mexicana by
H ernando Alvarado Tezozomoc (1598) —an original Spanish text substantiallysimilar to that of Duran; the manuscript know n as Codice Ramirez (c. 1581-1590)
also attributed to Juan de Tovar and regarded as essentially based on Duran;and "book VH" of Joseph de Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590)

23 Brotherston (1995: 78-79) also calls it the Tlahuixtlahuaca Roll because it com es fromthe town of that name. Other interrelated lienzos also showing Chicomoztoc as a place oforigin have recently been located in different communities within the Coixtlahuaca valley.

211

which includes large fragments apparently taken from the Codice Ramirez(O’Gorm an 1962: xiv-xxii, M artinez M arin 1976: 122 & 126, Couch 1991: 110112, Monjaras 1994: 49).
Also im portant for my survey is the work by three indigenous authors
and by one Mestizo, all Christians educated in Spanish institutions (Keen 1984:
209, Rendon 1965: 12). I already mentioned the Cronica mexicana by Alvarado
Tezozomoc, who traced his descent to the ruling lineage of Mexico-Tenochtitlan(Le6n 1992: xx). Besides this book in Spanish, he wrote another in Nahuatl
regarding the same events, the Cronica mexicdyotl. Together with the Cronica X
group this text is viewed as the "official" Mexica version of Aztec history. The
text itself dates from the first decade of the seventeenth century but them anuscript, preserved in the National Library of France, is a later copy (Le6n
1992: ix- xiv). W orking too at the turn of the sixteenth century, Fernando de
Alva Ixtlilxochitl descended from the last ruler of Tetzcoco and could also trace
his lineage back to Cuitlahuac, one of the last Aztec emperors. In Spanish hew rote a num ber of short Relaciones historicas (c. 1608-1625) and his lengthy
Historia de la nacion chichimeca (c. 1616),24 all fundam entally dealing w ith thepeopling of Tetzcoco by immigrant Acolhua-Chichimeca groups. Finally,
Domingo Francisco de San Anton M unon Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin,
who descended from the family ruling Amaquemecan in 1519 (O'Gorman 1985:
9-16, Romero 1983: 17-71), wrote a series of annals which num ber andextension has not yet been determined.25 Of these I only consulted some of hiseight Relaciones and his Memorial breve acerca de la fundacion de la ciudad deCulhuacan (Chimalpahin 1998 [c. 1620-1631]).

24 The chronology of th ese writings was established by O'Gorman (1985: 229-233).
25 While the history of the manuscripts until they arrived in the National Library of France is
obscure, most eighteenth and nineteenth centuries references to Chimalpahin use m any
different though som etim es similar titles. Therefore we ignore whether the extant docum ents
constitute the remains of a single work that has lost many pages and also the original internal
order, or w hether they are independent works, in which ca se we ignore which are com plete
and which are fragm ents of partly lost or unfinished works (Castillo F arreras 1991: x i,xxx). For more detail s e e Renddn (1965) and Castillo Farreras (1991: xi-xxxvii & 1997: v xx i).

212

The chronology for the elaboration of these writings is obscure as by thetime Chimalpahin began the seventh Relation, in 1629, he had already w ritten
the eighth (1620); as for the Memorial, he finished it in 1631 (Castillo Farreras
1991: xxvi-xxix). We know that in 1620 the governor of Am aquem ecan asked
him to write the province’s official history using a series of indigenous
documents that, in 1549, judge Andres de Santiago Xuchitototzin had
authenticated. Nevertheless it seems that by 1606 Chimalpahin had alreadybegun to gather and organise paintings and writings that his ancestors had
ow ned,26 which constituted the prim ary base of his work (Rendon 1965: 9-13 &20-23). The eight Relaciones

recount the migrations and wars of different

groups that populated Chaleo Amaquemecan during the mid twelfth century.
Every group that had political presence in the province is m entioned, including
the Mexica and the Culhua, who with the Acolhua dom inated the central
valleys from the thirteenth century on. The sections devoted to the Mexica—particularly the Tercera relation— tell of their migration from Aztlan to
Tenochtitlan (Rendon

1965: 33-34, Castillo Farreras

1991: xxxv-xxxvii).

Conversely the Memorial, though articulated around the peopling and dynastic
succession of Culhuacan, concentrates on the Culhua and Mexica history(Castillo Farreras 1991: xl-xliv).
An atypical author amongst the group of sixteenth century indigenous
historians due to his apparently m odest origins,27 Cristobal del Castillo wrote,in Nahuatl, a couple of books on pre-colonial history and the Spanish conquest,
substantial parts of which were lost in the nineteenth century.28 Of thesurviving sections, only those pertaining to the Historia de la venida de los
26 Som e of these books his father inherited from Domingo Hernandez Ayopochtzin, a noble ofthe local ruling lineage; others were given to him by different elders (Chimalpahin 1998 [c.
1620-1631]: II, 303-349).
27 Unlike Tezozdmoc or Chimalpahin, who had inherited not only the oral narratives containing
the historical discourse of their communities —traditionally transm itted in a formalised andexclusive way from generation to generation— but also the pictorial docum ents th a t
constituted their m aterial basis, del Castillo, being a commoner, did not have ac cess to the
pictographic m aterial, which he w as unable to read or interpret anyway (N avarrete 1 9 9 1 :
6 7 -6 8 ).
28 For detailed information on the history of the manuscripts and the structure of the original
books s e e Navarrete (1991: 13-14 & 20-31).

213

mexicanos y de otros pueblos, written between 1597 and 1600 are relevant here.
We know very little about this author's life. N avarrete (1991: 18-19, 48, 99-100)
contends that he was not a Mexica as his interpretation sometimes opposes the
canonical traditions of this group, whose history he portrays as illegitimate anddemonic in opposition to that of other groups previously established in thebasin. He was most probably a Mestizo born in the Valley of Mexico in the1520s or 1530s, and he probably received formal education in an institution run
by Franciscan friars as he wrote in Latin alphabet and used the N ahuatl term s
to refer to the Christian god and the pre-Hispanic deities that thesemissionaries had coined29 (Navarrete 1991:13-14, 33-34, 88-92).
Particularly im portant to this study are several brief narratives thatreflect a wealth of local indigenous knowledge virtually unchanged. The earliestof all dates to 1528 and is a history of Hatelolco from its m ost rem ote times(Historia de Tlatelolco desde los tiempos mas remotos). It pertains to a collection offive interdependent and anonym ous documents (Anales de Tlatelolco, 1948)
w ritten in Mexico-Tlatelolco between 1528 and 1532 (Duverger 1983: 20).
Beginning with the m igration from Aztlan Chicomoztoc Quinehuayan, thishistory follows the Mexica until the foundation of Tenochtitlan and continues
w ith the history of Tlatelolco during the Spanish conquest.
Also from an early date are three anonym ous narratives on CulhuaMexica history published in 1891 by Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta. One, theHistoria de los mexicanos por sus pinturas, (HMPc. 1547, in Garibay 1965)

includes, am ong other sections, several annals that register the Azteca/Mexica
m igration and the most outstanding events up to N uno de G uzm an's
expedition to Nueva Galicia. The document has been attributed to friar Andresde Olmos, w hom the president of the A udienda commissioned, in 1533, tocompile a book on the ancient Mexican culture. Neither the original manuscript

29 Tlacatecdlotl (demon) for the Mexica god Tetzauhteotl, Iztlacateteo (false deities) fo rother peoples' gods, and Tlaneltoquiliztli (true faith) for Christianity (N avarrete 1991: 9 3 9 4 ).

214

nor any copy of this book have been found. However, scholars believe that
HMP is a sum m ary that Olmos wrote from m emory several years after having
sent all his manuscripts to Spain (Garibay 1965: 10-13), or that it is a sum m aryof Olmos' work by someone else (Baudot 1983 [1977]: 196-219). The other tw onarratives are the Origen de los Mexicanos, and the Relacidn de la genealogta ylinaje de los senores que han senoreado esta tierra de la Nueva Espana, despues que se
acuerdan haber gentes en estas partes,

both very similar in content. W ritten

between 1530 and 1532 by Franciscan friars upon the request of Bishop Juan deZum arraga, they were intended to back up the petitions of land retribution that
Juan Cano m ade to the Crown in favour of his wife Isabel Moctezuma,
daughter of Moctezuma II (Baudot 1983 [1977]: 74-76). Therefore they trace
Mexico-Tenochtitlan's ruling lineage back to its Culhua roots, following the
successive migrations that crowded the central highlands since the Toltec
period.30
Three other anonym ous narratives compose m y sample. The Leyenda delos soles (1558) and the Anales de Cuauhtitldn (1570) are part of the so-called
Codice Chimalpopoca 31 and refer to Culhua history (Duverger 1983: 20). The
third, Histoire du Mechique (in Garibay 1965: 91-120) is a French translation of a
now lost Spanish document.32 The first person to publish it, Edouard deJonghe, thought it was part of the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas but
Garibay (1965: 14-16) questioned this attribution, arguing that the sites of
Quivira and Culiacan described in the document are places that Olmos neversaw. Instead he proposed that the text is largely the work of Marcos de Niza
(sections I-III), whose notes another friar would have later put together withother notes on mythology by a different author, m ost probably Olmos (section

30 Although they are admittedly based on pre-conquest pictorial docum ents owned by Isabel
M octezum a's family we ignore what specific pictographs the authors used, a s none seem s tohave survived and all extant pictorial manuscripts on Mexica history are colonial.
31 Translated from Nahuatl by Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca in the nineteenth century. Here I
use the 1945 translation by Primo Feliciano Velazquez (Cddice Chimalpopoca 1992).
32 Contained in a manuscript written on sixteenth century paper by Andr§s Thevet p re se rv e din the National Library of France. I hereby use the standard Spanish translation by Ramon
Rosales Mungia that Garibay published in the sam e volume a s HMP.

215

IV). In any case the original text m ust be posterior to 1542, w hen Vazquez deCoronado gathered the first reports on Quivira.
The rest of my sources are well know n sixteenth century treatises by theFranciscan missionaries who m ade extensive surveys on indigenous history,
beliefs and customs, all of which I have already referred to in previous
chapters. That is, Bernardino de Sahagun's Historia general de las cosas de Nueva
Espana —the Spanish section of the Codice Florentino compiled in collaboration
with N ahua informants between 1558 and 1577; Jerdnimo de M endieta's
Historia eclesiastica indiana,

finished in 1597 and widely copied by Juan deTorquem ada (Rubial 1997: 46-47) in his Veinte y un libros rituales y monarqma
indiana (1615), which I also reviewed; and the two main surviving w orks by
Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, the Memoriales and the Historia de los indios deNueva Espana, 33 w ritten between 1527 and 1565.
6.2.- Foreign ancestry and migration: a M esoamerican idiom for politics.
Primordial migration, as I stated above, was a common them e all overMesoamerica in the late pre-conquest period. Groups with different cultures,and even languages, considered their sixteenth century home as a gift from apatron god to which their ancestors had arrived after a journey that lasted
several generations. The Nahuas from the central highlands, the Tarascansfrom Michoacan, and some Maya groups in Chiapas, highland Guatemala,lowland Yucatan, and the region of Peten portrayed their forefathers roam ing
across the wilderness under the guidance of tutelary gods,34 w ho gave themnot only lands but also particular forms of livelihood together w ith a specific
33 The awkward correspondences observed in these two works, the few blatant errors th a t
the Historia... m akes regarding Nahuatl language and culture, and the multiple references th a tother sources make to a third manuscript by Motolinia have led scholars to presum e that bothderive from that m anuscript, lost today. However, while they consider the Memoriales anincomplete copy of the lost piece, made by Motolinia himself and finished in 1541 (thoughsupplem ented later), they believe that the Historia... is a summary made in Spain by som eone
else around 1565. For a discussion on this issue se e O'Gorman (1969).
34 Brotherston rem arks (1995: 62, 98) that it w as essentially the groups who claim ed
Chichimec or Toltec ancestry who represented their past in term s of "migration from d ista n t
landmarks;" w hereas the Mixtecs depicted their ancestry a s emerging "from tree s that stoodcloser to home."

216

expertise and the appropriate utensils (Michelet 1988: 15-19, M artinez M arin
1989: 27-30, Lopez Austin 1989a: 57 & 79-96,1993 & 1995b; Brotherston 1995: 4597, L6pez Austin & L6pez Lujan 1996:191-192,239-271).
This image of m igrant collectivities is not entirely rem oved from
historical fact. Other than the archaeological evidence discussed in chapter
three, the fragm ented distribution of the multiple languages spoken in
Mesoamerica by the time of the Spanish irruption —over eighty belonging tomore than fifteen families (West 1976: 277)— indicates that migrations had been
fairly frequent before that moment. Thus m any scholars consider that during
the Post-Classic period this phenom enon was integral to the socio-political
dynamics of the area (e.g. Carrasco 1971a, Nicholson 1971, West 1976,
M anrique Castaneda 1977, Davies 1980, Duverger 1983, Smith 1984, M artinez
M arm 1989, Florescano 1990, Noguez 1995, L6pez Austin & Lopez Lujan 1996),
even w hen they still debate the degree to which particular narratives accuratelyreflect historical fact.
Glottochronologicalresearch

based

on

early

sixteenthcentury

docum ented languages (Campbell 1979, Manrique Castaneda 1989: 18-23,
W right

1996: 2-5) corroborates

that successive wavesofim m igrants—prim arily N ahuatl but probably Pame, Otorru or M azahua speakers as well—flowed into the heartland of Mesoamerica betw een the eighth and fourteenth
centuries conquering and displacing other groups of Otomf, Mazahua,
Matlatzinca, and Ocuilteco speakers then established in the highland valleys ofCentral Mexico.35 As a consequence multiple competing polities of reduced
35 Anthropologists assign to Otopamean languages such a s Otomi, Mazahua and Matlatzinca a
temporal depth of two to three thousand years in the central highlands (Escalante Hernandez
1997: 121, Wright 1996: 2-3) w hereas they agree that Nahuatl is a recent arrival in
M esoamerica. It is the southernm ost representative of the Yutoaztecan linguistic family, a
dialectal chain extending south-eastw ards from California to Nicaragua that includes many
languages today disappeared like Guachichil, Xixime and Acaxee. The m ost acceptedclassification (Wick R. Miller 1981) divides the Yutoaztecan family into five branches,
diversified as the speakers expanded over new territories: Numica, Tubatulabal, Takika,
Hopi, and Southern Yutoazteca. N&huatl belongs to the Aztecan group of the Southern
Yutoazteca branch together with other languages like Pipil and Cazcan. While the whole fam ily
seem s to have begun its differentiation in the Great Basin of the Colorado river around 3 5 0 0 4000 y ears BPT, the Aztecan group only began to separate around 2500 years BPT (Manrique
C astan ed a 1989: 14-18 & 24-26).

217

dimensions emerged, quickly developing regional netw orks of alliance anddomination that had repercussions in the Mixteca, the Maya area and the West
(Lopez Austin & Lopez Lujan 1996: 176-189, Noguez 1995: 194-197 & 201-204,
Reyes Garcia & Guemes 1995: 246). It is precisely within this context ofincreasing conflict over territorial control and regional hegemony that ancestralm igration became the common idiom of historical representation throughout
Mesoamerica. This idiom, as Lopez Austin and L6pez Lujan (1996: 262-271 &
1999) recently suggested, was part of an ideological system serving tolegitimise w hat they call the Zuyuano political order, which represents a novel
solution to an old problem already confronted by powerful polities such as
Teotihuacan. That is, the need to achieve control over multiple micro­
communities of different languages and geographic origins —each internallystructured through ties of consanguinity— without seriously interfering theirlineage-based organisation so that economic exaction could be the m ore
efficient at the least expense possible.
At the level of local governance the Zuyuano system entailed regional
integration, under the globalising authority of complex hegemonic organisms,
of a variable num ber of virtually autonom ous polities, each retaining its
traditional rule but fulfilling, as a subordinate entity, a particular politicoeconomic function. The changing relations, internal cohesion, and territorial
claims of these polities found ideological expression in the highly norm ative
structure followed by most migration stories (L6pez Austin 1993), which"amounts to the collective birth of a group, its journey to the promised, land,
and the founding miracle that validates its right to possess" the territory it
inhabits at any one given point in time (Lopez Austin 1995b: 3-4).
N early every group represented departure from its land of origin as asort of supernatural covenant celebrated with a specific god that launched an
exclusivist history, which culminated miles away with themiraculous

apparition of an emblematic signal pre-defined by the comm anding divinity.

218

The Relation de Michoacdn (c. 1540, in Acuna 1987), for example, describes how
the m igrant Uacusechas recognised in lake Patzcuaro the site that god
Curicaueri had reserved for them (Michelet 1988: 17-18; Lopez Austin 1994b:
67). Similarly, m ost sources dealing with Azteca/Mexica history portray them om ent w hen chief Cuauhtlequetzqui —and sometimes others with him —came across the signal previously revealed by god Huitzilopochtli to indicate
the place where the Mexica would finally accomplish their glorious destiny.36
But, if the ending point of any given m igration was construed in term s soparticularistic as to deserve the label of a "promised land," the point of
departure was frequently conceived as the common birth-place of various
groups, bearing in fact an equivalent name in the traditions of peoples thatspoke unrelated languages. Thus, the Chicomoztoc of Nahuatl sources is called
Vucub Zivan in Maya documents.37 Literally, both expressions m ean "Seven
Caves" (chicome = 7 + oztotl = cave), or "Seven Gorges" (Vucub Ziv&n) and findglyphic correspondence in a num ber of well know n pictograms from Central
Mexico38 that represent the figure of a kind of multiple wom b (figs. 4-7)
suggesting the recent arrival of the m igrants in the w orld altogether(Brotherston 1995: 62, Lopez Austin 1995b: 2 & 1989a: 79, 85).
This attribution of a common place of origin m ay be partially interpreted
as a symbolic acknowledgement of current netw orks of inter-group relations,since the list of seven groups issuing from Chicomoztoc is different in eachparticular tradition, frequently m irroring the actual state of regional politics.
Thus while the notion of a separate, godly inspired migration leading to aprom ised land legitimised the right of the group concerned in any given
36 S ee section 6.5 below.
37 Popol Vuh, Memorial de Solola, and Titulo de los senores de Totonicapdn use this term incombination with others like Tulan Zuiva, Vucub Pec, and Zuyua, different forms to name thesam e place. That is, the city where different peoples acquired the specific protection ofparticular tutelary gods; the site of first human creation, where ancestors lived before
migrating and where the language of each group becam e different to that of others (See L6pez
Austin 1989a:79-80). Due to lack of agreem ent on the alphabetic correspondence of thephonetics of Mayan languages, different documents often spell the sam e word d ifferen tly .
Therefore, we can find "Wukub" standing for "Vucub," and we may read "Civ£n," "Siw&n," o r"Suywa" instead of "Zivan" and "Zuyua."
38 Outstanding examples appear in the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2 (in Yoneda 1991), the HTC(1989 [c.1533|), Codex Azcatitlan, and Codex Mexicanus.

219

narrative to posses a specific territory and justified the internal authority andexternal domination of its ruling elite, the hum an diversity that characterised
regional webs of economic interdependence, systematic war, and politicalsubordination was ideologically neutralised with the concept of the essential
unity of m an under the order of creation (Lopez Austin & Lopez Lujan 1999:
42-43). In this sense, migration histories in the valley of Mexico —andthroughout Mesoamerica— represented a w ay to discuss the relations existing
am ong different groups and the respective positions they occupied within theregional political structure (Navarrete 1991: 71). In consequence they w ere
constantly reform ulated as political conflicts and realignments took place(Lopez Austin 1994a: 38).
This is not to say that migration traditions were simple Machiavellian
expedients devised bytheruling Elites of hegemonic

polities. Theirm ultilayered signification admits historical, cosmological, and astronomicalinterpretations as well as ideological readings. My aim in stressing the political
functionality they generally had in the pre-colonial arena is twofold. It helps tounderstanding w hy the colonial expansion over Arid/Oasis America spawned
the collaboration of Nahuatl-speaking Indians, and it illuminates the symbolictransactions involved in the formulation of the image that Spanish conquerors
projected onto that region.
6.3.- To be or not to be one single people: N ahua identity and "ethnicity.”
Before the Europeans arrived the Nahuas had been the numerically dom inant
population of Central Mexico for several centuries, their major settlem ents
concentrating in the highland valleys of Mexico, Toluca, and Puebla-Tlaxcala, as
well as in the "tierra caliente" (hot land) of present day state of Morelos.
M odem academic literature often attributes them with a common ethnicity on
the grounds of their linguistic and cultural uniformity, even w hen m ost authors
acknowledge the absence of an "assertive consciousness of unity" (Lockhart

220

1992: 1) am ong Nahuas from different polities, whose particular identities—m any rem ark— were also rooted in a sense of ethnic distinctness (e.g.,
Berdan 1989: 18, Obregon Rodriguez 1995: 282, Carmack, Gasco & Gossen
1996: 81-82, Lopez Austin 1994: 35-38).
We can partially attribute this ambiguous treatm ent of ethnicity to thefact that available sources do not allow for an accurate reconstruction of
autochthonous principles in the classification of hum an groups. First, because
the information they contain is fragm entary and mutually contradicting, andsecondly because they are already the product of the negotiation betw een theincom m ensurate taxonomies of colonisers and colonised, and the need torender indigenous concepts intelligible for contem porary Spanish readers.
Sixteenth century documents, for example, frequently use various nam es—according to language, tribal chief, or place of residence— to address a same
hum an group (e.g., Azteca = Mexica = Tenochca) but in certain cases they also
subsume various culturally and linguistically unrelated peoples under the samelabel (Reyes Garcia & Guemes 1995: 233, Obregon Rodriguez 1995: 267, L6pez
Austin & Lopez Lujan 1996: 187-188). Thus the term Chichimeca, that m any
N ahua communities applied to their ow n ancestry, also served to designate
contem porary groups of hunter-gatherers, fishers, and primitive farm ers livingin the northern regions they called Teotlalpan, whom they regarded as barbaric
in opposition to the Tolteca. This, it m ay be rem em bered, was an archetypal
civilisation flourishing in the eleventh century to which the Nahuas also traced
significant ancestral connections.
Indigenous group-identities in Mesoamerica were in fact rem arkably
fluid and open to frequent shifts. Individuals acknowledged ties with various
social units of divergent dimensions, thus configuring patterns of social
solidarity and political allegiance that bolstered factionalism and resulted inconstant segm entation and re-aggregation. A situation that L6pez Austin(1994a: 38) has clearly described in stating that personal loyalties and feelings of221

attachm ent operated at different levels in the area, according to a hierarchy ofgroups and sub-groups that encompassed each other in a pyram idal structure
w here the major unit was the large linguistic group (e.g., Nahua, Otom f,
Matlatzinca) and the m inor was the family.
Beyond the polyvalence ingrained in indigenous forms of group identity,
however, and leaving aside the methodological problems posed by the sources,
the inconsistent use of ethnicity-related term s in relevant scholarly literaturereflects the intrinsically ambiguous character of the category itself, which I
think has generated more analytic problems than solutions, as the sort of social
relation a n d /o r distinction implied in the adjective "ethnic" is rather obscure.
Most often scholars invoke "ethnicity" to distinguish betw een hum an groups
that have different geographic origins and speak different languages, but theyalso use the concept to indicate a common cultural matrix or to typify social
relations established throughties ofconsanguinity.

Underlying

theseperspectives sits a definition of ethnicity —based on blood, language, andculture— that the criticism of anthropologists like Edmund Leach (1954) andFrederick Barth (1969) put in crisis long ago for its inadequacy to explain "thecomplex relationships existing between cultural expression, speech, and socialand political organisation" (Barfield 1997:152). At the same time a m ore current
approach, standing closer to recent debates centred around the issue of self­
ascription (Barth 1969: 14, Okam ura 1981, Banks 1996: 11-48) and emphasising
the presum ption of common descent over actual consanguinity (Keyes 1976,
Bentley 1987, Yelvington 1991:168), is also occasionally employed.39
To a large extent our difficulty to pin dow n the couplet ethnicity/identity
in the Mesoamerican context derives from the fact that for a long period thatneitherarchaeology

nor

ethnohistory

haveallowedtodefine,tw ocomplem entary yet conflicting orders regarding group affiliation and political

39 Note that even when this perspective is adopted the debate itself is never addressed. II
ignore whether this is due to lack of aw areness or because Mesoamerica specialists think it isirre le v a n t.

222

dominance coexisted, intersecting each other in ways we do not fullycomprehend. One, based on kinship, privileged consanguinity as a m ain criteria
for m em bership and originated lineage-based forms of authority; another,based on territoriality, gave the people who shared a place of residence a senseof community and political loyalty.
The Zuyuano model proposed by Lopez Austin and Lopez Lujan (1999),
certainly the m ost finished approach so far developed to this complicated issue,
typifies social relations based on affinity of language and descent as "ethnic,"
while reserving the category "political" to distinguish forms of social solidarity
and collective identity deriving from residential vicinity and territorial
domination. Nevertheless I shall hereupon drop ethnicity-related term s
altogether in favour of more specific terminologies in order to hopefully
portray, at a m ore concrete level, the intricacies of N ahua group distinctions;for despite having similar customs, speaking the same language and claiming
to come from the same mythical place of ancestral origin variously referred to
as Chicomoztoc, Huehuetlapallan, Colhuacan or Teoculhuacan, all N ahuas did
not consider themselves to be one single people.
Sixteenth century Spanish authors writing on ancient indigenous history
assum ed that m other tongue was an im portant m arker of corporate identity
am ongtheinhabitantsofCentral

Mexico.

Nevertheless,

they

also

acknowledged that individuals accorded greater importance to their ascription
into the small-scale communities they erroneously called nations or lineages,
articulated around different principles probably including descent. Indeed,linguistic units seldom constituted integrated political units in Mesoamerica. On
the contrary, while the population of different, even factionalised polities often
spoke the same language, major urban settlements were plurilingual yet
politically distinct from each other and internally unified. As for descent,sources are too obscure and incomplete to allow a detailed understanding of
how kinship interlocked with the wider political structure. Alhough it seems

223

that while ruling elites did trace genealogies that established links to a com m onancestor, at an overall polity level the norm was rather Active kinship. Thus
even if ties of consanguinity probably structured social relations within them inor sub-units that Nahuatl sources call calpoltin(see section four below),their link to the apical forbears of the overall group was established throughnarratives of origin and migration that recorded a common historicalexperience and prescribed the common worship of a patron deity.
In his Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias, Joseph de Acosta wrote:
The ancient and first residents of the province we call Nueva Espana werevery barbarous and rustic men who lived only from hunting and thus they
were called Chichimecas [...] Since they neither harvest nor plan the soil
they left vacant the best and most productive land, and this was thenoccupied by foreign nations whom because they are politically organised
they call Nahuatlaca (Nahuatl speakers), meaning people that speak clearlyand make themselves understood [...]. These second Nahuatlaca residents
came from another, very remote land to the North, where a kingdom that has
been called Nuevo Mexico was recently discovered. Two provinces lay inthat country, one is named Aztlan, meaning Place of Herons; the other
Teuculhuacan, meaning Land of Those Having Divine Grand Fathers. In
these provinces the Nahuatlaca, who are divided in seven lineages or nations
have their houses and fields and gods, rites and ceremonies in good orderand civility [...] and they say that from seven caves they came to populate
this land of Mexico...40
The history by Friar Diego de Durdn contains similar passages, though it placeseven more emphasis on the fact that N ahuas did not leave the Seven Caves all
at once:
The news I have about their origin [...] only starts from those Seven Caves
they inhabited for a long time, which they abandoned in order to come andseek this land; some first, others later, and still others much later 41

40 Los antiguos y prim eros m oradores de las provincias que llamamos Nueva Espana, fueron
hom bres muy b^rbaros y silvestres, que s6lo se mantenfan de la caza, y por eso les pusieron
nombre de Chichimecas [...] Como no cogian ni sem braban, dejaron la mejor tierra y m as
fertil, sin poblarla, y e sa ocuparon las naciones que vinieron de fuera, que por se r gente
polftica la llaman nahuatlaca, que quiere decir gente que se explica y habla claro [...] Vinieron
esto s seaundos pobladores nahuatlacas de otra tierra remota hacia el Norte, donde agora s e ha
descubierto un reino que llaman el Nuevo Mexico. Hay en aquella tierra dos provincias: la una
llaman Aztlan, que quiere decir lugar de garzas, la otra llamada Teuculhuacan, que quiere
decir tierra de los que tienen abuelos divinos. En e stas provincias tienen sus c a sa s y su s
sem enteras y sus dioses, ritos y cerem onias, con orden y policia los nahuatlacas, los cuales
se dividen en siete linaies o naciones [...] y dicen que de siete cuevas vinieron a poblar latierra de Mexico (Acosta 1962 [1590]: 320). The em phases are mine.
41 La noticia que tengo de su origen y principio no es m as [...] sino desde aquellas sie tecuevas donde habitaron tan largo tiempo, las cuales desam pararon para venir a buscar e s ta
tierra, unos primero, otros despu6s y otros muy despu6s (Dur6n 1967 [1579-1581]: 18).

224

Those who came from the said caves were the six kinds of people: the
Xochimilca, the Chalca, the Tepaneca, the Culhua, and the Tlahuica andTlaxcalteca. Not all of them together, neither in the same year though, but
first one and then the others, while the Mexica remained back there
according to divine will, they say.42
The same rem ark appears in m any other texts by Indian and Spanish authors,even the atypical version about the origin of N ahua peoples that Bernardino de
Sahagun includes in the last paragraph of chapter 29, book 10 of his Codice
Florentino, devoted to describe the "generations that have come to populate thisland" (todas las generaciones que a esta tierra han venido a poblar). The paragraph—bearing the subtitle "About the Mexicans" (De los mexicanos)— records a joint
m igration of several groups, including the Tolteca, the Chichimeca and other
non-Nahuatl speakers who, having arrived by sea to Panuco populated thecentral highlands and then dispersed, travelling separately to the N orth until
they reached Chicomoztoc. Then, after a non specified period, the N ahuas
departed again, heading South to re-establish the settlements they had onceabandoned in the valleys of Mexico and Puebla-Tlaxcala. Chicomoztoc,
therefore, is not a place of ultimate origin in this account. Nonetheless all the
N ahuas are depicted as living there together at a certain point in time before
again parting, divided into different groups who travelled separately to theSouth. In Saha gun's version, like in those by Acosta and Duran, the Mexica are
the last to arrive in the basin of Mexico; this time, however, we are told that
unlike the other groups (Tepaneca, Acolhua, Chalca, Huexotzinca andTlaxcalteca), they travelled beyond Chicomoztoc and so they were the last to
return (Sahagun 1989 [1558-1577]: II, 671-676).
Setting aside the explicit association that Acosta draw s betw een
A ztlan/Teuculhuacan/Chicom oztoc and the newly discovered Nuevo Mexico I
will make two remarks: First, that N ahuas derived the segm entary character of
42 Los que salieron de aquellas cuevas fueron los seis a6neros de gentes [...] los xochim ilcas,
los chalcas, los tepanecas, los culhuas y los tlahuicas y tlaxcaltecas. Aunque e s de saber que
no todos juntos, ni todos en un ano, sino unos primero y otros despu6s [...] quedandose alia el
Mexicano, segun dicen ellos, por ordenacion divina. (Duran 1967 [1579-1581]: 21) The
em phasis is mine.

their identity from the argum ent that their ancestors arrived in the basin of
Mexico each at a different time and settled dow n in separate land tracts toestablish separate, self-contained politico-territorial entities of variable size andpow er that m odern scholars call "city-states" —or senorios (e.g. Carrasco 1977:
205, Gruzinski 1989: 13-14, Obregon Rodriguez 1995: 283, Carmack, Gasco &Gossen 1996: 81-82) following the practice of some Spanish colonists. Secondly,that w ider affinities were recognised at a supra-com m unity level creating acertain sense of corporation among groups that recognised themselves as "firstorigin" siblings, notwithstanding their particular migration histories. The natureof this globalising identity, however, is obscure since the list of groups issuingfrom Chicomoztoc varies from source to source, sometimes num bering six,eight or even m ore "lineages" rather than the usual seven. Moreover, althoughm other tongue occasionally appears to define this higher level of corporate
identity, as in Acosta's treatm ent of the seven Nahuatlaca "lineages/nations,"
non-Nahuatl speakers are sometimes listed as well. Thus according to Toribiode Benavente (1996 [1541]: 126-129) all the inhabitants of N ew Spain came from
Chicomoztoc, where each of six children that the ruler begot (Xelhua, Tenuch,
Ulmecatl, Xicalancatl, Mixtecatl, and Otomitl) became the leader of a hum angroup w hich he guided in the search for a place to establish. N ote that some ofthese groups, like the Mixteca or the Otomf, represent wider linguistic wholes,
while the Tenochca represent a particular group within the larger linguistic
family of N ahuatl speakers.43
The terminology used by Spanish observers to describe indigenous socio­
political orders reveals a significant misconception of how people, land andrulership w ere related in N ahua society. Indeed, the Spaniards projected a
distinction, seemingly absent in native understandings, betw een the hum an
43 The corresponding passage in the Historia... (Benavente 1969 [1565]: 5-6) m entions
seven leading brothers but only specifies the places that six of them populated. Both in the
Memoriales and the Historia... this version is substantially different from that included at the
beginning of the text, which I cited in chapter three (pp. 107-108 above). Contradictions of
this kind are common in many colonial chronicles and respond to the fact that they compile
information from different local historical traditions which, as I stated before, w e reexclusivist in character.

226groups as such ("gentes, naciones, tribus, linajes") and the polities they
organised ("pueblos" and "senorios"), while they failed to detect the contrast
betw een m igrant and settled collectivities that native corresponding categories
implied, thereby conflating w hat Indians conceived separately. Thus in Nahuatl
documents we find no expression equivalent to such term s as "gentes,""naciones," "tribus" or "linajes." collective nouns that Spanish w riters applied toevery hum an group irrespective of territoriality; rather settled communities are
consistently called altepetl

while m igrant collectivities detached from any

particular land are always referred to as calpolli or one of its derivations.44
Consider the following examples from the Cronica mexicayotl, which
recounts the history of how the great "altepetl Ciudad Mexico Tenochtitlan"
originated, and how in due course it became head and m aster "of each andevery altepetl

located anywhere in this recently constituted N ew Spain"(Alvarado Tezozomoc 1992 [c. 1600-1610]: 4).45 Throughout the whole chronicle
the w ord altepetl

is used in the same m anner, sometimes in relation to

Tenochtitlan, sometimes to Aztlan-Chicomoztoc or various other entities (ibid.:
6,11,21,29, 33, 35, etc.) but always referring to w hat James Lockhart (1992: 14)
defines as "an organisation of people holding sway over a given territory;" thatis, urban centres and the polities they embodied, entities for which the
Spaniards used the terms "pueblo" (tow n/village/people), "dudad" (city) or"senorfo" (seigniory). Contrastingly, the author employs the term calpolli (orseveral derivations such as chiconcalpoltin)46 every time he w ants to addressm igrant corporations (Alvarado Tezozomoc 1992 [c. 1600-1610]: 13, 15, 16, 24,34, etc.), though instead of the six, seven or eight groups appearing in other
44The words a l t e p e t l and calp o lli are untranslatable. Although they have been rendered
into Spanish respectively as "pueblo" (town) and "barrio" (ward) most scholars prefer tokeep them in Nahuatl and I will do the sam e, given the uniqueness of the institutions to which
they refer. Even sixteenth century Spaniards often used the Nahuatl word c a l p o l l ithem selves, although som etim es they hispanicised it a s "calpul" (pi. calpules).
45 The original Nahuatl text says: "ynan yta itzonteco mochiuhtica ynmochi yx yxquich yc
nohuian a l t e p e t l yn yncuic Nueva Espana." Translated into Spanish by Adrian Leon a s:"madre, padre, cabeza que se esta haciendo de todos cada uno de los poblados de todos ladosde la reciente Nueva Espana."
46 In Nahuatl "the seven calpolli" is written " c a c h i c o n c a l p o l t i n ," from ca (indicative
particle) + c h i c o m e (seven) + calpolli.

227sources as the original peoples from Chicomoztoc —w ho established different
polities in the central highlands— the units that he term s the "seven calpoltin"
are the constituent sub-groups (perhaps clans) of the Mexica from Tenochtitlan
and Tlatelolco (Ibid.: 13, 26, 32, 74). Note that Alvarado Tezozomoc uses nogeneric term to designate the Mexica as one am ong other similar hum anaggregates.
Summarising, while the territorial and institutional side of w hat the
Indians called altepetl is represented in Spanish sources by such w ords as"pueblo," "ciudad," or "senorfo," the term s "nacion" or "linaje" they used tosignify hum an groups in general actually address w hat w e would call its ethnic
aspect. But such a distinction did not exist in N ahua understandings. At least
one additional Nahuatl document, the anonym ous Histoire mexicaine.. (1998),
confirms that from the indigenous perspective the m ain distinction rather
referred to the m igrant or settled condition; for although it never employs theterm altepetl it always refers to m igrant groups as calpolli —either Mexica
constituent sub-units or other groups also departed from Chicomoztoc— whileconsistently addressing established polities simply by their particular names.
This non-existence of a concept conveying the sense of hum an groups
understood as abstract conglomerations of people, which discloses the radical
parochialism characteristic of indigenous identity, is also manifest in thehesitant application of the term "nacion" m ade by the anonym ous, probably
Spanish author of the Relacion de la genealogia... (c. 1530-1532):
Three sorts of people exist in this New Spain, I do not know whether to callthem nations, as they call Spaniards, French, or Castilian; though it seems I
should indeed call them so attending to the manner in which they began topopulate [the land...] (Garcia Icazbalceta 1891: III, 263).47

47 "...en e sta Nueva Espana hay tres m aneras de gentes, no s6 si las digamos tres naciones,
asi como espanoles, franceses, Castellanos, y parece que si, segund y de la m anera quecom enzaron a habitar."

228

6.4.- Three intersecting arenas of corporate identity: The calpolli, the altepetl
and the tlatocdyotl.
The basic political unit in Central Mexico w hen the Spaniards arrived was thealtepetl, literally m eaning "water (atl) and hill (tepetl)," or "the water(s), thehill(s)" from the metaphorical expression in atl, in tepetl that brings together the
essential elements for a stable social life (Garibay 1962: 8, Castillo Farreras 1972:
58, Carrasco 1977: 205 & 1996: 167, Lockhart 1992: 1 4 )« Beyond this
etymological analysis no adequate translation exists for the term , as noequivalent institution is found in the western world. Nevertheless scholars
frequently compare it with the M editerranean city-state of Greek antiquity (e.g.
Carrasco 1977: 205, Carmack, Gasco & Gossen 1996: 81-82, Obregon R odriguez
1995: 283, Gruzinski 1989: 13-14, Lockhart 1990: 99-100, H odge 1991: 12-13)
because it was a socio-political entity defined by a deep sense of self­
distinctness,49 the control of a certain territory and the possession of anautonom ous governm ent —headed by a dynastic ruler or tlatoani(pi.

tlatoque)— to which a variable num ber of constituent segm ents (calpolli or
tlaxilacalli) paid tribute and owed obedience.
Most often the Spaniards called the altepetl "pueblo" (tow n/city/people),thus translated in the 1555 Nahuatl-Castilian dictionary by friar Alonso de
Molina and in Sahagun's Codice Florentino..50 This w ord —applicable tosettlements of any size— also conveys the sense of a conglomerate of people
tied together through feelings of common identity. Therefore, as James
Lockhart contends (1992:15), it described the altepetl better than "the standard

48 Dana Leibsohn (1994: 162) and Jam es Lockhart (1990) confidently assert that it w as also
the basic unit of self-definition and affiliation but other scholars rather attribute this quality
to the calpolli (e.g. L6pez Austin & Castillo Farreras).
49 Lockhart calls it "ethnic distinctness" but I do not think the notion of ethnicity is suitablehere.
50 In book XI, chapter 12, paragraph 1 Sahagun says: "Y tambien decian que los montes [...] estan llenosde agua, y por de fuera son de tierra [...] Y de aqui acostumbraron a llamar a los pueblos donde vive lagente altepetl, que quiere decir "monte de agua," o "monte lleno de agua." (And they also said that hills arefull of water, and outside they are made of earth. Hence they used to call the towns where people lives
altepetl, meaning "water-hill," or "hill full of water" (Sahagun 1989 [1558-1577]: II, 800).

229

terminology" that Spaniards used to designate their own urban entities in both
Europe and the N ew World: "ciudad or city for the highest rank, villa or tow n
for the second, and aldea or village for smaller dependencies." NonethelessSpanish understanding of indigenous socio-political arrangem ents was only
superficial.
Visually the altepetl appeared as a compact urban complex, mainlycontaining public buildings, surrounded by a network —sometimes denser andsometimes less dense— of residential compounds and hamlets (Carrasco 1977:
205-206, Gruzinski 1989:13-14). Deceived by its appearance, the Spaniards came
to conceive of it in term s of the institution that embodied, back at home, them inor unit of political organisation at the local level: the municipality,
composed of a "cabecera," or capital, ruling a set of "sujetos," or subject hamlets(Lockhart 1990: 99-100). Unlike Spanish municipalities, however, each altepetl
was "a sovereign or potentially sovereign entity" (Lockhart 1992: 14), thoughfrequently inscribed within wider political configurations that had resulted
either from the aggregation of various independent altepetl51 via confederationa n d /o r conquest, or from the internal division of an originally unitary groupdue to excessive grow th or political schisms. On the other hand, while the"sujetos" of a Spanish municipality were hierarchically related to the "cabecera,"pinnacle of a centrally organised institution, the altepetl was constituted by acollection of minor, self-contained communities symmetrically related to one
another that functioned as corporate units in all the different spheres of social
life (Lockhart 1992:15-20).
M odern academic literature typically refers to these micro-communities
as calpullis (hispanicised plural form of calpolli) and I will do the same since theterm is readily recognised. Yet as we saw before, calpolli in Nahuatl sources
m ost often designates the first origin sibling groups that issued from51 Archaeological evidence and documentary sources concur that the valley of Mexico w as
divided among forty to fifty polities of varying size and complexity, founded between AD
1100 and 1350 that were later absorbed into regional state system s headed by the cities of
Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco and Tlacopan (Hodge 1991: 113).

230

Chicomoztoc —or their constituent segments— during the m igratory phase of
their history, while other term s —most commonly tlaxilacalli— are preferably
used to designate altepetl sub-units.
The calpulliinternal articulation has been the subject of intense

controversy. Its m em bers —usually of the same linguistic group andgeographic origin— were clearly linked by ties of reciprocity and solidarity, by
the w orship of a common tutelary god —the calpulteotl— and by the collective
landholding of the plots they worked and inhabited, although the sources do
not provide sufficient information concerning the role of kinship and vicinity asmechanisms for recruitm ent and boundary definition. I will not go into muchdetail but interpretations range betw een tw o extreme positions: One,
represented by Victor Castillo Farreras (1972) and Alfredo L6pez Austin(1985b) considers that the calpulli was, above all, a group of kin related families
with strong endogamic tendencies, though no prescriptive m arriage rules
necessarily exited. The other, essentially represented by Pedro Carrasco (1971b,
1977 & 1988) and James Lockhart (1992: 16-20) is rather sceptic about theimportance of consanguinity to determine calpulli m em bership and emphasises
the political, territorial and administrative aspects of the institution, particularly
concerning overall state affairs such as the collection of tribute, the assemblageof w arrior troops and the recruitm ent of courvee labour.
For the purpose of this thesis we need only to keep in m ind that a calpulli
was a virtually autonom ous, self sufficient social unit generally coinciding witha residential ward. Each had its ow n internally elected sub-rulership, controlled
its ow n lands for the general or individual use of its members, and held its ow n
religious ceremonies in its own temples and with its own resources (Carrasco
1977: 190-191 & 207). As constituent parts of the altepetl

each of themcollectively faced such obligations as the paym ent of tribute and service or theparticipation in general cults and external wars, systematically contributing tothese global affairs through general mechanisms of fixed task rotation. This231m ode of organisation, James Lockhart (1992: 15) observes "can be term ed
cellular or m odular as opposed to hierarchical," since it followed an associative
rather than a strictly centralised authority pattern, replicated above the level ofindividual altepetl into a succession of increasingly complex political entities ofwhich the so-called Aztec Empire is the extreme example.
Indeed, m ost polities in Central Mexico in the late pre-conquest period
were conglomerations of a variable num ber of altepetl, some sovereign andsome subordinated, loosely held together in politically unstable entities,
internally shaken by perennial rebellion and succession disputes, and externallyengaged in continuous wars and alliance negotiations (Lockhart 1992: 15-17).
They fought and they conquered (or succumbed before) other like polities but
territorial occupation rarely, if ever occurred, and as long as defeated parties
recognised the overlordship of the victorious opponent —opportunely paying
the tribute or providing the services imposed onto them — they rem ained
virtually autonomous.
This picture resonates with the "galactic polity" model that S. Tambiah
developed to discuss ruler-realm relations in traditional Southeast Asian
kingdom s of the late nineteenth century; which constituted "large fields ofcoexisting galaxies" influencing each other, constantly form ing factional
coalitions

andcontinuallyshiftingboundaries(Tambiah

1985:

324).

Furtherm ore, the N ahua notion of rulership like "the imperium of the [...]
universal king" through which "the galactic polity was best conceptualised in
Burma and Thailand" according to Tambiah (1985: 323-324), was also graduatedaccording to particular ranks of power. Thus the w ord tlatocdyotl,

which

denoted both governm ent and realm at various levels of the politico-territorialorganisation,

derived

from

the

term

tlatoani—m eaning

"he

w ho

speaks/com m ands/governs"— that designated the dynastic ruler of thealtepetl. Preceded by the particle huey, as to make huey tlatocdyotl, it referred tohegemonic polities comprising several individual altepetl

who recognised a

232

dom inant tlatoani as the superior political authority, though keeping their local
governm ents for internal affairs (L6pez Austin 1985: 324, Obregon Rodriguez
1995: 282-283).52 In practical term s this m eant that commoners had to pay
tribute and give personal a n d /o r military service both to their own tlatoani andto that of the dom inant altepetl within the tlatocdyotl concerned. Also, it m eantthat local commercial routes and facilities within subordinate altepetl became
integrated to the global m arketing system of the whole, m uch to the advantageof the dom inant altepetl elite as Ross Hassig (1985: 5-7) dem onstrates for thecase of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.
These correspondences are not simple coincidence. Like nineteenth
century South East Asia, pre-conquest Mesoamerica was overw helm ingly
populated by peasants and even city dwellers in highly developed urban
centres often lived from agriculture, but the production of regular andabundant surplus was never assured. Yet population density was very high,since prevalent topographic and environmental conditions were rather suitable
for subsistence forms, even if they thw arted excess production and obstructed
the efficient transportation and storage of consum ption goods. Under these
conditions the accumulation of surplus depended on the capacity to control thelabour of masses of people (Castillo Farreras 1972: 90-98 & 132). This not only
resulted in intercine confrontation among polities of nearly every size, it also
forced the adoption of a system of dom ination that combined full local
autonom y with an overarching cosmology —periodically enacted in elaborate
state rituals— and the imposition of economic obligations enforced primarily
through the menace of w ar (Carrasco 1977: 187-189). Thus as in Tambia's
examples (1985: 321-322), the power of a Central Mexican huey tlatoani resided
in his capacity to "extract goods and services" from the comm oners and52 Eight huey tlatocayotl existed in the valley of Mexico by the time of Spanish conquest,
each presided by (and named after) the most powerful of its constitutive altepetl. T heir
nam es coincide with the groups more frequently included in lists of migrant groups from
Chicomoztoc: Tenochtitlan (Mexica),
Tlacopan (Tepaneca), Xochimilco (Xochimilca),
Cuitl&huac (Cuitlahuaca), Culhuacan (Culhua), Chico (Chalca), Mixquic (Mixquica), Tetzcoco(Acolhua) (Obregon Rodriguez 1995: 282-284, Bernal 1977: 150, C arrasco 1977: 1 7 4 ,Castillo F arreras 1972: 29).

233

mobilise them for public activities, particularly for the construction andmaintenance of irrigation systems and roads, and for he perform ance of state
and religious rituals that cemented the ruler's authority and legitimacy.53
N ot surprisingly the comparability betw een the political economies of
traditional Asian and Native American societies rests at the base of muchacademic literature on the Inca and Aztec states produced after Wittfogel
published Oriental Despotism in 1957.54 Most of this reflection, how ever, only
touched upon these similarities indirectly through the application of the Asiatic
Mode of Production Marxist model, which explains the coexistence of rural, self
sufficient communities and superior hegemonic organisms exacting a surplus in
the form of tributes and services while organising public w orks of generalinterest, as a transitional socio-economic form ation betw een the dissolution of
the prim itive community and the origin of the state and class society (Godelier
1977, Bloch 1975: 35-40).55
6.5.- From A ztlan to Tenochtitlan: The Azteca/Mexica M igration.
The Azteca/Mexica migration took place betw een the twelfth and fourteenth
centuries of our era. According to indigenous sources it began in the year 1
Tecpatl,which corresponds to the Christian year 1168, or possibly 1116

(Brotherston 1995: 45).56 Both Christian dates appear as equivalent to the
N ahuatl year 1 Teqpatl in the sources. Glosses accompanying the corresponding
glyph in codices Azcatitlan (plate El) and Mexicanus (plate 18), for instance,translate it as 1168 but Chimalpahin offers three different correlates: 1064 (1998[c. 1620-1631]: I, 85, 179), 1116 (ibid.: 99), and 1168 (ibid.: 191), quoting the first

53 Also Benedict Anderson (1972), Clifford G eertz (1980), and Shelly Errington (1989) show
how the control of people is the key to power in South East Asia.
54 S ee for example Wolf 1957, Chesnaux 1969, Bartra 1975, C arrasco 1988.
55 Although modelling and comparison, a s George A. Collier (1982: 1-8) observed, began torecede in the field of Native American studies at the close of the 1960s in favour of new
perspectives seeking a deeper understanding of local forms of organisation, Oriental
Despotism continued to be discussed in relation to M esoamerica and the Andes at least until
the mid 1980s.
56 1111 according to Berdan (1989: 26) .

234

as being the date of the Aztec departure.57 The same sources date the foundingof Mexico-Tenochtitlan in the year 2 Calli, which in our calendar corresponds toeither 1325 or 1345 according to most scholars, though not all colonial sources
coincide (Berdan & Anawalt 1997:6).
H ow these people lived in their original hom eland, Aztlan, w hy they left,w here they stopped and w hat they did before arriving in the valley of Mexico
is a complex story, for we have several varying accounts. Therefore I will only
provide a schematic sum m ary of the principal episodes contained in different
versions. I will discuss some details in chapter seven together w ith relevant
passages from Spanish-focused sources concerning the conquest of the North.
Aztlan was an urban settlement, seat of a stratified society like any altepetl
in the valley of Mexico. Its location —a place within a lake or at least almost
completely surrounded by w ater58— resembled that of Tenochtitlan 59 Also, it
57 The correlation between indigenous recorded dates and the Christian calendar is v e r y
problematic and has created much literature. Chronological disparity between sources has
been attributed to the simultaneous use of different calendars in M esoamerica —10 to 13 onlyin the basin of Mexico according to C aso (1967), Jim enez Moreno (1961: 146), and Kirchhoff(1954/1955)— but also to the chronological uncertainty structurally ingrained in the generaltime-reckoning system they all had in common. The system combined two independent but
interlocking cycles: A solar calendar ( xfhuitl) ordering the seasonal activities and m ost
im portant religious feasts, divided in eighteen 20-day units (months) to which five sp aredays (nemontemi) were added to make up a cycle of 365 days in all, and a divinatory alm anac
(tonalpohualli) combining 13 numerical coefficients and 20 signs to create a sequence of 2 6 0
different day-nam es (Lopez Austin & Lopez Lujan 1996: 222, Marcus 1992: 95-100, Hassig
1985: 75-78, Nicholson 1971: 44-45). Inbuilt imprecisions in the system resulted from thefact that each day of the xfhuitl w as called by the name it had in the tonalpohualli, so in any
given sequence of successive solar years the sam e day-nam e w as repeated, for instance, inthe first and 261 days of the first year, then in the 156 day of the second year and so on.
Now, 365-day solar years were named after the day in which they began, but for arith m etic
reasons only four tonalpohualli day-signs were susceptible to occupy this " y e a r-b e a re r"
position, succeeding each other in the order: 1-Tochtli, 2-Acatl, 3-Tecpatl, 4-Calli, 5 Tochtli, 6-Acatl 7-Tecpatl, etc., and forming a re-entering cycle every 52 years, equivalent
to 73 rounds of the 260 day cycle (Nicholson 1971: 44, Duverger 1983: 40-43, Lopez Austin& Lopez Luj&n 1996: 222, Brotherston 1995: 13, Hassig 1985: 75-78). The New Fire
cerem ony that marked the end/beginning of every "Year Binding" (52 year cycle) w as used
as time m arker in most indigenous historical records. Clearly this dating system is suited
only to distinguish years within a very short tim e-scale because the sequence of available
year nam es is repeated identically every 52 years, and no system counting consecutively
from a fixed zero point existed to label years with identical nam es which pertained todifferent revolutions of the cycle (Nicholson 1971: 45, Prem 1984: 6-7). Additionaldifficulties, Duverger observes (1983: 47), derive from the fact that S paniards integrated in
one record the different and mutually contradicting year-counts held by d iffe ren t
communities who shared no initial point from which to count successive years. Thus inworking out Christian date correlates for the events they historied, Spaniards took no
account of the fact that a year 1-Acatl of the M exica-Tenochca calendar could wellcorrespond to a year 12-Acatl in other calendars (i.e. Tilantongo) a s it was the case for the
Christian year 1519 (Brotherston 1995: 14).
58 Although most written sources portray Aztlan a s an island (e.g. Alvarado Tezozomoc 1 9 8 0[1598]: 223 & 1992 [c. 1600-1610]: 15; Chimalpahin 1998 [c. 1620-1631]: I, 65, 9 1 ,179, Histoire Mexicaine... 1998: 66), Codex Mexicanus represents the proximity of w ater in235

had a dynastic ruler and temples and its inhabitants lived from agriculture,
fishing and the gathering of lake products (Chimalpahin 1998 [c. 1620-1631]: I,
85,93; Castillo 1991 [1597-1600]: 115-117, Alvarado Tezozdmoc 1980 [1598]: 223& 1992 [c. 1600-1610]: 15). None of the etymologies that the sources provide forits nam e —respectively associated with Herons (Alvarado Tezozomoc 1980
[1598]: 223, Duran 1967 [1579-1581]: II, 28), Reeds (Codex Boturini and Codex
Mexicanus according to Seler 1985 [1894]: 327-328), or the white flower called
Aztaxochitl (Alvarado Tezozomoc 1980 [1598]: 223)— is a strict phonetic
derivation according to the rules of Nahuatl w ord composition, as D uverger(1983: 77-79) observes. Nevertheless, he remarks, they all denote whiteness andcorrespond to a m arshy environm ent, two elements which also characterise
Tenochtitlan. As for its geographic location the sources are vague andcontradictory. According to Alvarado Tezozomoc (1992 [c. 1600-1610]: 15) andthe Codice Ramirez (1980 [c. 1581-1590]: 4), for example, Aztlan stood in the
recently discovered province of Nuevo Mexico, but Alva Ixtlilxdchitl (1985 [c.
1608-1625]: II, 28) placed it tow ards the West, beyond Xalisco, Duran (1967[1579-1581]: II, 18) near Horida, and the Histoire du Mechique (in Garibay 1965:96) "beyond the m ountain of Tholman that Florida natives call Quivira." Much
speculation surrounds this issue though the m ost favoured hypotheses today
are those by Jimenez Moreno (1973: 169-170) who suggested Aztlan stood in
the lake of Mexcaltitlan, in present day Nayarit, and Kirchhoff (1961: 64-67 &1985: 258-259) who proposed it laid before present day San Isidro Culiacan,
across the Lerma river, in south-west Guanajuato.60
Interpretations concerning Aztlan's elusive location and its similarity to
Mexico-Tenochtitlan range between two extreme positions. One considers
m igration narratives essentially as symbolic constructs linked to cosm ology
the form of a river and Chimalpahin, in his Memorial (1998 [1620-1631]: I, 85), speaks
about an arm of the sea.
59 Compare the pictorial representation of Aztlan in the Mapa Siguenza and the codices
Boturini, Azcatitlan and Aubin (figs. 8-11) with that of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in the Histoire
Mexicaine... and the codices Mendoza and Aubin (figs. 12-14). Also the descriptions of both
places in the written sources quoted in this section.
For a list of the principal locations that scholars have proposed se e Tibon (1980: 355).

236(e.g. Brinton 1882, Seler 1985 [1894]) or to the political necessities of pow er
legitimation (e.g. Price 1980, Graulich 1974, 1984 & 1992, Florescano 1990,
Duverger 1983, Davies 1984). Thus while Seler (1985 [1894]: 326) saw Aztlan as"a mythical hypostasis" of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and the full story as a symbolic
chart of the cosmos referring to the cardinal directions rather than to realplaces, for Graulich (1974: 37-44,1984: 26 & 1992: 92-93) the narrative is m ainly asymbolic representation of the conflict between foreigness (hunter-gatherer
newcomers) and autochthony (local fisher-agriculturists). Contrastingly, theother position assumes that as migration narratives contain real facts clothed inmythical images, it is possible to reconstruct, on the map, the route that them igrants m ay have followed. Acosta Saignes (1946: 34-40), for instance,
attributed source discrepancies to the actual existence of two travel routes
followed by different groups who met and m erged in Tollan, w hereas Jimenez
Moreno (1973), Kirchhoff (1961: 59), and M artinez M ann (1971 & 1989) —w ho
attribute the Aztlan/Tenochtitlan likeness to the Mexica preference forlacustrine environm ents— believe that one single migration route is m uch
likelier.61
The Azteca began their march organised in various calpoltin —eachconstituted by several nuclear families linked by kinship according to O bregon
Rodriguez (995: 271)— all guided by four chiefs and a w om an w ho carried the"magic bundle" containing the tribal god's relics and spirit. The reasons m ost
frequently quoted as prom pting departure are three:62 dynastic or religious
conflicts betw een two brothers (Alvarado Tezozomoc 1992 [c. 1600-610]: 15-16;
Histoire du Mechique, in Garibay 1965: 96), the collective desire to conquer new
territories (HMP, in Garibay 1965: 39) or to escape the tyranny of an overlord(Castillo 1991 [1597-1600]: 115-119), and the comm and of god Huitzilopochtli

61 For more detailed discussions of these interpretative positions s e e Olive Negrete 1996 andN avarrete 1999.
62 Note that the p assages by Castillo and Chimalpahin herein quoted adduce more than one ofth ese reasons, while other sources like Historia de Tlatelolco (1948 [1528]) and Anales deCuauhtitlan (1992 [1570]) adduce none.

237—directly, in the form of a bird or through his priest63 (Codex Boturini, Codex
Mexicanus, Mapa Siguenza, Chimalpahin 1998 [c. 1620-1631]: I, 85-59 & 179-181,
Torquem ada 1975 [1615]: 1,112).
Of the multiple places they visited on the way, settling dow n for periodsof variable duration, only a few are relevant here. Two, Colhuacan (also called
Teocolhuacan) and Chicomoztoc(also

calledQuinehuayan)areindistinguishable from each other and occasionally even from

often
Aztlan.

Colhuacan/Teocolhuacan, regularly the first stop en route, appears as the placeof origin of an additional set of hum an groups, usually eight, who tem porarily
joined the ranks of the m igrant Azteca whereas Chicomoztoc is distinguished,in textual sources, as a sacred site where m igrant groups (Aztecs and others)
perform propitiatory rituals before they can actually take leave. Both locations
sometimes appear as different names for the same place of collective origin,though m ost frequently they are represented as contiguous, successively
visited spots.
Textual and pictorial sources alike rem ark the subordinate position thatthe eight calpoltin

from Teocolhuacan/Chicomoztoc took

during theirtem porary alliance with the Aztecs, having begged to be adm itted as travelcompanions and thus recognising the superiority of Huitzilopochtli as theprincipal deity of their "chosen leaders" (Calneck 1978: 251). Although the list
varies in different accounts, it is identical —or almost identical— in nearly half
the sources in m y sample, usually including the principal altepetl of the valley of
Mexico and its surroundings64 and thereby foreshadowing later politicaldevelopments.
From Teocolhuacan the Aztecs and the eight calpoltin m arched together
until reaching a large standing tree, beneath which the Aztecs built a small altar
63 The nam es Mexi and Tetzauhteotl also appear as those of the patron god, referred a s wellas the Demon (or tlacatecdlotl, Nahuatl word that missionaries coined for the Devil). Mexi and
Huitzilopochtli however are also the nam es of the Aztec leader, deified after death inCulhuacan and thence identified with the patron god of the overall group.
64 Unlike codices Boturini, Azcatitlan and Aubin that represent the groups by their collective
name, Mapa Siguenza represents them by their named rulers, appearing a s well in Codex
Azcatitian.

238

for Tetzahuitl Huitzilopochtli. The events occurred in this and the following
episode are enigmatic. They involve the breaking of the tree (fig. 15), preceded
or followed by Huitzilopochtli's m andate ordering the Aztecs to abandon theeight calpoltin (Histoire Mexicaine... 1998: 68-69, codices Boturini

and Aubin,

Alvarado Tezozomoc 1992 [c. 1600-1610]: 19-20,65 Chimalpahin Tercera relacion
1998 [c. 1620-1631]: I, 185-187). Immediately, an apparition amidst the desert:
Certain characters alluded to as demons or "mimixcoa" are sacrificed or
enslaved by the Aztecs (Histoire Mexicaine... 1998: 70-71, codices Boturini and
Azcatitlan, Alvarado Tezozomoc 1992 [c. 1600-1610]: 21-23, Chim alpahin Tercera
relacion 1998 [c. 1620-1631]: 1,187) w hereupon the group adopts a new collective
name —Mexica or Mexitin— following Huitzilopochtli's mandate.
L6pez Austin has pointed out the fundamental resemblance betw een theepisode of the broken tree just described and the rupture of the tree of
Tamoanchan which, according to other myths, stands at the centre of thecosmos communicating the hum an world and the divine realm. This incident
added onto the Aztecs’ sudden separation from their newly found companions,and their acquisition of a new name, suggests the renewal of the exclusive bondthat they had w ith their patron god (L6pez Austin 1989a: 93-95 & 1990: 96). As
we shall see in chapter seven the Spaniards well understood the message these
episodes encoded, recognising them as the supernatural institution of thepolitical order prevailing in Central Mexico w hen Cortes arrived.
Other scenes of political segmentation surface in following episodes thatshow the group's successive abandonm ent of small m isbehaving fractions. One
incident occurred in Mechoacan or lake Patzcuaro; another in Malinalco, w here
due to her sorcery, Malinalxoch, Huitzilopochtli's sister, was left behind while
sleeping. Much later her son Copil would trace the Mexica to Chapultepec andplot a regional w ar to avenge their deceit. The third episode depicts an internal
65 The episode is very obscure in this text because it mentions the tree and its rupture but
omits the eight calpoltin from Colhuacan and the god's instruction to leave them behind. Thus
it is only in relation with the other sources herein quoted that it becomes clear (see Calneck
1978: 246-247).

239

schism that is m uch more dramatic. The incident took place next to Coatepec,
the hill w here according to Duran (1967 [1579-1581]: II, 31-34), Alvarado
Tezozdmoc (1992 [c. 1600-1610]: 30-36 & 1980 [1598]: 227-229) and Torquem ada(1975 [1615]: I, 118-119), the Mexica built a dam that turned the place into agarden of abundance, so sweet and blissful that Coyolxauhqui and herfollowers requested Huitzilopochtli to end the migration, thus causing the furyof the god who slaughtered the impatient dissidents. While the incident is
om itted in several sources that make m ention of Coatepec simply as a visitedplace, where nothing remarkable happened (e.g. Historia de Tlatelolco 1948
[1528]: 32, Origen de los Mexicanos), Codex Azcatitlan (plates 9-10) and HMP (inGaribay 1965: 43-44) rather than as a m undane event present it as the
miraculous birth of god Huitzilopochtli, born in arm our from the w om b of
Coatlicue to slay his sister, Coyolxauhqui, and his innumerable brothers w ho
were planning to kill his still pregnant mother.66
Following the Aztec's steps after Coatepec, the next im portant stop is
Tula (Tollan). Although usually appearing as just another visited site, unm arked
by a particular event, its inclusion in the migration itinerary, however laconic, isdefinitely quite significant. As we have seen in previous chapters Tula had been
the political centre of a meteoric and powerful state, widely acknowledged as
the cradle of civilisation, and most Post-Classic polities in Central Mexico saw
ostensible Toltec ancestry as a conspicuous source of legitimacy at the level ofhegemonic power. Flourishing betw een the years 950 and 1150, Tula and the
Toltecs represent one of the m ost problematic issues that M esoamerican
specialists confront, partly because textual descriptions seem to be grossexaggerations w hen compared to the archaeological site of Tula Xicocotitlan,67
66 This version is substantially the sam e a s the cosmogonic myth of the birth ofHuitzilopochtli, which Sahagun (1989 [1558-1577]: I, 202-204) includes a s an independent
narrative within the section he devotes to native mythology, not as an episode of the A ztec
migration story.
67 The Relacion de la genealogia... (c. 1530-1532, in Garcia Icazbalceta 1891: III, 2 6 6 )a sse rts that Tula was "the first city ever to exist in these regions." Sahagun described th e
Toltecs a s a virtuous and knowledgeable people living in a realm of agricultural abundance andrefined urban life (1989 [1558-1577]: I, 208), who knew all the mechanical arts, invented
the calendar and script, astronom y and divination (1989 [1558-1577]: II, 650-654).

240

the only am ong several places bearing the name, which archaeologicalsequence corroborates ethno-historical reports on the composition of the Toltec
population and the collapse of the Toltec state.
Archaeological evidence shows that tow ards the beginning of the eighth
century the area where Tula Xicocotitlan was later established —inhabited until
then by small groups of agriculturists seemingly encompassed within theeconomic m acrosystem of Teotihuacan— experienced an abrupt increase inpopulation levels followed by a period of steady growth. This evidence and thesudden appearance of ceramic remains of the coyotlatelco type —form erly
related only to local elites of south-east Guanajuato, Zacatecas and Jalisco—indicate a massive arrival of migrants that coincides with the global contractionof northern Mesoamerican frontiers discussed in chapter two. A flow ofm igrants that m ay correspond to a large group of Culhuas who, according to
the Relacion de la Genealogta... (1891: IH, 263-267), came from Teoculhuacan led
by a certain character called Topild68 and established themselves, first in
Tulancingo and then in Tula. The civico-ceremonial complexes that constitutearchaeological Tula were built only during the following period (AD 800-950),
also m arked by the proliferation of mazapa objects, a kind of ceramic typical of
Teotihuacan. Therefore scholars consider that the population of Tula m ust havecomprised two m ain stocks: the Culhua or Tolteca-Chichimeca that various
sources trace back to Teoculhuacan-Chicomoztoc (i.e., im m igrants from
Guanajuato-Zacatecas-Jalisco), and the Nonoalca, probably a Nahuatl speaking
branch of the Teotihuacan descent also mentioned in the sources (Noguez 1995:
190-197 & 201-204, Lopez Austin & Lopez Lujan 1996:182-187, Bernal 1977:147).
As for the incidents and protagonists involved in the precipitous collapseof the Toltec state the sources are often contradictory. Yet they all present a
picture of internal conflict between factions, frequently leading to the exile of
the ru ler/p riest Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl and always resulting in the total erosion
68 Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl or just Quetzalcoatl in other sources like Sahagun (1989 [1 5 5 8 1577]: I, 209-218).

241

of political unity and, eventually, the complete abandonm ent of Tula (Zantwijk
1986: 321-337).69 Despite all the obscurities, scholars agree that Tula's downfall
eased the inflow of successive waves of Chichimeca immigrants70 into the basinof Mexico and surrounding valleys —of w hom the Mexica were the last. Also
they agree that the Toltec diaspora took a significant group of ToltecaChichimeca to the valley of Puebla71 whereas a smaller group, probably
comprising the ruling lineage descent, eventually established itself in
Culhuacan72 (Noguez 1995: 200-201, Carrasco 1971a: 459, Caam ano Panzi 1992:
138, Reyes Garcia & Giiemes 1995: 245-246, Lopez Austin 1993: 35, Brotherston
1995: 73-74).
The crucial point for us is that w hen the Mexica arrived in the valley all
five lake-shores were thoroughly filled w ith towns and hamlets, some foundedby the eight calpoltin w hom they had left at the site of the broken tree. Thus
they came to participate, initially, as yet another subordinate entity in aregional netw ork of interdependent but competing altepetl

w ith wellestablished mechanisms for power legitimation. Only one of these altepetl,
Culhuacan, was unequivocally a Toltec successor, since it had been founded byrefugees from Tula and maintained dynastic continuity. The rest w ere later
established by Chichimeca invaders, of w hom the group led by Xolotl wasparticularly prom inent as the dynasty he initiated in Tenayuca and Tetzcoco
eventually ruled the entire eastern sector of the valley. Other Chichimeca
groups include the Tepaneca, established in Azcapotzalco; the Otom f,

69 According to archaeological evidence Tula was nearly deserted early in the th irte e n th
cen tu ry .
70 The term Chichimeca applied to all "rustic," uncivilised peoples w hatsoever also se rv e d
to identify peoples with a common geographic origin in the North. Hence the ap p aren tly
contradictory use of the label Tolteca-Chichimeca for som e groups of Tula founders, whowere not uncultured but did come from the North, or the characterisation of ancient local
populations within the basin a s barbaric Chichimecas (Acosta 1962 [1590]: 320; Benavente
1969 [1565]: 2-3).
71 The HTC (1989 [c. 1533|) and the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan no. 2 (in Yoneda 1991) recount
how th ese Tolteca-Chichimeca sought the alliance of seven Chichimeca groups from
Chicomoztoc to expel the Olmeca-Xicallanca.
72 The Relacidn de la genealogfa... (c. 1 5 3 0 -1 5 3 2 ), the Origen de los Mexicanos (c .1 5 3 0 1 5 3 2 ), the Anales de Cuauhtltlan (1992 [1570]: 1 4 -1 7 ) and Alva Ixtlilxdchitl (1985 [c.
1608-1625]: I, 274-288) identify the Culhua with the Toltecs and their lineage with that of
Topiltzin Quetzalcdatl.

242

established in Xaltocan; the Acolhua, who settled dow n in Coatlinchan,interm arried with X61otl's Chichimecs and became part of the tlatocdyotl ofTetzcoco; the Totolimpaneca, w ho founded Chaleo, and the Xochimilca. Others,
like the Totomihuaque, the Tlaxcalteca and the Huexotzinca, to m ention just afew, peopled the adjacent valleys to the South (Keen 1984: 20, Carrasco 1971a:
465, Caamano Panzi 1992:134, Reyes Garcia & Giiemes 1995: 247-251).
By the time the Mexica arrived, the basin of Mexico was dom inated by aconfederation, sometimes described as constituting a Triple Alliance (Excan
Tlatoloyan in Nahuatl) where Tepaneca, Acolhua and Toltec peoples w ere
respectively represented by the allied cities of Azcapotzalco, Coatlinchan andCulhuacan (Armies de Cuauhtitldn 1992 [1570]: 37, Alva Ixtlilxochitl 1985 [c. 16081625]: I, 284, 342-347). This was a system of regional politics current at least
since the time of the Toltec supremacy. For the so-called Toltec em pire was aconfederation of three tlatocdyotl (Tollan-Otompan-Culhuacan), which was
replicated after the collapse of Tula in a new confederation (Xaltocan-TenayucaCulhuacan) replaced in turn by the Triple Alliance that Azcapotzalco, the m ost
powerful partner, maintained with Coatlinchan and Culhuacan (Garibay 1962:
9-10 & 13, Obregon Rodriguez 1995: 273-275, 281). Interestingly enough, theMexica circuit after Tula includes im portant altepetl in all three allied tlatocdyotl.
First they stopped at various localities in the eastern province of Acolhuacan;
then they visited the largest Tepaneca altepetl in the w estern shore of Tetzcoco
lake, establishing themselves for a long period in Chapultepec as vassals of
Azcapotzalco. Finally, a regional war forced them to leave this location request
asylum from the tlatoani of Culhuacan, who took them as vassals and allowed
them to settle the barren and desolate quarter of Tizaapan.
Sources of Mexica tradition use the period at Tizaapan to establish the
Mexica as a cunning and courageous lot, capable of enduring the m ost difficult
situations, w ho enjoyed the favoured protection of their god, Huitzilopochtli.
Being as they were, late intruders, whose customs often collided w ith the canon

243established by local culture, the Mexica awoke suspicion am ong m ost of thevalley's inhabitants, a situation that their enemy Copil had capitalised on toorchestrate the w ar that expelled them from Chapultepec. According to Duran(1967 [1579-1581]: II, 40) and Alvarado Tezozomoc (1992 [c. 1600-1610]: 50-51)
the Culhua tlatoani granted them Tizaapan hoping they would perish w hen
bitten by the poisonous snakes that sw arm ed the place, but m aking the m ost ofadversity the Mexica cooked and ate the serpents.
There is no point in reviewing source discrepancies concerning how
Culhua-Mexica relations evolved into the confrontation that put an end to the
Mexica stay in Tizaapan. Suffice it to say that neither the excessive tribute
obligations, nor the disadvantageous conditions under which they served asm ercenary troops had the shattering effect that Culhua nobility expected. On
the contrary, the military prowess they displayed in the w ar against Xochimilco
alerted the Culhua tlatoani, whose policy thereafter changed. He prom oted
interm arriage among Culhua and Mexica commoners and gave w om en of his
own lineage to m arry high ranking Mexica men. Nevertheless, the sacrifice the
Mexica perform ed to consecrate Huitzilopochtli's tem ple73

provoked theCulhua fury and, once again, they were forced to flee and roam the m arshylakeside, taking shelter am ong the reeds and rushes until discovering theirprom ised land.
The foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan is one of the m ost complex
episodes of the m igration story. For the purpose of m y discussion w e simply
need to know that in a tiny islet located within Azcapotzalco's territory, nearlake Tetzcoco's w estern shore,74 Huitzilopochtli miraculously delivered his
revelation: an eagle devouring a serpent, perched upon a prickly pear cactus
73 In som e sources the sacrificial victim is a Culhua maiden ( HMP, in Garibay 1965: 5 4 )—sometimes the daughter of the Culhua ruler himself (Alvarado Tezozdmoc 1992 [c. 1 6 0 0 1610]: 54-56, Duran 1967 [1579-1581]: II, 41)— w hereas in others the slain victims a refour Xochimilca captives (Codex Aubin 1963: 40-41, Torquemada 1975 [1615]: 1 3 1 -1 3 2 ,Historia de Tlateiolco 1948 [1528]: 39-41).
74 Mexica sources claim the islet was uninhabited but 1975-1979 excavations at the G reat
Temple of Tenochtitlan dem onstrated otherw ise. Remains unequivocally corresponding to theperiod AD 900-1200 lie beneath the level of remains dated after 1200 which correspond to
the Mexica occupation of the site, i.e., the city of Tenochtitlan (Duverger 1983: 350-351).

244

tree that grew from Cdpil's heart. The Mexica had killed Copil in ritual sacrifice
upon discovering his plot in Chapultepec several years back and they had
throw n his heart in the middle of the lake. N ow they could recognise thesignals that m arked the islet where it hit the ground as their ultimate
destination, so they finally established their own altepetl

and nam ed it

Tenochtitlan (Near the Prickly Pear Cactus Tree).
The scene is depicted in folio 2r of Codex Mendoza (fig. 13), show ing alarge rectangle within a blue border of stylised water, divided by tw ointersecting diagonal stripes that create the four sectors into which the city wasformally divided. At the centre stands a glyphic sign representing an eagle, acactus, and a stone.75 Framing the page is a continuous fifty-one-years count. It
begins in the upper left hand corner w ith the year 2-calli and continues around,ending at 13-acatl; that is, from the apparition of the miraculous signal to thefinal year of the reign of Tenoch, Mexica ruler since Culhuacan.76 Also
represented at the page bottom we see the Mexica conquests of Tenayuca andCulhuacan, both achieved in this period (Robertson 1994 [1958]: 98, Berdan &Anawalt 1997:4-5).
Despised by local people as a conflictive band of intruders, the Mexica
confronted in the beginning a very difficult situation. N ot only w ere they
forced to accept the condition of subjects to Azcapotzalco, given their altepetl
location within Tepaneca territory; they had also lost their tlatoaniin theChapultepec w ar and therefore had no dynastic ruler, an essential condition forpolitical autonom y. Furtherm ore, to achieve an effective presence in local
politics, the Mexica needed to link their own dynasty to that of an hegemonic
altepetl,

for as w e saw above, the Excan Tlatoloyan

completely structured

regional inter-group relations. Every altepetl in the valley was part of one of
75 The glyph is carved in a pre-conquest stone piece known as "teocalli de la guerra
sagrada," preserved in M6xico City (fig. 16).
76 Other pictorial representations include the Tira de Tepechpan (fig. 2), the Histoire
Mexicaine... (1998, se e fig. 12), codices Aubin (fig. 14), Azcatitlan (fig. 17) and Mexicanus,
w hereas written records include Dur6n (1967 [1579-1581]: II, 44), Chimalpahin Tercera
relacidn (1998 [c. 1620-1631]: I, 213-215), and Alvarado Tezozomoc (1992 [c. 1 6 0 0 1610]: 62-68).

245

three major tlatocdyotl, presided each by a hegemonic polity, that together
constituted a confederation which represented the major population stocks in
the region: Tepaneca, Acolhua-Chichimeca, and Culhua-Tolteca. The MexicaTenochca —an early conflict over land distribution had provoked a dissident
Mexica fraction to split off, settle dow n separately in the adjacent islet of
Tlatelolco and obtain its first tlatoani from the Tepaneca— decided to base theirruling lineage in Culhuacan due to the legitimising character this descent line
had as the m ost closely linked to Toltec ancestry (Broda 1978: 99, N avarrete
1991: 70-71). Later on they also secured Tepaneca blood by m arrying theirsecond ruler, Huitzilihuitl, to the daughter of Tezozomoc, tlatoaniof

Azcapotzalco (Obregon Rodriguez 1995: 278).
The first Mexica-Tenochca tlatoquehad, as subordinate rulers, very

limited pow er but their participation in their overlord's imperial w ars allowed
them to benefit from the tribute im posed on defeated tow ns (Obreg6n
Rodriguez 1995: 272-273 & 277, Hill Boone 1991: 138-139) and also broughtthem lands. After the 1418 Tepanec conquest of Tetzcoco, for example,
Azcapotzalco's tlatoani distributed a portion of the conquered territory am ong
subordinate allies, granting Huexutla to Tlatelolco and the city of Tetzcoco itself
to Tenochtitlan (Alva Ixtlilxochitl 1985 [c. 1608-1625]: I, 347). Thus by thefifteenth century the Mexica had developed such m ighty force and strong
politico-economic alliances that in 1426, capitalising on Tepaneca succession
conflicts they engineered a w idespread revolt (1428-1433) resulting in the defeatof Azcapotzalco, for which the collaboration of Tetzcoco and Tlacopan was
fundam ental. After this victory a new Triple Alliance perfectly fitting the Excan
Tlatoloyan tradition was formalised, its m em bers appearing as the successors of
the formerly dom inant confederation. Mexico-Tenochtitlan replaced Colhuacan
and its ruler took the title of Culhuatecuhtli (lord of the Culhua), w hereas thetlatoque of Tetzcoco and Tlacopan, respectively substituting Coatlinchan andAzcapotzalco, took the corresponding titles of Chichimecatecuhtli (lord of the246

Chichimeca) and Tepanecatecuhtli (lord of the Tepaneca). Nominally all threetlatocdyotl

were equal but the Mexica were in fact the dom inant partner(Carrasco 1971a: 465 & 1977: 174-175, 213-215, 218-221, Obregon R odriguez
1995: 278-282, Castillo Farreras 1972: 29, Bernal 1977:150).
This Triple Alliance, the so-called Aztec empire, soon extended its
dom ination beyond the limits ever reached by any previous pow er in
Mesoamerica.

Nevertheless,afewhighlyresistantpolities

rem ained

independent states until the Spaniards arrived, entrapped within its territory:
Tlaxcala and Huexotzinco in the Puebla-Tlaxcala region, Tototepec del N orteand Meztitlan to the Northeast, and Yopitzinco, Tototepec del Sur, andTeotitlan in the South (Davies 1968: 9-13, Carmack, Gasco & Gossen 1996: 8788). This ancient rivalry also sheds a light upon the significance thatcollaborating in the Spanish search for Nuevo Mexico could have had for the
Mexica, Tlaxcalteca and Huexotzinca, whose participation in several expeditions
is well documented, as the following chapter shows.

247
CHAPTER SEVENYOUR PAST IS OUR FUTURE. DOCUMENTING THE CROSS-CULTURAL
LOAN
In previous chapters I discussed how the history of N ew Mexico's colonisation has
been commonly associated with European legendary themes that Spanish
conquistadors, bewildered at the scene they found in central Mexico, would haveprojected onto the geographic and social space they subjected to the colonial rule.
Historians have long maintained that a Portuguese legend about seven bishops
w ho supposedly fled from Europe by sea to escape the Moor invasion of the
Iberian Peninsula, configured the expedition led by Francisco Vazquez deCoronado (1540-1542) and other subsequent journeys into the area that later
became N ew Mexico. The argum ent holds that the search for the Seven Cities of
Cibola —first reported by Marcos de Niza and quickly adopted as a prim ary goalin the north-w estw ard colonial expansion from N ew Spain— was carried out by
gold thirsty Spaniards who seized upon the old m yth of the Seven Cities allegedly
founded by the Portuguese bishops somewhere across the Ocean (Hodge 1907,
H am m ond 1956 Horgan 1963, Clissold 1961, Chavez 1968, Udall 1987, W eber 1987
& 1992, Cutter 1992, Pastor Bodmer 1992, Mora 1992).
This "mediaevalist hypothesis," which rests on the assum ption that Spanish
conquistadors acted on the basis of imaginary geographies tainting their vision
with well-known European chimeras, pertains to a historiographic tradition that
reduces the ideal worlds of the conquerors to the notion of "the marvellous." A
concept that scholars track dow n to popular culture in mediaeval Europe (e.g.,
W eckmann 1951 & 1984). Fully developed by Enrique de Gandfa in the late 1920s,
this interpretation became current in the 1940s, w hen authors like Irving Leonard(1944 & 1949) and Ida Rodriguez Prampolini (1948) re-wrote the history of early

248
Spanish colonialism emphasising those cases indicating that Europeans sought in
the N ew W orld the m onsters and marvels of their ow n culture. Today it iscommon place to assert that the desire ofconfirming the existence of themarvellous was such a strong driving force in the Spanish Middle Ages that it
shaped the N ew World enterprise as much as the Crown's imperial project, thecrusading spirit so deeply seated in the Spanish consciousness, or the ambitious
search for gold and spices (Weckmann 1951: 132, y 1984; Hanke 1959: 3, Ladero
1994:132).
This kind of perspective, very successful in the contem porary academic
world, has resulted in a general disregard of the role that Central Mexican
indigenous traditions of ancestral origin played in forging the image of Nuevo
Mexico that Spanish soldiers and authorities attained throughout the sixteenth
century. Moreover, the excessive weight that it attributes to the European im agery
also dilutes the importance that Indian political and territorial interests had in
shaping the colonising process.
My intention in this chapter is to document the suggestion, posed in different
sections of this thesis, that by mid sixteenth century N ew Spain's im aginary
geography comprised an allegedly rich, densely populated country defined in thesources as "the ancient Mexican's place of origin," and that the province of Nuevo
Mexico was established in the course of the search for this imaginary place. It is m ycontention that m any sixteenth and some early seventeenth century sources using
the term Nuevo Mexico actually m eant the starting point of the Azteca / Mexica
m igration as described in N ahua traditions of ancestral origin. Therefore I havesuggested to interpret the foundation of the province as a transcultural product,
the culmination of a process of semantic duplication that began in 1521 w ith the re­nam ing of Mexicoas Nueva Espana. Likewise I have proposed to see in the

exploration and settling of north-west New Spain the will of m any conquerors to249"de-migrate" an ancient migration, following back to Aztlan-ChicomoztocTeoculhucan the path that the Azteca / Mexica once followed in response to
Huitzilopochtli's mandate.
Some of the authors I criticised in chapter five (e. g. Gandfa 1929, Clissold
1961, Pastor Bodmer 1992) had already suggested, albeit weakly, that N ahua
m igration myths could have been among the legendary motifs that fed theconquerors’ imagination. However, they contended that Spaniards saw thoseindigenous narratives merely as the confirmation of other European fables throughwhich they had already conceived the nature of the unknow n territories. The
following quotation by

Pastor Bodmer(1992: 107) represents

well thisinterpretation:
In the New World the medieval legend of the Seven Bishops seems to havebeen mixed with another myth that the Indians in Mexico frequently told: thereligious myth of Chicomoztot [sic] that described the origins of the seven
Nahua tribes.
Greek and Roman legends concerning the Amazons and the Fountain of Eternal
Youth —popularised in the Middle Ages by Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, andnovels of chivalry— no doubt were widely searched in the Americas, as w e haveseen in chapter five. Amazons are often m entioned in early sixteenth century
documents, including Hernan Cortes' and N uno de Guzm an's letters. M oreover,the peninsula of California derived its name from those very sources. It is also
clear, we saw too, that the fabulous island of Antilla —appearing from thefourteenth century onw ards in m any European maps, often combined w ith thestory of the Seven Bishops—lent its name to the Caribbean archipelago. H ow ever,those stories evaporated once Cortes imposed the Spanish rule over the so-called
Aztec empire and, as documents directly related to the exploration of Nuevo Mexico
make no allusion to the famous bishops, the association m ust be attributed to the
speculation of m odem scholars.

250
On w hat basis do historians sustain that such imaginations survived thecolonising advance in mainland N orth America? Could the Spaniards keep their
mythical m onologue once they faced the complex, hierarchical societies of
Mesoamerica, tow ards which they avowedly felt more affinity than tow ards
Caribbean peoples?
N ew Mexico’s early history is characterised by disenchantment. As theconquest progressed N orth from the mining districts of Nueva Vizcaya settlers
saw w ith dismay that their dreams of rapid enrichment and social enhancem ent
vanished, for neither spectacular wealth nor grandiose urban centres come intoview beyond Santa Barbara. Yet lay and religious adventurers gave total credence
to all sorts of rum ours promising findings similar to the valley of Mexico
elsewhere. Such discordance between the "empirical reality" and expectation has
disconcerted the scholars, who cannot explain w hy the Spaniards w ere so reluctant
to abandon their hopes that the N orth concealed a w orld of incredible wealth andurban refinement. Certainly the old Aztec capital resembled nothing theEuropeans had seen before, but the supposition that these m ade them blind to
everything w ondrous except the legends they had grow n up w ith depends upon
an extremely simplistic understanding of the intersubjective dimensions ofpractice. The overwhelm ing encounter with Mexico-Tenochtitlan provoked wild
dream s of wealth and power indeed, but to develop into feasible projects such
dream s needed the firm supported of solid evidence, and it was N ahua traditionsof ancestral origin, indigenous reports concerning currently extant locations, andpersonal experience which provided that required evidence. Thus it was not afeverish imagination lost in the pursuit of chimeras but the form ulation of anem pirical reality w hat propelled the Spaniards northwards.

251
7.1.- Some explicit traces of the Azteca/Mexica m igration in colonial chronicles.
The clearest testimonies that link Nuevo Mexico to N ahua ancestral m igrations arecontained in a couple of texts written by soldiers who participated, respectively, inthe expeditions led by Francisco de Ibarra (Nueva Vizcaya) and Juan de Onate(Nuevo Mexico), both composed several years after the events their authors
protagonised and narrated. One is the epic poem by Gaspar de Villagra, Historia dela Nueva Mexico (1986 [1610]), which constitutes the most complete account w ehave on Onate's 1595-1598 conquest expedition. The other is Baltasar de O bregon's
Historia de los descubrimientos antiguos y modernos de la Nueva Espana (1924 [c. 1584]),
which contains lengthy accounts on the principal expeditions carried out in the
Northwest until 1582, including those that, like Ibarra's, did not necessarily aim toreach the Pueblo area but did search for the mythical land of Mexican origin.
N either Obregdn nor Villagra ever use such nam es as Aztlan, Teoculhuacan
or Chicomoztoc. However, both m ention the Mexica primeval abode, theirm igration and the indigenous codices recording the story. Obregdn (1924 [c. 1584]:10), for instance, wrote that H ernando Cortes and viceroy M endoza tried to"discover the origin, coming, root and m ain of the ancient Culgua Mexica"(descubrir el origen, venida, raiz y tronco de los antiguos culguas mexicanos), seriously
suspecting that they would find many people and riches "to be placed under them antle of the Catholic faith" (para sugetarlos al gremio de nuestra santa fe catdlica).
Twenty five years later Villagra (1986 [1610]: chants I-HI) claimed that in thoselatitudes where Nuevo Mexico stood, traces of the ancestral m igration of the
Mexicans abounded. Thus we can confidently assert that the ancient indigenous
traditions came to formulate the objective of the Spanish colonial enterprise and tosuggest the projection of the name Nuevo Mexico onto the North. Although often

252
overlooked, the following paragraph from Obregon (1924 [c. 1584]: 14-15) spells
this out clearly:
The first and foremost reason why [the Spaniards] were eager to carry out anexpedition to Cibola, original abode of the Mexicans, was that among theparaphernalia, furniture and treasure of the powerful king Moctezuma, themarquis [Cortes] found chronicles, hieroglyphs, and paintings that revealed theorigin, root, and migration story of the Culhuas and the ancient Mexicans.1
Now, if conquerors could formulate their exploits on the basis of those narratives
it was because they fulfilled two basic requirements to qualify as legitimate,truthful and authoritative knowledge. On the one hand they were chronologicallystructured as annals —a well reputed format for recording historical knowledge inEurope too— and, although they were orally transm itted, they were also
contained in the pictorial codices that conquerors had identified as books,2recorded in the form of "hieroglyphic texts". Thus the authoritative character thatwriting had for Christian culture m ade of these traditions legitimate knowledge, as
it is clear from the following passage by Villagrd:
It is notorious, public voice and famous,that from these regions descend,those more ancient Mexicans,whom the famous city of Mexico,
so hey named to insure they would always,
eternally be remembered,[...]

the truth of which is proved and verified,by that ancient painted,
hieroglyphs they possess,to communicate and understand each other3

1 "La ca u sa e razon principal e primera de haber sido codiciado el descubrimlento e jornada de lasprovincias de Cibola y origen mexicano fue haber hallado el m arques las crdnicas, caracter ypinturas, entre los homenaje, muebles y tesoro del poderoso rey Moctezuma, las cuales
satisfaclan el origen, tronco e venida a estos reinos de los culguas y antiguos mexicanos."
2 In fact when Motolima (1996 [1541]: 121) describes to the King the different kinds of "books*that Mexican Indians had he remarks that only one, the annals ("el de los anos y tiempos") istrustw orthy and its content can be confidently taken as legitimate, true knowledge. The o th e rs
are the product of the Devil’s invention.
3 D estas nuevas regiones e s notorio, / publica voz y fama que descienden, / aquellos m as antiguos
Mexicanos, / que a la ciudad de Mexico fam osa, / el nombre le pusieron porque fuesse, / e te rn asu memoria perdurable / [...] / cuya verdad se sa c a y verifica, / por aquella antiquisim a pintura,/ y modo hierogliphico que tienen, / por el cual tratan, / hablan y s e entienden (Villagr& 1 9 9 2[1610]: 75).

253
On the other hand, the fact that there was multiple documents and oral testimonies
telling the story fitted well with the criteria for authenticity and credibility current
in the Spanish juridical and political practice of the time, which established theveracity of any one given statement through the accumulation of testimonies.
Therefore, since m any informants from different localities told the same story in avery similar way, certainty over its trustworthiness became ever m ore strong.
As w e saw in chapter six Nahua m igration narratives share a general
structure that fulfilled political legitimising functions. Most accounts start from aplace in the underw orld "The Seven Caves" (Chicomoztoc), combined in the
Azteca/Mexica case with another location surrounded by water: Aztlan. The
m igrants, invariably instructed by a patron god, who offers a glorious destiny, set
out in a log pilgrimage after crossing an arm of the sea, a lake or a stream. Thenthey continue until finding a signal, previously revealed by the god, whichindicates the ending point of the journey: the prom ised land. In the Azteca /Mexica case, god Huitzilopochtli is the commanding divinity and the waters
crossed are those of the lake wherein the island city of Aztlan stood. A part fromthe foundation of Tenochtitlan, signalled by the appearance of an eagle perched ona prickly pear tree, the episode concerning the rupture of a tree that m arked thefirst schism of the N ahua m igrant group is crucial for the present discussion.
Let us then analyse with detail the passages corresponding to the Azteca /Mexica migration in Villagra's Historia de la Nueva Mexico.4
After stating the geographic position of the province that Onate conquered,Villagra declares that it is publicly known to be the original hom eland of the
Aztecs. Then he narrates Central Mexican Nahua traditions of ancestral origin,arguing that they certify such reputation, which is also confirmed by the tales thesoldiers heard in the frontier settlements of New Spain. According to Villagra,
4 The fragm ent com es in Villagra (1992 [1610]: 74-87).

254
natives in those regions unanimously repeated that far in the N orth the land
concealed a "simple, hollow cave" (la concava caverna desabrida) from where long
before had departed "two brave brothers" (dos briosisimos hermanos) of royallineage, each guiding a large group of people and animated by the desire to extend
the scope of their empire. N ot far from where they set out, however, they had anapparition: A well know n dem on euphemistically alluded to as "that damned"(aquel maldito) suddenly rose before them, disguised as an old, horrible wom an, todeliver the Devil's instructions. Over the head this grisly w om an carried anenorm ous piece of pure iron in the shape of a turtle shell. After declaring that she
approved of the brothers' ambition of power and glory she com m anded one ofthem to return home, as their father was old and sick, while she instructed theother to follow the destiny of his noble fate and continue dow n the road until
founding Mexico-Tenochtitlan. I quote the w ords that Villagra attributes to theDemon, which correspond to the m andate of Huitzilopochtli that, according to the
N ahua m yth, prom pted the Azteca / Mexica migration:[And you must settle down]
on a hard and solid rock,entirely surrounded by clear water,where a tuna cactus will be planted,
and perched upon the wide, thick cactus leafs,
an impressive eagle, beautiful, enormous,
fiercely feeding herself will tightly,
grasp in her claws a large serpent,[...]For there He wants to have established,
the high and gentle metropolis,of the powerful state,
which he expressly orders,
to be named Mexico Tenochtitlan55 "...donde en duro y solido penasco, / de cristalinas aguas bien crecido, / vidredeis una tuna
estar plantada, / sobre cuyas gruesas y anchas hojas, / un dguila caudal bella disforme, / conbraveza cebando s e estuvlere, / en una gran culebra que a sus garras / vereys que e sta rebuelta
y bien asida / que alii quiere se funde y se lebante, / la metrdpoli alta y generosa, / del poderoso
estado senalado, / al cual expresam ente manda, / que Mexico Tenuchtitlan se ponga..." (Villagra
1992 [1610]: 82-83).

255
The passage, it m ust be noted, contains the central elements of the Azteca /Mexica
m igration as N ahua traditions recount them. The place of origin, Chicomoztoc,
represented by "the simple hollow cave;" the departure at the request of a god,
Huitzilopochtli (here the disguised Demon), and the emblematic signal of the eagle
devouring a serpent as indicative of the arrival into the "Promised Land" (theValley of Mexico). Furthermore, it also contains, in a somewhat distorted form, thetree-breaking episode that, in some versions of the indigenous narrative (e.g.,
codex Boturini plate IE, Alvarado Tezozomoc 1992 [c. 1600-1610]: 19-20), m arks them om ent when, following Huitzilopochtli's m andate, the Aztecs parted with theother N ahua groups (the eight calpoltiri) and changed their nam e for that of
Mexica. An episode that Villagra expressed, first, with the Demon's instructions
ordering one brother to return hom e thereby enabling the other to proceed; andsecondly, w ith the piece of broken iron that the Demon used to indicate —m arking
the soil as if it were a map— the w ay in which the m igrants had to settle theterritory once they reached the "promised land:"And standing on her toes,
she raised her thin yet powerful arms,
and then propelled her monstrous cargo [the iron piece],[...]

and as it hit the solid ground,
trembling, totally perturbed,
it broke to pieces that sprinlded all around,and in this very way, following the pattern of those marks,[the Mexica] later on divided their domains6
Villagra does not reveal the sources upon which he based his account of the Azteca/ Mexica migration. Most probably he used oral information, though he could
have used some of the accounts w ritten by missionaries on this topic in the second

6 "Y levantando en alto los talones [...] / alzo los flacos brazos poderosos, / y dando a lam onstruosa carga vuelo [...] / la portentosa carga solto en vago, / y apenas ocupd la dura t i e r r a[...] / cuando temblando y toda estrem ecida / quedo por todas partes quebrantada, / [Y asi], deaquesta misma suerte traza y modo, / la poderosa tierra [m£s tarde] dividieron..." (V illag e
1992 [1610]: 83-84).

256
half of the sixteenth century. It is difficult to know w hether he saw any of theindigenous pictorial documents that he characterised as "ancient painted
hieroglyphs." However, his oral sources were certainly well informed. Many
captains in Onate's arm y had access to first-hand information on the Indian
civilisation that the conquest had destroyed: Juan de Onate's father, Cristobal, hadarrived with H em an Cortes and, w hen Vazquez de Coronado left for Cibola, hebecame governor of N ueva Galicia. Like him other captains in the arm y hecom m anded had direct kinship links with first conquerors and settlers. As for the
events concerning the colonising process prior to Onate's expedition it is quitepossible that Villagra obtained most of his information from oral sources as well.
On the one hand he frequently remarks, w hen speaking about things he did not
personally see, that his assertions are based on eyewitness testimonies. On theother hand, we know that m any of his fellow soldiers had participated in earlier
expeditions. Nevertheless he seems to follow closely the history by Baltasar deO bregon (1924 [1584]). Also, he may have known the reports by N unez Cabeza deVaca (1906 [1642]) and the passages on the conquest of N ueva Vizcaya, Cibola andNuevo Mexico contained in early printed chronicles such as Mendieta's Historia
Eclesidstica Indiana (1997 [1597]: II, 59-64,471-474,495-502).
The most rem arkable aspect of the first chants in Villagra's poem, how ever,is not the degree of detail to which they reconstruct past events that the author
m ay have know n either by word of m outh or through other texts. It is those
rem arks that Villagra makes as an eyewitness w hat seem specially outstanding.
That is, the empirical evidence that verifies, in his opinion, m ost of the Aztec
m igration story. Particularly revealing is the way in which he articulates N ahua
m yths, his own experience, and the reports concerning the Seven Cities that
Spanish soldiers constantly obtain from Indian informants.

257
To begin with, Villagra asserts that just as the ruins of Classical Rome, "thatiron heap rem ained right where it was planted" (aquel mojon que alU quedo plantado),
standing as a m onum ent on the way to Nuevo Mexico. Therefore, he continues,
every soldier in Onate’s arm y —including himself— could see it, realising incomplete am azem ent that it certified the Mexica story. Moreover, to convince thereader he argues "as an eyewitness" (como testigo de vista) that the metal was as
pure and fine as Copella silver, and that no iron vein that could explain its
provenance existed in the vicinity (Villagra 1992 [1610]: 84-85)7 Secondly, hementions the ruins of a large city —most probably La Quem ada— and theabundant ceramic remains that the arm y constantly came across:That it is from this new territory that first departed,
the refined Mexicans is indicated,by the large, destroyed city,that we all can see in Nueva Galicia,
with its massive buildings turned to ruins,which the natives of the land,
assert was founded,by the new Mexicans who left,from the land we now search for,[... and beyond this place the soldiers
everywhere they walked discovered]patent traces, marks and signs,of the truth we now pursue,
for throughout all those deserted lands,
and without looking for it,
we always found plenty of ceramics,of quality good and bad,sometimes gathered in large piles,
sometimes spread around, dispersed8

7 The large pieces of virgin iron that are the object of Villagra's speculation in this passage a rethe fragm ents of a m eteorite. They were obviously an outstanding landmark in the time when
Ofiate led his army to Nuevo Mexico and they still exist today, though not in the place w here
Villagr6 saw them, that is, where the m eteorite hit the ground (Stephen Lekson, C urator of
Anthropology, Museum of Natural History, University of Colorado: Verbal communication).
8 "Y haber salido destas nuevas tierras, / los finos m exicanos nos lo m uestra, / aquella granciudad desbaratada, / que en la Nueva Galicia todos vemos, / de gruessos edificios derribados, /donde los naturales de la tierra, / dizen que la plantaron y fundaron, / los nuevos Mexicanos quesalieron, / de aqu esta nueva tierra que buscmos, / [...y desde aqui la soldadesca por todas p a rte sencontraba] / patentes rastros, huellas y senates, / desta verdad que vam os inquiriendo, / a
cau sa de que en todo el despoblado, / siempre fuimos hallando sin buscarla, / m ucha sum a de loza,mala y buena, / a vezes en montones recogida, / y otras toda esparcida y derram ada..." (Villagra
1992 [1610]: 86-87)

258
It could be argued, of course, that this is a post-factum interpretation, elaborated
after the province was established and in a tim e w hen the colonial andm etropolitan authorities had put into question the convenience of keeping it as acolony thereby making it necessary to find justifications for its maintenance. On
the other hand, there is sufficient proof to assert that, in publishing his poem ,Villagra sought to back up his request to be appointed governor of a mining
region, for while writing the text he was negotiating in Spain the corresponding
royal charter.9 For both reasons it could be strategically convenient to present
Nuevo Mexico as the Aztec ancestral hom eland and to prove that m any otherconquerors since Cabeza de Vaca and Cortes himself had tried to find the place.
Nevertheless, earlier documents (letters, reports and petitions) deriving from the1580s expeditions to the Pueblo area and from other enterprises not necessarily
linked to the exploration of that region, also refer to Nuevo Mexico in such term sthat an association with the original Aztec hom eland, w hen not explicit, isinescapable.
The first document I w ant to bring forth is the one Brotherston and Gallegos(1990) call the Tlaxcala Codex, the final section (f. 236-317) of Diego M unoz
Cam argo's Historia de Tlaxcala (number 242 of the H unter Collection of the
University of Glasgow). It is a sixteenth century pictorial manuscript that consistsof a series of 156 scenes primarily depicting the battles that Tlaxcalan Indiansfought against other native peoples as part of the obligations deriving from their
alliance w ith Cortes and other European captains. The Codex no doubt is related tothe so-called Lienzo de Tlaxcala, painted around 1550, as it contains almost the sam e
scenes, w ith the same order and the same Nahuatl glosses (Brotherston & Gallegos
1990: 117-118). How ever it expands the Lienzo to include the conquests of

9 Official docum ents concerning this petition are reproduced in Francisco del Paso y T roncoso's
edition of V illage (Villagra 1900: II, 5-81).

259
Guatemala, Oriente, Nicaragua and Oaxaca, as well as Vazquez de C oronado’s
expedition to Cibola (Cipolla in the Codex glosses). This final scene, that occupies
the last folio in the Codex (Acuna 1984) shows an enclosed tow n with sevenentrances, or gateways (fig. 18) that resonate with the seven Chicomoztoc caves(Brotherston & Gallegos 1990: 134-135). Reason w hy Brotherston (1995: 74) thinksthat the docum ent "reflects the ancient history as if repeated achetypally insixteenth century events.
The Tlaxcala Codex is an indigenous document, painted by indigenous scribes,
and herein lies its importance for the argum ent of this thesis because, while it was
the Spaniards alone who conceptualised Mexico as a Nueva Espana, the toponymic
projection of Mexico onto the N orthw est was the product of the collaborative
construction of Spaniards and N ahua Indians, involved at least since the decade of
1540 in the common enterprise of subjecting the Chichimeca territory. This isclearly stated not only in the Tlaxcala Codex but also in another pair of indigenous
documents that, in addressing the Mixtdn War, are far from portraying N ahua
troops as merely "participating in Spanish conquests."
Plate 1 of the Cddice de Tlatelolco (fig. 19), painted in the second half of thesixteenth century, shows for instance thearmiesthat viceroy M endoza

com m anded to fight in that war, but while small m ounted characters at the bottomof the page represent the Spanish troops, w ith their captains (including the viceroy
himself), large standing Indian warriors represent the leading caciques of the Indiancompanies, indicating that for the scribe the w ar was som ehow an indigenous
enterprise. A similar attitude of pride is manifest in the account that Francisco
Acauzitli, cacique of Tlalmanalco, wrote about the perform ance of his people—w hom he personally commanded— in that w ar (AGN, Historia, vol. 4, No. 5, f.
483-508).

260

After the Mixton W ar many N ahua Indians from Central Mexico w ent alongin the conquering expeditions heading northwards. As I explained in chapter four,
an im portant Mexica group collaborated w ith Francisco de Ibarra and founded thevillage of Nombre de Dios. It is not impossible that Indian collectivities such as thisone contributed to convince the Spanish captains that the search for the ancestral
N ahua hom eland was a feasible enterprise. Obregdn (1924 [1584]: 39-41) asserts in
his chronicle that Francisco de Ibarra's uncle, Diego, was determ ined to "discover
the Nuevo Mexico, which in those days was called Copala" and which m any people
thought to be the place of origin of the "ancient Culguas Mexicanos".

The 1563

Relacidn de lo que descubrio Diego de Ibarra en la provincia de Copala, llamada Topiame(AGI, Patronato 21, No. 4, R. 3) and the Relacidn de las cosas de la gobernacidn de la
Nueva Vizcaya e informaciones referentes al servicio de Francisco de Ibarra. (Patronato
20, No. 5, R. 16) provide the corresponding first-hand testimonies.
Although Francisco and Diego de Ibarra did not use the expression Nuevo
Mexico as a toponym , they did say about certain places that they could well be a
"New Mexico," and also stated openly the desire to find the Mexican ancestralhom eland. On the other hand, it is precisely to this period that the first
docum ented uses of the term as a place-name thus far identified belong. The
earliest is a report by friar Jacinto de San Francisco (1561). I hereby quote therelevant passage:
Hoping to witness in my own days another conversion process like that of thisland, I set out from this city in die company of two other friars, more than two
years ago, in the search for Nuevo Mexico, the existence of which is
known since we arrived in [New Spain], although it has not yet beenverified [...] and we came to a point one hundred and fifty leagues from thiscity, where there are many different people [...] And this [exploring enterprise] I
would undertake wilfully [...] in order to contribute [...] to opening the way to
Santa Elena and to the new land where Francisco Vazquez de Coronado went,261

and many leagues beyond, so that [...1 Nuevo Mexico's truth could be finallyestablished.10
Note that the friar here does not refer to the region later identified as Nuevo
Mexico. The term, in the text, is the name of a place indeed but not a know n place.
Nuevo Mexico appears in his discourse as an elusive, hidden object, the existence of
which the Spaniards struggle to verify. A place, in short, that conquerors andmissionaries dream t about on the basis of Indian tales. An interesting docum ent
dated a few years later represents the first m om ent w hen the mythical goal was
reified; that is, a chart recording the act of taking possession of "Nuevo Mexico's
Lake" discovered on Novem ber 8, 1568 by a certain Francisco Cano, lieutenantm ayor of the mines of Mazapil.11
7.2.- A mirror image: Mexico-Tenochtitlan and Nuevo Mexico /Cibola/Copala.
The similarity betw een Aztlan and Mexico-Tenochtitlan has not only been thesubject of intense academic debate in the nineteenth and tw entieth centuries. Just
as m odem scholars have done, the Spaniards noted from the start the patent
similarity that indigenous painted books and oral traditions attributed to the tw ofurtherm ost points in the migration epic of the Azteca /Mexica. As I said in chapter
six, none of the pictographs on this topic that Cortes and his m en saw in the early
contact years seems to havesurvived. Nevertheless,theunquestionable

resemblance between the representation of Aztlan in the Mapa Sigiienza (fig. 8) andthat of Mexico Tenochtitlan's foundation in the Histoire Mexicaine... (fig. 12) and the
10 "Con deseo de ver en en mis dias otra conversion sem ejante a la de esta tierra, sail d esta
ciudad en com pam a de otros dos religiosos, habra m as de dos anos, en dem anda del Nuevo Mexico,de quien se ha tenido noticia desde que a esta tierra vinimos, aunque la certinidad no se ha v isto[...] y llegamos ciento y cincuenta leguas desta ciudad, a donde hay gran diferenca de gentes [...]
La cual (demanda) yo tom aba y tomarfa con gran voluntad [...] para que [...] se abriera camino
desde aqui a Santa Elena y a la tierra nueva donde fue Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, y muchas
leguas m as adelante, y muy en breve y en poca costa [...] saberse la certinidad del Nuevo
M6xicco." Letter from Jacinto de San Francisco to the King, Mexico, July 20, 1561 (In Garcia
Icazbalceta 1889, II: 241-243).
11 Toma de posesion de la Laguna de Nuevo Mexico. Testimonio dado por el escribano Pedro de
Valverde, 10 November 1568 (in CODOINAO: XV, 535-540).

262

Codex Aubin (fig. 14), and between these and the emblem representing thefoundational miracle engraved in the pre-conquest monolith known as Teocalli de laguerra sagrada (fig. 16) dem onstrate that for indigenous people both places
m irrored each other.
Somehow the narrative of the m igration as contained in the standard pre­conquest version invites verification. Already in pre-conquest times Moctezuma I(1439-1469) sent a group of wise men to follow his ancestors' pilgrimage routeback to the land of origin but they could not follow the traces beyond Tula, so they
appealed to magic (Duran 1967 [c. 1579-1581]: II, 215-222). M odem scholarlyinterpretations of these narratives, as we saw in chapter six, aim either to unravel
the symbolic significance of this similarity or to reconstruct the m igratory path inorder to locate Aztlan. For some scholars this would am ount to solving "theproblem of the degree of credence that Mexican indigenous traditions in generalcan be accorded" (Kirchhoff 1961: 59). Curiously enough, in his attem pt toovercome the difficulties that Moctezuma's envoys had solved through magic,
Kirchhoff engages in a sort of "de-migration" structurally very similar to the onethat sixteenth century conquerors also carried out. Like them, he matches the
localities m entioned in ethnohistorical sources with present day localities bycom paring the landm arks described in the chronicles and codices w ith thoseobservable on the ground. This type of verifying strategy depends on assum ing anessential similarity between the principles that rule the w ay in which the cognisantsubject form ulates his relation to the world and the principles that articulate theunderstandings of the alien discourse m ediating his relation to the object he wants
to cognise, which entails of course identification. As we saw in chapter tw o it was
precisely this cognitive operation w hat opened the space for the transcultural
negotiation that m ade the Spaniards believe there was another indigenous
metropolis where they could repeat their exploits.

263
For the Spaniards Nuevo Mexico was Aztlan, even if they did not spell it out
by using the term. A European coastline m ap published in the 1580 Atlas by Vaz
Dourado (map 10) indicates how far was this a widespread assum ption in the
period preceding the foundation of the province that Onate conquered. The chart,
intended as an instrum ent for navigation, shows in a central position the Pacific
Ocean seashore of N orth America, including Baja California. Although it contains
o*|htalmost nothing else, two identification elements on the teft extreme of the page
resonate w ith images of Aztlan as they appear in two or three prototypical codicessuch as the Codex Boturini and the Codex Azcatitlan (figs. 9-10), and also w ith the"map of Tenochtitlan" attributed to H em an Cortes (map 8). One above the other, apair of brain-cell-looking figures interconnected by a narrow line (or thread orchannel) clearly represent two lakes. The one in the bottom is m arked with thelegend "Fernaocortes. atomoporar Matecuma MEXICO" so it obviously represents
Mexico City; the one at the top has no legend but I contend it is Nuevo Mexico.
Tenochtitlan m irrors Aztlan in that it is a lake, among other things, and Nuevo
Mexico, represented in this m ap exactly N orth from Mexico city, does the same. Let
us not forget that already in 1568 Francisco Cano claimed to have discovered"Nuevo Mexico's Lake" somewhere around the mining district of Mazapil(CODOINAO: XV, 535-540). Furthermore, other explorers in the same period—and after— who identified Nuevo Mexico with other geographic locations, also
refer to a densely populated lake district and, as I show right below, some evenreproduce additional elements typically signalled bym odernscholars ascharacterising the m irror relation between Aztlan and Tenochtitlan in the native
tradition.
Friar Pedro de Espinareda, a Franciscan missionary in the mines of San
M artin, N ueva Vizcaya, who collaborated with Francisco de Ibarra and was, with

264
Jacinto de San Francisco, one of the founders of the village of Nom bre de Dios
(Barlow & Simsor 1943:14-24), wrote in a letter dated January 20,1567:
I affirm that [...] about nine years ago, travelling over the land of Panuco—coast of the Northern Sea— with other missionaries during the enterprise I
said above, I knew from the Panuco natives that further inland, approximately
one hundred and fifty leagues towards the North, there was a great lake
surrounded by large settlements which had plenty of gold, although I
rather believed it was copper and I understood the place was called theWhite Mexico and certain Spaniards wanted to go and see but they were loston the way [...] And after I came to this land of San Martin, a fellow missionary
named friar Cindos [Jacinto de San Francisco] heard the same news
from these people and I also say that the Viceroy sent captain Francisco de
Ibarra to Copala, which I understand is precisely that place but
following his own ideas and dismissing ours he went towards the Southern Sea
to Sinaloa [...| Thus I think it would be a great service for God and the King todiscover this land [Copala / the Lake district above mentioned] because twothings then could be done, one to convert those souls and the other to open theway for these mines so that the Spaniards here could find relief and join efforts
with Melendiz's conquest [of Florida] to prevent the French or any other rivals
from finding their way into [the region].

Note that nearly tw enty years later Obregdn (1924 [1584]: 39-41) asserted that
Copala was Nuevo Mexico's former name, but note particularly that Espinareda's
contention that the lake was called "the White Mexico" resonates w ith the fact thatboth Aztlan and Tenochtitlan, as we saw in chapter six, w here associated to"whiteness" in the N ahua tradition (see p. 235 above).
After 1539 and until approximately 1600, the imaginary geography ofnorthern N ew Spain comprised a num ber of places w ith a non-fixed position that

12 "Digo que [...] habrd nueve anos que andando yo y otros religiosos por la tierra de Panuco, co sta
de la m ar del norte, en la demanda que tengo dicho, entendi de los naturales de Panuco que
adelante, hacia el norte, ciento y cincuenta leguas, poco m as o menos, habla una gran laguna y
grandes poblaciones alrededor de ella y que tenian cantidad de oro, aunque yo entendi que e ra
cobre y que se llamaba el Mexico Blanco y ciertos espanoles quisieron ir a verlo y perdieronse enel camino [...] y despues que vine a esta tierra de San Martin, tuvo un mi com panero que sellamaba fray Cindos la misma noticia de los de acd y como el senor visorrey envid a Francisco de
Ibarra por capitdn a lo de Copala, que segun tengo entendido e s esto y 61 rigidndose por su p a re c e ry dejado el nuestro se fue por la mar del Sur para irse a la Zin.a [Sinaloa...] y ansi tengo entendido
que s e hard gran servicio a Dios y a Su Mg. en descubrir esto porque se podrlan hacer dos c o sa s,la una convertir aquellas anim as y lo otro abrir camino para esta s minas [...] y los espanoles se
remediardn y juntarse a esta derrota con la conquista de Melendiz y quitarse a la ocasi6n que losfran ceses o otros contrarios no hallen donde entrar." Letter by friar Pedro de Espinareda to Lie.
Orozco, judge of the Audiencia de Guadalajara, Nombre de Dios, January 20, 1567 (AGI,
Audiencia de Guadalajara 51).

265
oscillated as follows. Initially all the vast unknow n territory beyond the frontier of
New Spain, between Florida and California, was divided in three zones: Quivira to
the Northeast, in the Great Plains; Cibola in the N orth, on the m argins of the Rio
Grande river (today Rfo Bravo), and Copala to the Northwest, som ewhere in the
Colorado river above the California sea. From the 1560s on different sections of
this overall area were know n as Nuevo Mexico, although little by little the region
associated to this nam e became more definite as toponym s construed upon
indigenous references were assigned to specific locations. Thus while Baltasar deObregon claimed that Copala was Nuevo Mexico's former name, by the time Onate
conducted his conquering enterprise Quivira and Copala both fell outside theboundaries of the province of Nuevo Mexico, which had become clearly identified
with Cibola, that is, the Pueblo Indian country. This ambiguity is significant,particularly the confusion between Copala and Nuevo Mexico as it indicates thatancestral N ahua migration stories somehow configured the Spanish representationof the land long before Villagra spoke it out loud. Some reports since Francisco de
Ibarra's days place Copala (a lake densely surrounded with cities frequently
considered the Mexica ancestral homeland) N orth from California. May w e affirm
that Spaniards interpreted the California sea as the w ater stream that m igrant
Mexica crossed in the initial stage of their journey?
From the 1580s on explicit connections between Nuevo Mexico, the ancestral
Aztec hom eland and a still occult lake district thoroughly urbanised multiply. The
chronicle by Baltasar de Obregdn and the Relacidn breve y verdadera deldescubrimiento del Nuevo Mexico, que descubrimos nueve companeros que salimos deSanta Barbola, en compania de tres religiosos de la orden de senor Sant Francisco (Cartas
de Indias I: 230-33), which reports on friar Agustrn Rodriguez' 1581 journey to theConchos river, are clear examples of this kind of mixture.

266
According to the Relacidn, the party set out from Santa Barbara on 5 July
1581. After walking thirty one days across a territory inhabited by naked
Chichimecas ("jente desnuda chichimeca") and then nineteen days more without
seeing any people at all, the expeditionaries m et an Indian who said that one day
further they would find abundant maize and people dressed in colours, like the
Spaniards, and he did not lie, for"...in August 21, we discovered a town that had forty five houses, two and threestoreys high [...] and later on we discovered five more villages [...] And twodays later came a cacique [...] from whom we knew that further ahead there
was a great number of towns....13
All in all the party discovered sixty one towns, the houses of which stoodclose to each other along well delineated streets and often clustered around plazas.
According to the report, friar Bernardino Beltran, a monk who shortly after
entered the region with captain Antonio de Espejo, "was told about a large lake
nearby, surrounded with m any settlements of m any people w ho go aboutnavigating in canoes, the prows of which they ornam ent with large, brasscoloured

globes"(Cartasde Indias I: 232-33).14 About

Rodriguez'

andChamuscado's expedition Obregon (1924 [c. 1584]: 251-253) wrote that as theirm arch progressed, the expeditionaries, ever more frequently came across dressedpeople w ho reported that others beyond lived in large houses and "spoke the
Mexican language" (hablaba la lengua mexicana). Also throughout the region they
saw willow grain deposits (trojes) "that seem almost like those of the Mexicans"(que imitan a las de los mexicanos), and as they knew that further ahead Indians w ere
bellicose they had no doubt of their kinship to "the ancient Culhua-Mexica" (nodudaron ser estos de la misma poblacion de los antiguos culguas mexicanos).

13 “...a veinte y un dias del m es de agosto, descubrimos un pueblo que tenia quarenta y cinco c a sa sde dos y tres altos ... y luego hallamos y descubrimos otros cinco pueblos [...] Y a cavo de dos
dias bino un cacique [...] nos ynformamos dellos que adelante avia grandissim a sum a de pueblos ya los lados...” (C artas de Indias I: 230-31).
14 “Dieronle noticia de una muy grande laguna, de muchas poblaciones y gente, y que en ella andan
en canoas, y que en las proas traen de color de alaton unas bolas grandes...”267
There is one last point I m ust address to dem onstrate the relation that Nuevo
Mexico, understood as a transcultural imaginary world, has with N ahua traditionsof ancestral origin. The m ost frequent explanation that traditional historiography
formulates for the m eaning of the term Nuevo Mexico is that the Spaniards,
overw helm ed by the sight of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, engaged in the frantic search
for another, similar place. But to postulate the existence of a Nuevo Mexico entailed
m ore than imagining a replica of the pre-conquest Aztec capital. In the popular
usage of the time Mexico was not only used to designate Mexico City. Veryfrequently it alluded to the region H em an Cortes initially conquered, w here
N ahuatl was spoken, and Nahuatl in fact was generally called "lengua mexicana," aswe saw in various quotations throughout this thesis.
The peculiarity of the toponym rests on the fact that it is the only sixteenth
century example where the adjective N ew precedes an indigenous place-name.
This is not simply the result of the projection of the expectations that MexicoTenochtitlan awoke. The sixteenth century exploration of N ew Spain's N orthw est
was characterised by the massive participation of N ahuas from the basin of Mexicoand the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley. The chronicles written in Nahuatl by indigenous
authors, which attribute great importance to that participation, speak about"Yancuic Mexico”.15 Regularly translated as "new" (nuevo), the w ord Yancuic has
am biguous connotations. In Nahuatl it means "the new" as the "the m ost recent"but also "the original," "the primeval."16 Thus Yancuic Mexico m ay also be translated
as "the first, the original Mexico," that is, Aztlan. This was precisely the sense thatm any Spanish conquerors, at least since the decade of 1560, gave to the expression,even w hen in their ow n language the w ord nuevo or nueva (new) m eant a very
different thing: "another," in the sense of "a second thing of the same kind," the15 Alvarado Tezozdm oc's Crdnica Mexicayotl (1992 [1598]), for instance.
16 (Federico Navarreta and Josd Ruben Romero: personal communication).

268"recently created" (recien hecho) and the "never seen before" (Fernandez Gomez
1962: 716-717).

269

CHAPTER EIGHTCONCLUSIONSYe shall utterly destroy all theplaces, wherein the nations which ye
shall possess served their gods, upon
the high mountains, and upon thehills, and under every green tree: andye shall overthrow their altars, andbreak their pillars, and bum theirgroves with fire; and ye shall hew
down the graven images of their gods,
and destroy the names of them out ofthat place.
Deuteronomy 12: 2-3 (King James
Version)The paradox that Spanish conquerors experienced in confronting urban life in
Mesoamerica and the ambivalent attitude they assum ed before indigenous
culture after witnessing the strange yet familiar marvels of Mexico-Tenochtitlan
inscribe the fundamental questions inspiring this thesis. Like everywhere else in
the New W orld, conquerors acted here as if program m atically guided by
Yahweh's prescription in Deuteronomy, laying waste to Indian settlements with
spectacular thoroughness. They demolished the people's altars, destroyed theirbuildings, and burnt the images of their gods. A suppressive performance thatindigenous records of colonial history depict dramatically1 and which m odern
literature on sixteenth century colonial discourse has extended to European
conceptualisation of Amerindian otherness in general, frequently claiming thatthe pow er of representation exercised by European conquerors as a cognitive
strategy for dom ination was so entrenched in their ow n cultural categories that
1 See for example plates 10 and 13 of the Description de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala
hecha por Diego Munoz Camargo (1584-1585, in Acuna 1984), showing respectively, the"burning and conflagration of the idolatrous tem ples of the province of Tlaxcala" and the"conflagration of all the clothes and books and atire of the idolatrous priests."

270

their understandings and behavioural patterns rem ained

unaffected byindigenous customs and ideas. Nonetheless, and w ithout denying that the
profound asymmetries and the violence of colonialism had im portant
repercussions at the level of representation, m y analysis shows that within
Mesoamerica indigenous views were neither completely neglected nor entirely
suppressed. On the contrary, they became part of the conquerors' cognitive
repertoire, m oulding their expectations and informing their interpretation of thelandscape and people they subsequently came across.2
I shall begin my conclusions by briefly recapitulating the principal points
the thesis has dem onstrated and will then continue to weave them into recent
debates concerning the definition of culture and the nature of asymmetric crosscultural interaction.
8.1.- Recognising Self in the Other.
The propositions developed in this thesis are fundam entally four:
1)

Nuevo Mexico came into being as the transcultural formulation of an"imaginary world," incorporated tow ards the mid sixteenth century in theconquerors' hypothetical m ap of m ainland north America among the unknow nterritories awaiting to be "discovered". Its construction and reification involved
the convergence of two parallel historical processes. On the one hand, thegradual accumulation of testimonial and second hand reports concerning a
distant province to the N orthw est of New Spain w here cotton clad people,
allegedly exploiting rich deposits of precious stones and metals, inhabited large
and refined cities. On the other hand, the conqueror's growing conviction thatthey could locate, and should appropriate, the place where Mexican ancestry

2 Following Rapport & Overing (2000: 50) I take cognition to be "the knowledge which people
employ so a s to make sense of the world, and the ways in which that knowledge is acquired,stored and retrieved."

271

ultimately came from according to N ahua traditions of ancestral origin andmigration.
Before it was a colonial province with concrete territorial boundaries
Nuevo Mexico was a disembodied object of colonial desire. For the Spanish
conquerors and probably also for their N ahua Indian allies it was the original
Mexico, Aztlan Chicomoztoc, traces of which they sought in several regions to
the N orth of New Spain until deciding it corresponded to the area inhabited by
the groups today known as Pueblo Indians. Thus Amerindian historical
discourse, in this region at least, was far more im portant in framing Spanish
expeditionary activities than the corpus of European mediaeval imaginations
traditionally regarded as the topical horizon of the sixteenth century Spanish
colonial enterprise. This circumstance, like the extensive adaptations thatcharacterised the Hispanic style of municipal governm ent set up in central
Mexico (Gibson 1952 & 1964, Lockhart 1992 & 1999), shows that the colonial
order in N ew Spain, far from spelling the end of indigenous culture, established
a complex mixture of native and Hispanic elements that should lead us to placem ore emphasis on the intersubjective character of cross-cultural engagement.
2)This process of cultural and institutional salvage, which apparently

did not occur in the Caribbean, was possible in central Mexico because theconquerors recognised conspicuous affinities between this region and their ow nmotherland. A recognition that the coinage of the toponym Nueva Espana andthe posterior construction of Nuevo Mexico codify.
The term N ueva Espana has been traditionally interpreted either as asignal of colonial appropriation, or as the expression of perceived geographic
affinities betw een Mesoamerica and the Iberian Peninsula. If we consider only
those testimonies relating to the period w hen the toponym was devised these
two interpretations seem self-evident. However, compared to other previously272

form ulated place-names such as La Espanola, which connotes, unequivocally, apossessor-possessed relation, the term N ueva Espana propounds a conceptual
relation of homology between Spain and its American replica. Yet even w hen
Cortes, in justifying his act of naming, spoke about topographic, climatic and"other" resemblances, the similarities that seem m ost significant, and which
carried the most weight in considering Mesoamerica another, New Spain,
pertain to the sphere of social life and politics, not to the realm of nature (seepp. 39-52). Unlike Caribbean savages, N ew Spain's native inhabitants had
palaces, roadw ays and market-places, and m ost importantly, they also had anorganised religion —albeit in the perverted form of idolatry— and a system of
dom ination whose structure seemed uncannily parallel to the political order of
old Spain, in that it subordinated the local sovereignties to the regional ones,
and these in turn to the central power, in a successive hierarchical scale that
culminated with the great tlatoani of Tenochtitlan. It is no coincidence that in
New Spain the conquerors translated the Nahuatl w ord tlatoani as senor, thus
placing the rulers of the subordinate indigenous states on the same level as
European princes, dukes, and counts, while in the Caribbean they had been
content to use the Tamo w ord cacique, or the Spanish term s rey, regulo, reyezuelo,
to distinguish any individual who exercised authority w ithout further describing
the nature of such authority.
In this sense Carmen Bernard and Serge Gruzinski (1992: 11-37 & 40-56)
are right to suppose that after the encounter w ith Mesoamerica the Spaniards
distinguished two types of societies, making an explicit connection between thepresence of religion, which they m arked by characterising objects of worship as"idols," and the existence of a political order resembling the one their ow nsociety had inherited from Roman times in that it had institutional forms ofauthority and a juridical system.

273

The contrast is clear in the texts I reviewed in chapter one. The
Spaniards’ exclusive use of the indigenous w ord zeme to designate the objects
that people in the Caribbean worshipped or invested with supernatural
attributions correlates with the almost complete absence of social and politicaldescription that characterised this phase of conquest. Contrastingly m ost
accounts concerning the exploration and conquest of Mesoamerica, which
substitute references to zeme with references to "idols” and introduce such term s
as "vassals", "lords" and "law", contain reasonably detailed passages on the native
political and social order. Therefore it seems clear that conquerors perceived
zemes as the cultic counterpart of a lawless, disjointed society whereas they tookidols as a sign of civilisation, in the Roman-derived sense of "civic oriented
comm unity life/'3
It is common to see in the colonists' application of European categories
such as idolatry or em peror their incapacity to bridge incommensurability.
Nevertheless,the"recognition" argum ent

I propose

takes

a

different

perspective. It assumes that such recourse to their own term inology m ust countas evidence for the fact that colonists could actually relate conceptually to thesocial reality they intruded, even if they partly m isrepresented it. Hence theim portance of reading New Spain's documentation against earlier evidence
from the Caribbean islands, where a deep sense of alienation had rather
resulted in descriptive reticence.
As I noted in chapter one, the Spanish relationship to the zeme ought tobe compared to the Portuguese idea of the "fetish" as described by Pietz (1985: &1987). That is, a venerated object essentially different from all the w orshipped
3 This is also exemplified by the Spanish use of the term Behetria. In mediaeval Spain the w ord
designated a group of peasant lineages free to change their lord within or outside th ecommunity to which they belonged. By the sixteenth century the institution had alre ad ydeclined, defeated by the monarchy. Nevertheless the term subsisted with a different meaning,
denoting confusion and disorder. In Peru the Spaniards used it in this sense to characterise th eleast centralised societies outside the sphere of Inka rulership (Bernard & Gruzinski 1 9 9 2 :28-29, Platt 19: 8).

274

objects familiar to the Europeans before international mercantile capitalism put
the Portuguese in touch with West African forms of handling the supernatural.
Unlike Christian images and pagan "idols," the objects the Portuguese called"fetish" were not iconic representations of divine beings but supernaturally
powerful objects in themselves, and this is precisely w hat the Spaniards took
zemes to be. Yet while in the period and region that Pietz discusses the categoryof the "fetish" came to substitute the category of the "idol" as the em bodim ent of
Christianity's other, in sixteenth century Hispanic America "zemes" only
temporarily displaced idols in the Spanish consciousness, and this was due to thefact that the Caribbean experience of incommensurability was followed by thesurprising experience of identification in Mesoamerica.
3)

The Spanish experience of witnessing an unexpectedly readable

alterity in central Mexico had major epistemological consequences. Above all it
opened a space for cognitive negotiation betw een indigenous and Spanish
wisdom that m ade communication across cultures possible. The fact thatconquerors could label the strange w orld that lied before them with the same
categories they applied to their own society, and material artefacts (books,
temples, idols, vassals, lords, etc.), induced them to conceive of the w ay in which
Nahuas andEuropeans respectively represented

past happenstance asanalogous forms of knowledge. This is to say that conquerors granted
credibility to N ahua m igration stories and acted accordingly, following the trailof the kingdom that the ancient Mexicans of those narratives had abandoned
centuries before.
The authoritative status accorded to a form of indigenous discourse that
Spaniards interpreted as the local historical m em ory challenges the generalvalidity of the thesis (Pagden 1986, McGrane 1989, Greenblatt 1991: 119) that
Europeancontact with theAmerindian

realitywasinvariably

—and

275

exclusively— m ediated by culturally constituted representations, primarily
consisting of the central themes of Christian cosmology and a heterogeneouscollection of archetypes of Oriental and Ancient alterity. While this certainly
applies to particular historical periods (early phases of any one nation's colonial
enterprise in America), and particular m om ents of personal experience (initialconfrontation w ith the exotic w hen arriving in America for the first time), such
im ported symbolic structures receded in the process of engagement. The
Spanish aim to subject New World people and territories to political control,
economic exaction and cultural/religious conversion certainly entailed theassault on indigenous institutions, beliefs and habits. However, in the particularcase of New Spain the Mexica society, shattered by the Spaniards in the political
front, w ent on to take centre stage in the collective imagination of the colonial
world. Often it substituted Europe as the referent against which otherindigenous societies were defined, while the mythical history of its rem ote
origins provided the colonists —be they Spaniards or "Indian friends"— with aprospective horizon, also serving them as chart for landm ark decoding.
4)

The conquest of N ew Spain's north, and specifically of the kingdomof Nuevo Mexico, m ust be interpreted as a product of the intersection betw een
Hispanic and Nahua identity. Beyond the lust for pow er and glory, the Spanish
wish to retrace the past of the ancestral Mexica migration responded to their
deeper Christian convictions. For the Judeo-Christian West, the origin holds
innocence. If the Mexicans represented for the Spanish the conceptual challenge
of a civilisation as w orthy as that of Europe but perverted by demonic, bloody
sacrifice and idolatry, perhaps the return to the Mexicans' origin would m ean
retracing the path of the fall. Perhaps Aztlan / Nuevo Mexico seemed to the
Spaniards to be the same Indian civilisation they so adm ired in Mexico but
w ithout the Devil, for was it not Satan in the figure of Huitzilopochtli who276

ordered the Aztecs to abandon the lacustrine paradise in which they lived,
afterward comm anding them to change their name as well and take on that of
Mexicans?
But if the colonists' advance through the unknow n lands north from
New Spain represented for m any Spaniards an enterprise aimed at recuperating
the Aztec greatness in its pristine state, for m any Central Mexican Nahuas—massively incorporated

in such enterpriseas "auxiliary" troops— it

represented, perhaps, the opportunity to recover, at least partially, the original
autonom y they had lost with the imposition of Mexica domination. Thus thepolitical significance of ancestral migration stories was renewed through colonial
engagement. Before the Spanish conquest, as we saw in chapter six, such stories"represented a w ay to [...] discuss the relations existing am ong different groups
and the respective positions they occupied within the regional political structure"(Navarrete 1991: 71), serving to legitimise territorial occupation and politicalauthority, both within any one particular altepetl and am ong various individual
altepetl linked in a dom inant-subordinate relation. After the conquest they
continued to be the common idiom of regional pow er legitimacy but now theyalso became the arena for the negotiation of collective rights and privileges viz a
viz the Spanish overlordship. Therefore, in analysing the colonial situation in
Hispanic N orth America we m ust extend our inquiry beyond IndigenousSpanish relations and interactions to focus as well upon the way in which thepresence of alien Spaniards affected the relations betw een different indigenous
groups and different sectors of any one indigenous society.

277

8.2.- Localising the Euro-American encounter: intersubjectivity and thetransculturation process.
Many years ago, in a now classical collection of essays titled First Images ofAmerica. The Impact of the New World on the Old, John Elliott (1976: 14-17, 21)argued that the repercussion of New World realities on European culturalconfigurations is obscured by the fact that preconceptions deriving from the
Judeo-Christian and the classical traditions guided European perceptions,functioning as a sieve for the selective contemplation of novelty. Nevertheless,he contended, both traditions were diverse and contradictory enough as toallow for the incorporation of new impressions, which became less and lessdependent on the established European cosmology as personal experience
proved more authoritative then Authority itself.
Much recent writing on the conquest of the Americas, though focusing
as well on the European's cognitive response to Am erindian culture and society,takes an almost opposite direction, as it has as major concern the analysis of
w hat Stuart B. Schwartz calls "implicit ethnographies" (1994: 2-3). That is, theseries of understandings about Self and Other that are not necessarily articulated
or codified but perm eate the way in which people m eeting across cultures think
about, and act before, the "Other" they confront. In this sense it is closer to thekind of postcolonial critique developed by Edward Said (1995 [1978]) and Homi
Bhabha (1994) than it is to Elliott's perspective. Like Said it emphasises how, in
confronting the external world, Europeans have re-structured their self identity,
refashioning their experience of otherness through the construction of an
essentialist discourse that solidifies the contrast betw een ruler and ruled in sucha w ay that the righteousness of colonialist practice becomes naturalised. This is
w hat Bhabha terms colonial discourse, which he describes as a construction that278

represents the colonised as a population of degenerate types who are in need ofan externally imposed structure of administration and instruction (1994: 70).
Stephen Greenblatt, for example, studies the "representational practices
that the Europeans carried with them to America" (1991: 7) and maintains thatrather than reflecting "knowledge of the other," early representations of the
N ew W orld and its inhabitants were devises to "act upon the other" which
resulted from imagination, not from reasoning upon empirical observation(ibid.: 12-13). Also Bernard McGrane (1989) and Peter Mason (1990 & 1991),
am ong others, analyse European representations of America as a language fordom ination based upon pre-established notions of the exotic. Thus McGrane
identifies three successive paradigmatic discourses on the non-European; thefirst of which, Renaissance cosmography, m easured America against theChristian m yth of the fall, paradoxically robing indigenous culture of its nonEuropean distinctiveness while recognising the hum an essence of indigenous
people as non, but nevertheless, potential Christians (McGrane 1989: 7-26). In asimilar vein, Mason's analysis of the European imagery of the exotic projected
onto the N ew World rests upon the premise that the inability of European
observers "to go beyond their own familiar frames of reference" (1990: 21) was afunction of the spoliation and the political domination they exercised.4 In
contrast with these authors, Tzvetan Todorov (1999 [1982]) contends that
Europeans could understand the American "Other" because they had developed
in w riting a powerful technology for the m astery of signs, which native
Americans lacked, and that this contrast regarding the capacity for rapid
adaptation to the unforeseen explains the Spanish apparently inexplicable
4 Studies on the "implicit ethnographies" of Amerindian people had been done before the issue
becam e an important question concerning W estern constructions of the non-European world.
Pioneering works on that field were done by Miguel Le6n Portilla (1984 [1959]) and Nathan
W achtel (1977), who titled their respective books The vision of the vanquished. Leon P o rtilla's
book is rather a critical compilation of testim onies reflecting the indigenous view of theconquest of Mexico w hereas Wachtel's is a study on native perceptions of the Andes' Spanish
conquest.

279

success in subduing complex and populous societies such as the Aztec. In his
view, however, that Spaniards could understand the Aztec w orld did not imply
cultural exchange, or cultural appropriation on the part of the colonisers.
All these interpretations share the conviction that the challenge thecolonisation of America represented was merely an external stimulus in thereconfiguration of the West, since Europeans responded with their ow n cultural
resources to the cosmological disruption that New W orld realities brought
about. This undoubtedly illuminating critique of colonialism, as I stated above,
has overlooked the epistemological ruptures that m ight have occurred in theprocess of subduing the Other. Ruptures that not only show ed alternative
possibilities in that history but also contribute to explaining w hy Amerindianpeoples succeeded in resisting their absolute assimilation into the West. In the
picture of complete European imperviousness presented by recent scholarship,
Am erindian people and their culture scarcely contributed new forms of thought
to the resulting order of things. Furtherm ore, they appear as absolutely devoidof a space for negotiation in their dealings with their new dom inators, divestedof any sphere of m eaning in practice, and subjected to a process of total erasure.
The possibility that in certain moments their ow n discourse could havecontam inated the colonisers is neglected for the sake of the more general
critique of the oppressiveness of colonial representation.
Part of the problem I see in this literature is that it views the EuroAmerican encounter in terms of discrete, opposing totalities, loosing sight of thespecificities of local negotiations, sectorial realignments

andsmall-scale

processes of resignification. Thus although my principal concern —like that of
Elliott and his postcolonial successors— lies with the assessment of N ew World
encounters from the perspective of the European experience of cultural
dislocation, I have abandoned the "overall European civilisation perspective" to280address a particular intersubjective space. That is, the social field constituted by aconcrete set of Europeans who arrived in America to stay and the Indian groups
they interacted with, which I view as a new em ergent socio-cultural reality in its
own right. As J. and J. Comaroff (1997: 25) m ade clear in the introduction tovolume two of their study on missionaries and colonialism in nineteenthcentury Africa, "Colonial societies rarely consisted [...] of two discrete worlds,
each whole unto itself, caught up together in the interdependencies of a
Hegelian master-slave relationship." Rather, they "were increasingly integrated
totalities." Whence the importance of studying the "localised cultural forms" thatem erged in "European worlds abroad" (Comaroff & Comaroff 1997: 23).
W hat does it mean, then, to address the intersubjective dimension ofcolonial encounters and w hy is it im portant at all? If the claim of m any
postcolonial critics that any discourse about another culture is m ore a form ofself projection than reliable description of the Other is right (Said 1995 [1978],
Boon 1982, Clifford & Marcus 1986, Marcus & Fischer 1986), how could we thenachieve an understanding of the process whereby two or m ore contacting
cultures intermesh?
To answer these questions I shall quote J. and J. Comaroff's assertion(1997: 24-25) that, although the historical dynamic of the opposition betw eencoloniser and colonised has led to discursive objectifications that represent bothfields as distinguished by irreducible contrasts, neither of them was ever an"undifferentiated sociological or political reality." To emphasise intersubjectivity,
therefore, is above all to break dual, oppositional representations through andrecognise, at the concrete level of localised encounters, that each of thecontacting "social fields" is constituted by different agents with different
interests. Moreover, it entails realising that even the same person's response to
the confronted Other is frequently unstable and ambivalent, varying according

281

to particular circumstances or assuming different attitudes tow ards different
aspects of the Other's reality.
Once we recognise the heterogeneity and polyvalence of colonisers andcolonised it becomes clear that their interaction creates entanglement, as theoutlook and interests of certain social groups in each side m ay be closer to thoseof certain groups in the opposite field than they are to those held by competing
sectors of their own "culture / society." Thus if we search beneath the grand levelof imperial project enforcement and behindthecurtain of pre-given

representational systems we shall find cross-cultural interaction to be a complex
process of realignment and conceptual re-definition that entails, as the sixteenth
century quest for Nuevo Mexico, an uneven mixture of imposition, resistance,collaboration, borrowing,

revivalism, andm isunderstanding.

This

very

circumstance implies that we can indeed access the process of entanglem ent bycontrasting the vast array of visual and discursive representations of Self andOther, and their interaction, that the actors involved in any given encounterproduce.
In the second place, addressing intersubjectivity entails acknowledging
the instability of every sign and cultural product. Ideas, technologies andinstitutions seldom remain identical to themselves w hen entering a process ofcross-cultural engagement.
N ahua traditions of ancestral origin and migration, for example,
rem ained a fundamental point of reference in the colonial world but had
different m eanings for different social actors. Among central Mexican natives
they continued to cement self-identity, though modified to prove authochtony
as in the text by Sahagun's Mexica informants concerning the peopling of N ew
Spain discussed in chapter six (see p. 215),5 or activating, as I suggested for some
5 Chapter 29, book 10 of Sahagun's Historia General de las cosas de Nueva Espana a sse rts th a t
Mexico was peopled by several human groups who arrived by se a from Panutla and w e re

282groups of non-Mexica Nahuas, a collective urge to recover the land of ancestral
origin and with it the autonom y of primordial times. Spanish settlers andcolonial authorities of course invested the theme with yet other different
meanings. W hat is im portant here is that all these divergent interpretations—and the practical usage to which they were put— contributed im portantly topave the w ay for the Spanish conquest of north-west New Spain and w ere lateron locally appropriated and re-signified, providing one of the m ost powerful
symbolsaroundwhich

the1680 Pueblo

Indianrebellion

articulated.

Furtherm ore, in the post-colonial worlds that resulted from the Spanish
conquest of mainland N orth America and the imperial grow th of the UnitedStates —that is, present day Mexico and the Southwest of present day UnitedStates— the Aztec m igration and the N ahua original hom eland are still sociallyand politically relevant, yet their significance is far rem oved from their original
sense. In Mexico they have long served the official ideology through which theState prom otes national identity and achieves legitimacy, claiming the Mexica

guided by their god to Tam anchan, in the South. Then, after granting the land to the people, thegod and the wisemen left, taking the books away and promising to return. Reason why thepeople had to com pose other new books as best a s they could. After this episode the n a rra tiv etells how the original group divided itself in sub-groups, all of which left Tamoanchan anddispersed. Some went to Teotihuacan and then continued, divided in groups of d iffe ren t
languages, until reaching the northern deserts of Chicomoztoc where they becam e h u n tergatherers but they finally returned, each in a different moment, to the southern provinces
they had abandoned before. According to L6pez Austin we must read in between the lines thefollowing statem ent: "We Mexican, are part of the original people who cam e to this landfollowing the will of God. He gave us this land to profit but warned us that he would return. We
are neither complete newcomers, nor Chichimeca and have the sam e right to this land a s those
who did not go to Chicomoztoc, or those who went and returned before we did." Prior to the
Spanish conquest, L6pez Austin explains, the Mexica based their territorial claims on the"right of conquest," but a s the argument ceased to be pertinent once the Spaniards conquered
them, the notion of the "divine gift" became more important in the narrative. N evertheless,nam es of particular indigenous deities had to be omitted as these were all considered demonsby the Spaniards. Whence the use of such abstract forms to address the divinity as Totecuyo(Our Lord) —used in pre-Hispanic times for any god; Tloque Nahuaque (Owner of what is Near
and what is Besides), or Yohualli Eh6catl (Night and Wind, i.e., the invisible and non-touchable).
All of th ese term s were current and well-established words in the N&huatl language when
C ortes arrived. The p assage, therefore, is a secularised history, a strategic adaptation of the
traditional story for European consumption, aimed at preserving local knowledge and discourse
but turned credible for Christian readers. The narrative had to convince the Spaniards but alsoneeded to keep the indigenous canon to maintain authoritative status before other non-M exica
Nahua groups (L6pez Austin 1985a: 327-330 & 1994a: 48-51, 64-69. Also Alva Ixtlilxochitl,
in Historia de la Nacidn Chichimeca (1985 [c. 1608-1625]: II, 28), explains the Mexica
arrival to the valley of Mexico a s a return.

283

arrival in central Mexico as its ow n foundational origin (Florescano 1998). In
recent years, however, the m yth has been re-appropriated by subaltern sectorsof Mexican society who contest the social and cultural project enforced by theState. Likewise, Chicano resistance culture in Southwest United States adopted
Aztlan as m ain identity symbol to fight against Anglo-American marginalisingracism, urging a return to indigenous roots and denouncing the imposition of
W estern m odernity and its attendant social and ecological "disasters" (Anaya &Lomelf 1989, Brotherston 1998).
In m y introduction I outlined two basic models for the assessment ofcross-cultural interaction between Europe and non-European societies current incontem porary scholarship. I observed that w hether they focus on the European
experience of "the Other", as the "mediaevalist" (Gandfa 1929, Hanke 1959,
W eckmann 1951 & 1984, Pastor Bodmer 1992) and the "Western alterity system"(Pagden 1982, Hulme 1986, Mason 1990 & 1991, Greenblatt 1991, McGrane 1989)
perspectives do, or w hether they concentrate on the response of imperialised
Others to the European intrusion, as in Sahlins' structural theory of history or
the multiple works on native acculturation and native resistance all over the
globe, these models do not allow a proper appreciation of the cultural intricacy
that characterises colonial societies.
If, as stated above, "European worlds abroad" were never refractory
micro-Europes successfully —or unsuccessfully— im posing alienation onto thenatives, neither were they simple mixtures resulting from the juxtaposition ofculturally specific objects, practices, institutions and representations that one canisolate to compile an inventory of the elements contributed by each contacting
group. They have always been intersubjective spaces of contamination. This is
w here Bhabha's well know n and sometimes contentious notion of "hybridity"(1990 & 1994: 38, 111-116) offers a significant advance in thinking on the topics

284

we are here considering. "Hybridity" usefully defines the situation outlined inthis thesis in that it entails a lot more than the combination of culturally specificpractices, objects and ideas. The concept rem arks the opening up of "acontingent, borderline experience [...] in-between coloniser and colonised" (1994:
206-207) which entails "deformation and displacement" of the discriminatory
principles upon which domination rests (Bhabha 1994: 111-112). And this indeed
occurred w hen

the Spaniards recognised Mesoamerican institutions asconstitutive of a political order similar to their own, consequently subm itting
their judgem ent to the authority of indigenous historical knowledge, thoughstill retaining a general derogatory attitude tow ards Indian culture andindividuals. Also the notions of "transculturation" (Ortiz 1995 [1940]) and"colonial semiosis" (Mignolo 1994b & 1995) can serve to assess the process of
hybridisation that unsettles, according to

Bhabha, the representational

modalities that have characterised colonial discourse. Addressing the dialogic
dimension of cultural creativity, both categories challenge the assum ption that
hierarchical relations m ust necessarily take the form of a m onologue that would
reduce the possibilities of colonised peoples to overt, violent resistance or toperform as the passive recipients of Western inscription.
The notion of colonial semiosis, which encompasses the whole variety
of semiotic interactions taking place in colonial situations including colonial
discourse (Mignolo 1995: 7), underscores multi-directionality thereby suggestingthat cross-cultural, albeit colonial encounters entail the multivocal agency ofinnum erable individuals who are at once objects and subjects, never fullyautonom ous, never fully conscious of it as Talal Asad has observed (1993: 16-17).
Likewise, Ortiz' (1995 [1940]: 97-103) concept of transculturation forces a noncentric approach to the process of cultural transition that incarnates in colonialsocieties bom from the perm anent relocation of people. Transculturation is not285

about colony-metropole relations but about the economic, institutional,
aesthetic, epistemological, linguistic, ethical and sexual repercussions of socialand geographic displacement. It cannot be spelt in term s of the opposition
betw een colonialist intruders and imperialised natives because the local field it
concerns, as the intruding one, is heterogeneous as it regards to both culture
and power. N ot all those foreign groups transplanted to colonial Cuba, the casewhich the term originally referred to, shared in the position of pow er,6 nor
were they members of the same cultural matrix. By the same token, indigenous
peoples were far from constituting a unified social field.
The sixteenth century quest for Nuevo Mexico was clearly a result of theprocess of transculturation through which colonial New Spain acquired its m ost
distinctive features. A process w here colonial semiosis as manifest in the
manifold resignification and m utual contamination of Aztec ancestral history
and Christian sacred history played a central role. In this sense it can also be
categorised as a way of world-making, a concept that Nelson Goodman coined
to indicate that the order of any given representation of the world we perceive,its objects and relations are not found but fabricated in a refashioning processthat turns old worlds into new through different interpretive operations (1978:
7-17, 1984: 21). Although Goodman's worlds are neither specific depictions ofparticular places nor historical narratives of any kind but the overall intellectual
systems through which our scholarly perception of socio-cultural reality isorganised (functionalism, structuralism, etc.), we can extend his argum ent todefine those collective processes of imagination that, like the quest for Nuevo
Mexico, entail the translation, through interpretation, of one pre-extant w orld

6 Think that alongside Iberian conquerors / settlers the colonisation brought into the island
considerable num bers of Africans from the Atlantic regions of that continent including Senegal,
Guinea, the Congo, Angola, and Mozambique. Also sporadic waves or a continuous flow of such
culturally diverse immigrants as Amerindians from the mainland, Anglo-Saxons and even
Asians from M acao or Canton (Ortiz 1995 [1940]: 98).

286

(the original abode of N ahua traditions of ancestral origin) into another (apolitico-territorial entity to be searched and colonised).

Maps

288

WOV&ciA( Jl. J. j j „iVUUE.HL1A\\\ F,\A

Map 1.- P ro v incia del Nuevo Mexico. Map drafted in the late seventeenth century (AGN).

289

-

0
TV ~

100
m a p 2.

E xten t o f Spanish Control in 1600

Map 2.- Extent of Spanish control in 1600 (Source: Gerhardl982: 5).

290
MEXICO, 1519

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Map 3.- Mexico in 1519, with a detail of the Lake basin and Tenochtitlan. (Source: Berdan 1989: 33 )

291

ARID AMERICAOASISAMfiRICA

MESO AMERICAtei

Map 4.- Mesoamerica, Arid America, Oasis America (Source: L6pez Austin & Lopez Lujan 1996:
16).

292

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294

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295

Map 8.- Map of Mexico-Tenochtitlan attributed to Hernan Cortes. Nuremberg, 1524 (Source:
Mundy 1996: xii).

296

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297

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l ( , ' )

Illustrations

299

Fig. 1.- Chapultepec.Cof/ex Boturini, plate XIX. (From the 1964 edition by Corona Nunez). The scene
represented besides the group of year-signs represents the defeat of the Mexica in the war that expelledthem from Chapultepec.

300

i?ty

Fig. 2.- Foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Tira de Tepechpan, plate 5. (From the 1996 facsimile
edition by Noguez). The lower part of the register shows the foundation of Tenochtitlan in the year 4Tochtli (1366). The upper part shows the death of Icxicuauhtli, Chichimeca ruler of Tepechpan, and theenthronement of his successor in the year 13-Tochtli (1362).

301>K*c>vonV

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Fig. 3.- Year-sign grouping .Codex Aubin, page 12. (From the 1963 edition by Dibble).

302

Fig. 4.- Chicomoztoc.CWex Azcatitlan, plate IV. (From the 1995 facsimile edition by the National
Library of France). Here Chicomoztoc is represented as a hill with an animal head resembling that of abear. It is a distortion (due to European influence) of the indigenous glyph for cave (oztotl) consisting of amonster opening the mouth. The caves, that could be mistaken for the animal's feet, appear in the lower
part of the hill.

303

Fig. 5.- Chicomoztoc. Selden Roll, plate 2. (Copied from Brotherston 1995: 128).

304

S*&)tetes i.ljs’

Fig. 6.- Chicomoztoc. Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, f. 16r. (From the 1989 facsimile edition
by Kirchhoff, Guemes & Reyes Garcia ).

Fig. 7.- Chicomoztoc. M apa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2. (Copied from Yoneda 1991:123).

306

Fig. 8.- Aztlan. Mapa Siguenza. (Copied from Florescano 1990: 637).

307

Fig. 9.- Aztlan. Codex Boturini, plate I. (From the 1964 edition by Corona Nunez).

308

xrofjntca.Chaica3

Iuj?nrt(ci.Ciji<f»iw ccui ^Cy<xna,($c« * .- 0 » npa

ftiia((c\ytc<jrnnc&ma,\

Fig. 11.- Aztlan. Codex Aubin, page 1. (Copied from Brotherston 1995: 53).

309

~niT'i£?'Fig. 10.- Aztlan. Codex Azcatitlan, plate I. (From the 1995 facsimile edition by the National Library ofFrance).

__

js M i f X t ^ C s J c i C - ^ i a ^

/,
/

V

'/ * L ? ^

£

•

* -

-* A <~ U A b > ‘4 rr*-'S & T K .ivd*r*) C * ^ ^ 4

Fig. 12.- Foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Histoire Mexicaine depuis 1221 jusqu’en 1594, fol.
(From the 1998 critical edition by Medina Gonzalez).

311

li- "T^’O
C

}>i

titfr

rS E F J

Fig. 13.- Foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.CWex Mendoza, f. 2r (From the 1997 critical edition by
Berdan & Anawalt).

312

Fig. 14.- Foundation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Codex Aubin. Page 15. (From the 1963 edition by Dibble).

313

Fig. 15.- The breaking of the tree. Codex Boturini, plate III. (From the 1964 edition by Corona
Nunez).

Fig. 16.- Teocalli de la Guerra Sagrada. Engraved monolith preserved in the Museo Nacional deAntropologia, Mexico. The figure represents the signal that marked the foundation of Tenochtitlan, which
served as the toponym glyph that identified the city (Drawing copied from Florescano 1990: 647).

315

Fig. 17.- The life in Tenochtitlan. Codex Azcatitlan, plate XIII. (From the 1995 facsimile
edition by the National Library of France). The scene represented here shows everyday lifein the lacustrine environm ent of Tenochtitlan.

^»
'

^

CfuJsStf /*G»; * W < y Y * r . ru i,ff t u 4 f a n a * a / * s s T* k *f t n /„?, ft'
A * £ * » & r f a y .'U tw Cn r,u u j & . ' Q l f c ^ o r .r S r # S£ ,i J>u
”

‘

C?'

*Lr 4

Fig. 18.- Cipolla (Cibola / Zufli). Tlaxcala Codex, in Diego Munoz Camargo's Description de laciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala, f. 317. (Copied from Acuna 1984). The drawing represents the city of
Cibola, with seven gates (four in the large building of the central square and three in the small buildingof the lower right-hand comer) that resonate with the seven caves of Chicomoztoc.

317

Fig. 19.- The army that viceroy Antonio de Mendoza commanded to fight in the Mixton War.
Codice de Tlatelolco, plate 1. (Biblioteca Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, picture by Fernando
Osorio Alarcon, CNCA / INAH / MEX).

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