founding inequalities in acolhuacán, mexico:...

DRAFT IN PROGRESS: PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE

1

Founding Inequalities in Acolhuacán, Mexico: 1453-1540s Benjamin D. Johnson, UMass Boston

Starvation, the central Mexicans knew, came in the middle of the year as the new corn

grew to maturity in the ground. It was during this time of hunger and waiting that the political

and religious elites of the Triple Alliance saw fit to congratulate themselves for another harvest

well-administered, during the celebrations of the Greater and Lesser Feast of Lords. These were

the feasts of exclusion, social distance, and submission. In Texcoco, the capital of Acolhuacan,

the lesser feast began with a popular exchange of gifts and flowers, evoking the collective effort

necessary for the harvest; but the principal attraction came with the lords and nobles solemnly

crowning themselves with diadems and setting their concubines free to dance in the streets.

During the Greater Feast of Lords, the performance of social distance was even more striking, as

an effigy representing political power was crowned in gold, while a dancer paraded through the

streets with a fresh corn tortilla, showing to the multitude the plenteous outpourings flowing

from the combined forces of the political and religious order. A virgin was killed, first fruits

were laid before the altar, and everyone took the first bite of a fresh tamale in months.1

Or, at least this was how things were supposed to go. In the year 13 House (1453) as

misfortune would have it, crops failed miserably at exactly the time of yearly hunger and lordly

celebration. Starvation had hit the valley before, but 13 House was particularly bleak. There was

no food for either sustenance or ritual, people died in much larger numbers than usual, and the

1 Duran (OLD), around 287. As will be the case throughout this chapter, almost all historical reports of the Triple

Alliance come from early colonial sources, produced in a changed political and intellectual environment.

Nevertheless, these sources can be usefully mustered. For a deeper methodological discussion, see Federico

Navarrete Linares, “Los libros quemados y los nuevos libros. Paradojas de la autenticidad en la tradición

mesoamericana” in Alberto Dallad, La abolición del arte: El Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte (Mexico

City: UNAM, 1998), pp. 53-71 and the Various entries in Elzabeth Hill Boone and Gary Urton, eds., Their Ways of

Writing: Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian Americ (Washington, Dumbarton Oaks, 2011).


2

cosmic and temporal orders were called into question. Things became even worse in 1 Rabbit

(1454), and Texcocan annals like the Codex en Cruz recall this and the following year with the

image of a naked individual vomiting profusely. Nezahualcoyotl, the leader of Acolhuacan at the

time, responded as he could. He raised a temple to the Mexica god Huitzilopochtli, as a sign of

his allegiance to and leadership within the consolidating power of the wider Triple Alliance; he

sacrificed some foreign dignitaries in a plea for full harvests; and he celebrated the eventual

return of good yields on the top of the pyramid of the rain god Tlaloc.2

The poor cultivators of Acolhuacan, for their part, experienced the drought not as a

problem of order, but of survival. New expressions entered into the popular Nahua lexicon:

necetochhuiloc—roughly, “there was 1 Rabbiting”—

became a jarring and poetic testament to the horrors of

that year. Across the lake in the Mexica capital of

Tenochtitlán, Huehue Moteuczoma erected his famous

“hunger stone” monument, and freed individuals from

tribute and other commitments to seek survival where

they could. Annals from neighboring regions show the

twisted forms of commoners lying in the dust, as stray

dogs scavenged the bodies of the deceased. “The

2 Codex en Cruz, 2 vols. Charles E. Dibble, ed. (Salt Lake City: Utah UP, 1981).

Figure 1. “1 Rabbiting.” Códice de

Huichiapan, f. 37r. Used by permission of

the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e

Histoira, Mexico. (There is a slight error in

this text’s calendar, but the image still holds.)


3

famine was very rigorous and people ate each other,” noted one record from the hills far

northwest of Texcoco. In this year in particular, death was brutal and survival even more so.3

During these lean years, slavery became a viable option for commoners and their children.

“There was Totonacing,” netotonachuiloc, is what people

said; referring to the rising exchange of slaves, both

adults and children, for food with the Totonac people of

the Gulf Coast. This trade expanded during the killing

famine of 1453-5, and once again during the subsequent

appearance of the 13 House-1 Rabbit calendar sequence

in AD 1505-6. The Codex en Cruz is unmistakable in its

reference to Totonacing, depicting a Texcocan heading

off to the Gulf Coast (marked as such by the distinctive

“bird person” motif) with a carrying frame and strap,

ready for manual service and hauling. Other illustrations

are even more explicit, such as those of the Codex

Telleriano-Remensis, where a tearful noble laments as a

trader carries a slave toward the bird people of the lowlands.4

3 Judging by its appearance in sources as varied as the Codex Aubin, the Codex Chimalpahin, the Florentine Codex,

and the Anales de Tula, the term necetochhuiloc seems to have been in wide popular usage in the sixteenth century.

Matthew D. Therrell, David W. Stahle, and Rodolfo Acuña Soto suggest (“Aztec Drought and the ‘Curse of One

Rabbit’” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 85: 9, pp.1263-1272) that there was a deeper memory for

1 Rabbit droughts, reaching back to perhaps even the ninth century. This seems unlikely, however; only a horrible

drought would have entered the lexicon as “1 Rabbiting.” and this term seems to have appeared after 1454.

Nevertheless, following this date, the stigma of 1 Rabbit became so troublesome that, at the subsequent recurrence

of this year sign in 1505-6, the younger Moteuczoma (Xocoyotzin) postponed the epoch-marking New Fire

ceremony by a year in order to avoid the curse.

Figure 2. “Totonacing.” Codex

Telleriano-Remensis, f. 41v. Used by

permission of the Bibliothèque nationale

de France.


4

The Dominican friar Diego Durán, an early Spanish arrival who grew up in Texcoco a

few decades after the events in question, remarked in the 1570s that “those who left for the land

of the Totonacs never came back to the cities they left, so that even today you find

neighborhoods of [the central Mexican ethnicities] Mexica, Chalca, Texcoca, Xochimilca, and

Tepaneca in that land.” He continues, stating that since the time of the famines of 1453-5 the

central Mexican groups listed above, “went away to live there, and there they remain down to

today. They didn’t want to return to their places of birth, fearing another similar disaster and

knowing that the central Mexican provinces lacked land for planting.”5

PEOPLE IN MOTION

Totonacing was not a new phenomenon. For centuries if not millennia, migration has

been one of the principal forces behind many major changes in Mesoamerican history. People

moved around, escaping one situation or seeking another, and this had a profound impact on the

structures of politics and society. For instance, baseline archaeological excavations from

4 A few notes on the image in Figure 2: The Codex Telleriano-Remensis makes a direct connection between

diminishing food and foreign trade—the bottom two elements of the image refer to the grain reserves of

Tenochtitlan; which, like those in Texcoco, fell to dangerously low levels over the years in question. Regarding the

“bird-person” pun, one of the words for bird in Nahuatl is tototl, which shares beginning syllables with the word

Totonac, totonacatl. The pierced septum references the Huastec people, who lived just north of the Totonacs.

Finally, Eloise Quinones Keber, in her commentary on the Codex—Codex Telleriano-Remensis: ritual, divination,

and history in a pictorial Aztec manuscript, Eloise Quiñones Keber, ed. (Austin: Texas UP, 1995), p. 228—suggests

that the bound individual in Figure 2 is a mummy bundle. This seems unlikely, however, given several important

divergences from the canonical form: the eyes are open instead of closed, and the head and the feet are uncovered.

Particularly given the context, this individual was being sold as a slave on the Gulf Coast.

5 "los que salieron para la provincia de Totonacapan . . . nunca mas voluieron á las ciudades de donde auian salido, y

así se hallan oy en dia en aquella tierra barrios de mexicanos, chalcas, tezcucanos, xuchimilca, tepanecas, que desde

aquel tiempo se fueron á vivir allí y permanecen hasta el dia de oy. No quisieron voluer más a su natural, temiendo

otro semejante suceso y sauiendo que la provincia mexicana carecia de tierras para poder sembrar.” DURAN old

249


5

Acolhuacan, which we might expect to show some type of consistent trend over time, instead

suggest alternating patterns of consolidation and dispersal, rising remarkably at least four times

over some 2500 years, only to fall again. Population sizes careened between large peaks and

desolate valleys according to the politics of the day.

Figure 3. Population Estimates for Acolhuacan, 800 BCE- 1960 CE

Time Frame Number of Sites Hectares Min. population Max. population Change from

previous

800-600 BCE 19 74 790 2150 --

500-300 BCE 29 251 3860 9000 Rise

200 BCE-100

CE

52 747 10,070 20,200 Rise

200-400 CE 37 197 1335 4000 Fall

500-700 CE 23 144 855 2675 Fall

800-900 CE 24 1059 15,820 31,900 Rise

1000 CE 59 442 2670 6515 Fall

1300-1500 CE 110 4609 57,585 116,395 Rise

1960 CE 70 3219 73,476 -- Fall, then rise

Source: Jeffrey R. Parsons, with Richard E. Blanton and Mary H. Parsons. Prehistoric settlement patterns in the

Texcoco Region, Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 1971).

For much of its history, Acolhuacan’s population moved inversely with empire. When

Classical Teotihuacan (ca. 200-700 CE) and then Tula (ca. 1000 CE) dominated the region, local

farmers moved away—either to be closer to the center of power or to vacate the disputed

territory between the local empire and its nearest neighboring rivals. During periods of

decentralization, Acolhuacan filled in once again with agricultural colonists. But, after the fall of

Tula, something changed. Nomadic warrior bands began to settle and intermarry with local

farmers, giving the region a military profile previously unseen. A similar process occurred across

the lake in Tenochtitlan and, by the mid-fourteenth century, these two powers had aligned to

form a local powerhouse know as the Triple Alliance (popularly known as the Aztec Empire),

together with Tlacopan as a junior partner. This story is well told in a number of Acolhua and


6

other sources, such as the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa Tlotzin, and the Mapa Quinatzin, in addition

to the related narratives of don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl.6

The wider point is that human habitation in the region was governed as much by politics

as by ecology. We know that dense urban centers like Classical Teotihuacan and Tula were

summarily abandoned by nearly all of their inhabitants, and similarly that even marginal

settlements regularly came and went across the region. (On this second point, see the striking

surveys of human settlement in central Mexico produced by Jeffrey Parsons, Keith W. Kintigh,

and Susan A. Gregg.) During periods of decentralization, people spread more evenly across the

landscape, while in times of imperial consolidation special efforts were made to intensify

production through hill terracing, advanced waterworks, and chinampa-style lake farming.7

Almost all of this fluctuation came from the poor farmers, servants, and artisans who are

the main protagonists of the story I tell here. These ignored majorities influenced society in

multiple and varied ways, as we will see across this text, but among their most powerful actions

was simply moving through space over time. It was commoners like these who filled the

tributary roles of Nezahualcoyotl and flocked to Acolhua markets, and it was also people like

these who were among the first to leave when famine hit or when local could no longer support

their populations. To be sure, migrations were not free nor taken lightly by migrants and their

6

Regarding the structure of the Triple Alliance, see Frances F. Berdan, et al., Aztec Imperial Strategies

(Washington, D.C, 1996); Michael E. Smith, “The Aztec Empire and the Mesoamerican World System” in Empires:

Perspectives from Archaeology and History, ed. Susan Alcock, et al. (New York, 2001), pp. 128-154, summarized

in Michael E. Smith, The Aztecs, 2nd

ed. (Malden, MA, 2003); and Pedro Carrasco, Estructura político-territorial del

Imperio tenochca: la triple alianza de Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco y Tlacopan (Mexico City: FCE, 1996).

7 Jeffrey Parsons, Keith W. Kintigh, and Susan A. Gregg, Archaeological settlement pattern data from the Chalco,

Xochimilco, Ixtapalapa, Texcoco, and Zumpango regions, Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of

Anthropology, 1983).


7

families—strangers were easily ostracized across the periods in question—but people

nonetheless moved, and often. Commoners almost never stood still.

A TIGHTENING ORGANIZATION

The instability of populations over time could prove vexing for political elites, who

worried that commoners would, “as it were, flee along the roads,” but it also provided a

straightforward mechanism for building an empire. Acolhuacan’s most famous and successful

ruler, Nezahualcoyotl (in power ca. 1429-1472), organized a series of political reforms and

public works that solidified populations in his realm. He improved the infrastructure of

transportation and marketing, recruited or co-opted mid-level noble operatives across his

territory of influence, and opened up new farmland thorough terracing and irrigation. In a

ceremony of land possession recorded in the Títulos de Tetzcotzingo, Nezahualcoyotl repeatedly

“plants” noble administrators across the landscape to care for “my possessions as ruler.” The

nobility’s right to govern depended on their services rendered, and Nezahualcoyotl repeatedly

cedes rights in recognition of effort: “it is theirs, for through their efforts they brought it in.”

Conversely, “unruly” nobles would be cut off.8

Narratives like the one I’m telling here would have once simply emphasized

Nezahualcoyotl’s skill in stitching the realm of Acolhuacan together, through internal reform and

8 “yn ma yuhqui hotli camo ye in qui[to]tocti in macehual” Codex Chimalpahin, vol 2. Ed. and trans., Arthur J.O.

Anderson, Susan Schroeder and Wayne Ruwet. (Norman: Oklahoma UP, 1997), p. 192. “notopiltzine ca ye nican yn

toctoc . . . . ca notlahtocatlatqui ca nel oncan anmechtequitpanozque ynixquixtin noplihuantzitzin yn ompa cate yn

tlahtoca altepetl Tetzcoco. . . . Can in tlatqui, ca in iciyahuilliztica in oquihual yacanque. . . . Auh intla

cuecuezotizque quiniquac yez anquiquixtilizque” Brian McAffee and R. H. Barlow, “The Titles of Tetzcotzinco

(Santa María Nativitas)” Tlalocan 2:2 (1946), pp. 110-117. Throughout this text, my translations will differ slightly

on occasion from those provided by the editors and translators of published documents. On Nezahualcoyotl’s

reforms more broadly, see Jerome A. Offner, Law and Politics in Aztec Texcoco (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983).


8

external alliances with Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan, but this would be only half the story. Already

in the 1980s, Jerome Offner began to portray Nezahualcoyotl’s actions as a response to rising

pressure across Acolhua territory from various disaffected groups; and more recently, Lane

Fargher, Verenice Heredia Espinoza, and Robert Blanton have argued that Acolhua commoners

held enough land apart from the nobility to force a more bureaucratic and responsive form of

government than, say, in Puebla or the Mixteca Alta—although less so than in the neighboring

and enemy Tlaxcala. Or, to put it another way, commoners were independent enough in

Acolhuacan that a successive line of rulers were forced to work for collective as much as for

individual gain. This can clearly be seen in the public projects of Nezahualcoyotl and his

successors, and in the generally rising economic fortunes of the Acolhua realm over the period of

imperial consolidation.9

So Acolhuacan became ever more efficient, but also increasingly ordered and hierarchical.

Perhaps paradoxically, the political and economic clout of commoners in Acolhuacan made them

more dependent on the ruling hierarchy than before, as a more symbiotic form of politics

emerged to support such things as infrastructure projects, civic festivals, and wars of imperial

expansion. As long as the Acolhua hierarchy was able to retain local legitimacy, the tlatoani

(ruler) could effectively exercise power over lands and people only tenuously in his institutional

grasp. For instance, in the same Tetzcotzingo titles cited above, Nezahualcoyotl is unequivocal

about the relationship between commoners, the administrative hierarchy, and himself as ruler.

9 Offner, Law and Politics; Lane F. Fargher, Verenice Y. Heredia Espinoza, and Richard E. Blanton, “Alternative

pathways to power in late Postclassic Highland Mesoamerica” J. Anthropological Archaeology 30:3, pp. 306–326.

Of course, Texcoco’s western neighbor Tenochtitlán saw even more growth over this period—to the point of

repeatedly infringing into the functioning of Acolhuacan.


9

Nezahualcoyotl describes his realm as a series of nested hierarchies, where commoners pay

allegiance to local nobles, who submit to the ruler in exchange for certain standardized privileges.

Describing a series of commoner settlements, he specifically asserts that,

The people of Quauhpechco work for my children, the nobles of Texcoco. The people of

Tequanolco are the subjects of Nezahuacoyotl. One [noble administrator] is named

Xochitonal; another is Quacoz. The people from Amanalco are my tributaries, they are

cotton weavers. . . .10

During this period of imperial expansion, terraces spread up the mountains and across the

lakes as consolidating markets and officious managers squeezed ever more production from

commoners on the land, and populations boomed. Estimates by Jeffery Parsons suggest an

absolute explosion in population during the Triple Alliance, as planters pushed the agricultural

frontier ever farther up the hills of Acolhuacan and rulers invested in terracing and irrigation. As

Acolhua populations both rose and spread during this imperial period, so too did the number of

administrative centers in the areas surveyed. And everywhere, when the rains came, the

commoners would eat their celebratory tamale as the rulers congratulated themselves once again

for a harvest well managed.11

LOCAL DIFFERENCE

But we should be careful not to paint a uniform or totalizing picture of political hierarchy

at this time, particularly in the realm of ideology. Returning briefly to the Greater Feast of Lords

10

“Auh yn Quauhpechco tlaca quinmotequipanilhuizque yn nopilhuantzitzin Tetzcoco. Auh yn Tequanolco tlaca

ymacehualhuan yn Neçahualcoyotzin. Auh yn Amanalcotlaca notetequipanocahuan ichcac chiuhque.” “Titles of

Tetzcotzinco,” p. 118.

11

Jeffrey R. Parsons, with Richard E. Blanton and Mary H. Parsons. Prehistoric settlement patterns in the Texcoco

Region, Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 1971).


10

described above, for instance, it is important to note that these celebrations were not uniform.

Across the lake in the imperial capital of Tenochtitlan, the demarcation of social distance was

even greater, as nobles passed around canoe-fulls of food their huddled dependents, who in turn

would be beaten with canes for taking two portions of mush instead of one. Nobles would further

complain of additional hangers-on, those who “wouldn’t quiet down or leave even if they were

really beaten.” After this, warriors and finely-attired dancing girls would parade through the

streets, the warriors dragging “the other nobles who didn’t go to war” along behind them, tied at

the wrists. The social hierarchy was clear: first nobles who fought, then nobles who fed, then

commoners who were beaten.12

Moving away now from the big capitals and into the hinterland of Acolhuacan, the

celebration changes once again. In the marginal village of Tepeapulco, halfway between

Texcoco and Tlaxcala but tributary to the former, reigning nobles received little pride of place

during their feast days. Rather, it was women—and the dark earthly forces they were understood

to represent—who took center stage. During both Feasts of Lords, the lesser and the greater,

flower-adorned commoner women sang day-in and day-out for two months straight. The first

month was dedicated through female human sacrifice to Huixtochihuatl—the older sister of the

Tlaloque rain deities, patroness of saltmakers, and perhaps as well a symbol of pre-Toltec

rulership in the region—while the second was pledged to both Xilonen and Cihuacoatl, two of

the most powerful fertility deities of the Nahua pantheon. Xilonen was a youthful aspect of the

12

“iuhquen amo peuilmatque, in ma nel quein oaltoca quein valhuitequi”/ “no se querian apartar de alli, aunque les

dauan de verdes cacos” Florentine Codex, book 2, f. 51r. Available through the World Digital Library

http://www.wdl.org/en/item/10096/zoom/#group=1&page=231 “yn otomi yoan inpipilti: amo teoan motecpana,

canillo tlama, incãpa onmoquitez tetlan” “lleuauan asidas de las manos, la otra gente noble que no eran exercitados

en la guerra” book 2, f. 51v. On this warrior ideal, see Inga Clendinnen’s classic “The Cost of Courage in Aztec

Society” Past & Present, 107 (1985), pp. 44-89.


11

primary maize goddess, while Cihuacoatl (evoked as herself or under such aliases as Plant

Generator, Our Mother, Eagle Woman, and Warrior Woman) was a formidable deity of warfare

and childbirth, the one who ground the bones of an earlier creation to make the current crop of

people on earth. Like Huixtochihuatl, she represented ideas of pre-Imperial rulership, lending her

station to high priests in Texcoco and to the second-in-command of Tenochtitlan.13

In Tepeapulco, the Greater Feast of Lords was also called the month of Eating Fresh

Maize Tortillas; and this second name is particularly telling. Unlike the commemorations in

Tenochtitlan or Texcoco, where the primary celebration performed and coldly reinforced social

hierarchy, the feasts in Tepeapulco centered around the core components of the staple tortilla:

water, salts, corn, and the female labor that would grind all the ingredients together. To be sure,

dark forces were evoked in Tepeapulco as women died on sacrificial altars; but the story from

the backlands was one of bloody, fierce renewal, different than the stern social distancing or

pious self-congratulation seen in the capitals.

This might say something about administration as well: it could stand to reason that these

differential celebrations, enacted during the time of greatest hunger during the year, also

correlated to the experience of social reproduction in the different localities. In the capitals,

13

The descriptions from Tepeapulco come from fray Bernardino de Sahagún and his local collaborators, Primeros

memoriales, ed. and trans, Thelma D. Sullivan, with H. B. Nicholson (Norman: Oklahoma UP, 1997); see

particularly notes 61, 67, and 70. A full comparison of all the actions and iconography for greater and lesser Feasts

of the Lords across the three separate locations of Tepeapulco, Texcoco, and Tenochtitlán is beyond the scope of

this work, but even a superficial examination illustrates many important differences. Commoner women are central

in Tepeapulco, but are little more than signifiers in Tenochtitlan, wearing the right clothes, but marching to the

orders of their warrior and priestly chaperones. We can be relatively sure that the women are commoners in

Tepeapulco, because in ceremonies for other months the participation of nobles was specifically mentioned, as it

was as well in Tenochtitlan. For a fuller comparison of the sources for Tepeapulco and Tenochtitlan/Tlatelolco, see

Arthur J. O. Anderson, “Los ‘Primeros memoriales’ y el Códice florentino” Estudios de cultural náhuatl, vol. 24

(1994), pp. 49-91.


12

brutal and efficient hierarchies were the defining sign of mass agricultural production; while in

Tepeapulco, the desperate struggle of each farmer took center stage, as everyone kept vigil while

Cihuacoatl was slain and reborn once again.

MAKING THE SOURCES

We know about the festivals in Tepeapulco and Tenochtitlan through the work of the

history workshops patronized by the early Spanish ethnographer and evangelist fray Bernardino

de Sahagún in both of these cities. In each case, Sahagún sought out local scribes and stimulated

them to translate their documentary and oral histories into Nahuatl texts written in the recently-

introduced Roman script. He began collecting histories in this way in Tepeapulco, then in the

once-independent city of Tlatelolco (now annexted to Tenochtitlan), and finally in the core of the

capital itself. To each new site, Sahagún brought the stories and manuscripts he was working on

previously and, as he saw it, corrected them against ever-more centralizing and prestigious

perspectives—as the friar himself describes it, “the first sieve through which my work was

decanted was the people in Tepeapulco, the second those in Tlatelolco, and the third those in

Mexico [Tenochtitlan].” The final result of this was the mighty and wide-ranging Florentine

Codex, widely acknowledged as a pre-eminent compendium of life during the Triple Alliance.14

The Florentine Codex is powerful work of collective historical memory, but it is also

fundamentally a top-down version of empire. For over a century now, scholars have been

comparing Sahagún’s early annotations in Tepeapulco—which are treated as a separate

14

“El primero cedazo por donde mis obras se cernieron fueron los de Tepeapulco; el segundo los de Tlatelolco; el

tercero los de México” Quote from beginningof Book 11. Check the Dibble translation.


13

manuscript entitled Primeros memoriales—against the final, triple-brewed histories of the

Florentine codex, and discovered a series of striking divergences. For instance, the latter text

from Tenochtitlán would describe the elaborate preparations of the human victims offered in

exquisitely-tuned sacrifice to the war god Tezcatlipoca, while in Tepeapulco “no people were

sacrificed; only offerings were made, only birds were decapitated, and at sundown women

planted sacrificial papers.” Arthur J. O. Anderson goes so far as to argue that, for the Sahagún’s

later collaborators in Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlan, the information gathered in Tepeapulco was

inapplicable and irrelevant to other, more central, locations in the Empire. And, sure enough,

almost everything from Tepeapulco was edited out of the final manuscript.15

Not generalizable, and therefore trivial: despite some important works to the contrary,

this has been the overall assessment for most of the marginal hinterlands of the Triple Alliance—

despite the fact that such places accounted for the overwhelming majority of people living in

(and, according to Michael Smith, fighting for) the Empire. Indeed, there are many ways to

generalize: one good method is that of Sahagún and his noble interlocutors, whereby

correspondence is tracked across some field of space and time. Another approach is to follow the

connections between diverse parts of a system, to see how changes in one unique sector affect

the whole. In this study, I choose the latter method, showing how transformations among poor

people in the hinterland forced fundamental changes to the wider politics and society in central

15

Anderson, “Los ‘Primeros memoriales’”, p. 58


14

New Spain. Despite manifold social and political divisions within both the Triple Alliance and

its successor regimes, changes in one place still produced major consequences for the whole.16

HINTERLANDS AND CENTERS

Take the case of Xicotepec as an example. This torrid region, coming down off the Sierra

Norte in the modern state of Puebla, was a Totonac area that fell under Acolhua control during

the reign of Nezahualcoyotl. Across the centuries of this region’s history, particularly as

recorded in the early colonial Códice de Xicotepec, a robust narrative appears countering the

story of Acolhua imperial ascendancy. There are telling localisms, such as the attribution of a

rural thatched roof—indicative of non-Acolhua identity in Texcoco, if not necessarily in

Xicotepec—to Nezahualcoyotl’s palace; or the triple place glyph for the region, giving its name

in Nahuatl, Totonac, and even Otomí. More than this, the Códice de Xicotepec shows a series of

Totonac rebellions against Acolhua authority in the region—led in at least two instances by

women, and with the possible collusion of imperial Acolhua administrators. Words are

exchanged, weapons presented, and some Acolhua notables end up captured and corralled,

guarded by man-eating jaguars. Conquest was never as certain in the hinterlands as it appeared in

the center.17

16

Michael E. Smith, “The Role of Social Stratification in the Aztec Empire: A View From the Provinces,” American

Anthropologist, vol. 88, pp. 70-91; see also his contributions to Aztec Imperial Strategies.

17

This section on Xicotepec draws heavily on Guy Stresser-Péan’s study accompanying a facsimile of the Códice de

Xicotepec (Mexico City: FCE, 1995). See also Jerome A. Offner, “Un segundo vistazo al Códice de Xicotepec”

Itinerarios 11 (2010), 55-83. For an even broader treatment of the relationship between Totonac areas in the Sierra

Norte and Acolhua power, see Guy Stresser-Péan, Lienzos de Acaxochitlan (Hidalgo) y su importancia en la

historia del poblamiento de la Sierra Norte de Puebla y zones vecinas (Pachuca: Gobierno del Estado de Hidalgo,

1998) and, mostly for a later period, Bernardo García Martínez, Los pueblos de la sierra: el poder y el espacio entre

los indios del norte de Puebla hasta 1700 (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1987).


15

Further, after these rebellions were put down, new

figures appear on the scene: chief among them a series of

Mexica warriors from Tenochtitlan with their distinctive

upswept haircuts. Styles changed with power and everyone,

from the new local governor to Nezahualcoyotl’s son and

successor Nezahualpilli, now sported the new hairstyle. The

internal coup against Acolhua power in the region also shifts

the narrative center of the document, displacing Texcoco for

Tenochtitlan, the new center of power in northern

Mesoamerica. The governor of Xicotepec now distributes

treasure and honors to Mexica warriors and marries into a

noble line from Tenochtitlan, although he also shows up to see

Nezahualpilli execute one of his own sons in Texcoco.

The codex ends on a purely local note: after the Triple

Alliance falls to Spanish and Tlaxcalan invaders, people in

Xicotepec debate what to do about their local pyramid in light

of Christian claims. The scene tapers out with God the Father, cross in hand, reigning over a

scene of early colonial administration. Everyone’s hair is now short, cut in the Spanish style—

but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The wider story, from Xicotepec and from Acolhuacan more

broadly, is as much about reinterpretation as it is about change—about how people rebuilt a

society, eventually convincing themselves and their interlocutors that things had been that way

Figure 4. Imperial hairstyles. Códice

de Xicotepec. Above, Nezahualcoyotl,

with his thatched palace, spiky hair,

and headband. Below, his son

Nezahualpilli wearing a Tenocha style.


16

all along, or at least as long as anyone cared to remember. Perhaps the best way to bridge a

historical gap is to forget that it even existed.18

In some ways this forgetting was easy. As suggested in the Códice de Xicotepec and in

other Acolhua documents like the Códice Xolotl, one of the primary functions of politics at this

time was to convince people that what they were doing was new, even when it really wasn’t. The

Triple Alliance ballooned to dominance with this ruse over only a few generations, successfully

rebranding many core Mesoamerican activities as consequences, instead of causes, of its rule.

Partially standardizing endemic conflict through seasonal “flowery wars” is one example from

the political realm; reinterpreting the quantity, purpose, and location of blood sacrifice is a

second; a third concerns the erasure and reconstruction of historical memory through the burning

of earlier annals, particularly in Tenochtitlán.19

Similar patterns of redirection occurred in the economic life of the empire, where capitals

like Texcoco canalized already active patterns of production and exchange into distinct spheres

of influence. Basic goods produced in Acolhuacan rarely if ever crossed Lake Texcoco to

regions controlled by Tenochtitlan, and vice versa; although, once again, Mexica prestige items

began to filter in to central Acolhucan at the end. Overall, the Triple Alliance seems to have done

18

A similar story is told in the Tira de Tepechpan, where a tributary Acolhua altepetl—much nearer the center—

falls increasinly under Mexica influence. Cf., Xavier Noguez, ed. Tira de Tepechpan: códice colonial procedente

del Valle de México (Mexico City: Biblioteca Enciclopédica del Estado de México, 1978); and Lori Boornazian

Diel, The Tira de Tepechpan : negotiating place under Aztec and Spanish rule (Austin: Texas UP, 2008).

19

On warfare and ideology, see Inga Clendinnen’s Aztecs: An Inperpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991);

Alfredo López Austin, Cuerpo humano e ideología: las concepciones de los antiguos nahuas (Mexico City: UNAM,

1980); and Aztec Imperial Strategies. On the burning of written documents, see Navarrete Linares, “Los libros

quemados.”


17

little to integrate the various parts of its empire, except in the realms of warfare, high art and

spectacle, monumental architecture, and inter-elite political coordination.20

Acolhuacan was, therefore, part of a three-legged imperial stool. Tlacopan, Tenochtitlan,

and Texcoco each grew out of well-rooted local hierarchies that reached from the many locales

led by minor bosses through to the large realm of the empire. The final step of the imperial

arrangement occurred in the confabulation of regional rulers—a shifting set of interactions

marked by negotiation, rivalry, and spectacle; and solidified primarily through ties of marriage

and descent. Since the time of Nezahualcoyotl’s father, for instance, Acolhua rulers always took

at least one Mexica wife, who would bear a ruling heir for the following generation. Other

children—there were often dozens—would marry into the local hierarchies supporting Acolhua

rule, secondary centers like Teotihuacan, Otumba, Huexotla, and even Xicotepec.21

Despite clear theory and repeated practice, alliances often proved troublesome:

Nezahualcoyotl had to kill a rival tlatoani to secure his chosen Mexica wife, and then executed a

son for improper marriage positioning. Nezahualpilli gained rule at the age of seven and, after

his majority, also had major difficulties with his Mexica wife, Chalchiuhnenetzin. After

Nezahualpilli’s death, his heirs broke into warring camps to dispute control of Acolhuacan, and

20

For markets and tribute arrangements from a Mexica perspective, see Carrasco, El imperio tenocha; for

Acolhuacan and divided markets, Leah D. Minc, “Style and Substance: Evidence for regionalism within the Aztec

market system” Latin American Antiquity, vol. 20, no. 2 (June 2009), pp. 343-374; Deborah L. Nichols, Christina

Elson, Leslie G. Cecil, Nina Neivens de Estrada, Michael D. Glascock and Paula Mikkelsen, “Chiconautla, Mexico:

A crossroads of Aztec trade and politics” Latin American Antiquity, Vol. 20, No. 3 (September 2009), pp. 443-472;

Gary M. Feinman and Christopher P. Garraty, “Preindustrial Markets and Marketing: Archaeological Perspectives”

Annual Review of Anthropology vol. 39 (2010), pp. 167-191.

21

See Offner, Law and Politics, pp. 229-30; Pedro Carrasco, “Royal Marriages in Ancient Mexico” in H.R. Harvey

and Hanns J. Prem, Explorations in Ethnohistory: Indians of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century (Albuquerque:

New Mexico UP, 1984), pp. 41-81; and, once again, Aztec Imperial Strategies.


18

so on. But Chalchiuhnenetzin was particularly noteworthy: Reliable evidence suggests that she

took a series of noble lovers from the Acolhua hinterland, sacrificed them, and then reformulated

parts of their bodies into small sculptures she called gods. To be sure, this was all very prohibited,

and after Nezahualpilli found her in bed with three such lovers, he stoned her to death in a public

ceremony. Notably, however, her crime was infidelity and not murder. An eyewitness recalls her

execution with considerable detail, even decades later:

I saw it myself and it happened before my eyes, when the daughter of the lord Axayacatl,

ruler of Mexico Tenochtitlan, committed adultery with Maxtla of the house of

Tezonyohcan (Tezayuca) and with Huitzilihuitl, that it was done on a grand scale and

countless people were punished, who were strangled and crushed with stones along with

the lady: some stewards, some artisans, some merchants, and also the ladies-in-waiting

and dependents of the land. All the world assembled, people came from the towns all

around to behold; the ladies brought along their daughters, even though they were still in

the cradle, to have them see. Even the Tlaxcalans, and the people of Huexotiznco and

Atlixco, though they were our enemies, all came to see; the whole roof of the house of

the Cholulans was brimful. And as to how the lord ruler Nezahualpilli fed people, there

were all the containers with hollow bases, the reed baskets, and the sauce bowls, by

which the Mexica were very much put to shame.22

22

“ca huel oc niquittac ca nīxpan mochīuh, in ìquāc tētlaxxīn, in tlācatl Āxāyăcătzin Mēxìco Tĕnŏchtitlan tlàtoāni

ichpōchtzin, īhuān in căli tĕçŏnyòcān Māxtla, īhuān Huītzĭlìhuitl, ca cencà huel huēy in mochīuh, ca àmo çan

tlăpōhualtin in quitzăuctiàquè, in īhuān cihuāpilli, mĕcānĭlōquè tētĕpăchōlōquè, cĕquīn călpīxquè, cĕquin tōltēcà,

cĕquīn pōchtēcà: niman yè in īpìhuān, īhuān in ītlănnĕncāhuān izcihuāpilli, centlālli mŏmăn, nŏhuĭān āhuàcān,

tĕpēhuàcān huālhuīlōac in tlămăhuĭçōcò, quinhuālhuīcăquè izcihuāpīpīltin in īmichpōchhuān; inmānel yè cōçŏlco

ŏnŏquè inīc quintlachialtìquè: inmānel yè Tlăxcăltēcà Huĕxōtzīncà Ātlīxà in toyāōhuān catcà, huel oc moch

tlăchĭăcò, huel tètēn in īxquich chŏlōltēcăcălli in tlăpăntli. Auh inīc tētlăquăltì in tlācătl tlàtoāni Nĕçăhuălpĭltzīntli

moch tlatzīncŏyōnīlli in ācăchĭquĭhuitl in mōlcăxĭtl: huel in mopīnāuhtìquè in Mēxìcà.” Frances Karttunen and

James Lockhart, eds., The Art of Nahuatl Speech: The Bancroft Dialogues (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American

Center, 1987), p. 154. Although this text mentions two lovers for Chalchiuhnenetzin, the Codex en Cruz shows

three.

Also, and perhaps unavoidably, Chalchiuhnenetzin has become one of the most written-about women of the

Triple Alliance, although she remains at the narrative margins. See Robert Barlow, “Chalchiuhnenetzin” Tlalocan,

vol. 1 (1947), pp. 73-75; and Susan Toby Evans, “Sexual Politics in the Aztec Palace: Public, Private, and Profane”

RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol. 33 (Spring 1998), pp. 166-183. She even has a part in Salvador Novo’s

satirical La guerra de las gordas (Mexico City: FCE, 1963), translated to English in 1994 as The war of the fatties

and other stories from Aztec history Michael Alderson, trans. (Austin: Texas UP, 1994).


19

There is a lot to say about this description, beginning with the hospitality. Nezahualpilli

staged the execution of his wife as a public and festive performance, where no delicacy was

spared to the participating multitudes. In this execution, as in any other important public ritual,

the primary function of the ruler was as host and patron, sponsoring and mediating the key

events of communal life. This performance of power, in punishment as well as in sacrifice,

addressed many audiences at the same time. To foreigners and enemies and the curious,

Nezahualpilli displayed the extent of his economic and political power in the numbers of people

he was able to feed and in the multitudes who flocked to his rite of justice. The memorable

breadth of Nezahualpilli’s networks of power was, according to this eyewitness, what shamed

Chalchiuhnenetzin’s home town of Tenochtitlan, more so than the crimes of the ruler’s daughter.

Additionally, through these same acts of calibrated generosity, Nezahualpilli reaffirmed his

personal status as the supreme authority and patron of the community—a standing that

Chalchiuhnenetzin undermined with her famous adultery. Local nobles, as well as large numbers

of associated commoners, clearly saw this episode as instructive, and even brought along

children to make tangible the proper lessons of patronage and loyalty.

Beyond Nezahualpilli, we can see other political networks in action as well. The noble

pretenders Maxtla and Huitzilihuitl likely sought Chalchiuhnenetzin’s company not only for

reasons of sexual attraction, but for politics as well. Chalchiuhnenetzin’s own lines of power

were manifest, not only in the connections to her father the Mexica tlatoani, but also in the

“countless people” who followed her to her death as retainers, economic and political

representatives, and dependents. As for Chalchiuhnenetzin herself, it seems plausible that she

believed her privileged position at the intersection of Mexica and Acolhua rulership entitled her


20

not only to the tribute and labor of her dependents and pretenders, but to their collusion—if not

their lives—as well. And, indeed, tlatoque regularly pledged the bodies of dependents in battle or

sacrifice, or in damaging labor projects such as heavy drainage. Nobles often used commoner

lives as extensions of their own, as in the famous couplet “in cuitlapilli, in atlapalli”—literally,

the tail and the wings. Commoners were the steering mechanism of a ruler’s flight.23

The eyewitness to Chalchiuhnenetzin’s stoning mentions offhandedly at the end of her

relation a series of other noble misdeeds: a son of Nezahualpilli flirted with his stepmother and

was then strangled to death, another moved out of the family compound and was punished, a

foreign noble was castigated for drunkenness, and various other lords and ladies and dependent

rulers suffered as well. “If I mentioned all [of the punishments],” she continues, “it would be a

very long time before I finished talking.”24

IMPERIAL SOCIABILITY

To guard against these multiple and ongoing infractions, rulers of the Triple Alliance

emphasized a strict and severe program of education, training, and public display targeting both

nobles and commoners—including, at least for Texcoco, public instruction by the tlatoani every

eighty days. Newborns were told their place in society in the first hours of life, receiving

exhortations and miniature symbols of their future functions: girls of the nobility received

spindles and thread for their future role as money-weavers, while boys were given shields and

23

Florentine Codex, vol. 2, bk. 6, ch. 43, f. 202v. Available at the World Digital Library,

<http://www.wdl.org/en/item/10096/zoom/#group=2&page=418> (Accessed April 23, 2013.) This section is replete

with other references to commoners and the mediation of social inequality.

24

“Intlā moch iz ōniquitēnēhuani, ca huel huècāuh in ōnitlamizquia ic nitlănōnōtzaz” Bancroft dialogues, p. 156.


21

battle-cries in anticipation of their warrior status. Perhaps tellingly, commoner boys also received

miniature cargo straps, readying them for their coming years of transport. Commoner girls were

told to be quiet, not to follow their hearts, and to “be careful to make tortillas well.”25

Among both elites and commoners, children were regularly separated

from their parents and attached to new patterns of loyalty and sociability. Soon

after the birth of new heir, Acolhua noblewomen were exhorted to “not neglect

his breastfeeding”; that is, to “see to it that your attendants care for him.” These

wet nurses were understood to exert important power in the rearing of children,

particularly in a negative sense. Indeed, one of the fixed expressions handed

down through Sahagún describes a wet nurse who “smashed” or “broke” a child,

occurring “when she suckled the child of a noblewoman and the child died.”

More systematically, schools and apprenticeships socialized youth into the

practice of living in the Empire, while regular festivals modeled and explained

social behaviors, often including the added drama of public sacrifice.26

Ongoing educational efforts were supplemented with regular encouragement and

oversight on the part of neighborhood officials, who monitored production, stimulated local pride

and coordination, and enforced local standards over their assigned wards. The urban built

environment, particularly the core quarter of lordly palaces, temples, ball courts, and markets

25

On the quarterly lecture, called NAME, see MOTOLINIA>>>// Clendinnen. On the straps, see Mendieta, book 2,

ch. 20-24. “ten cuidado de hacer bien el pan”

26

“mā ticmoxiccāhuilì in īca in īchīchīhuăltzin, īpan timotlàtōltīz inīc conmochuitlahuīzquè in māhuītzĭzīnhuān in

mocìhuān.” Bancroft dialogues, p. 128; “in chichioa, anozo ticitl, in iquac tla aca pilli ipiltzin quichichitia ce tlacatl

cioatl: auh zan no ommic in piltontli: ic mitoaya: ontlaxamani, ontlapuztec” Florentine Codex, vol. 2, bk. 6, ch. 43,

f. 206r-v. For a wider meditation on the rigors of education in the Triple Alliance, see Inga Clendinnen, “The Cost

of Courage in Aztec Society” Past & Present, vol. 107 (May 1985), pp. 44-89.

Fig. 5

Tlaloc

temple

fire, Códice

en Cruz


22

also contributed to the organization of collective life around the actions and ministrations of local

elites. The organizational power of the built environment was such that early Spanish evangelists

highlighted the need to raze the pyramids of the Triple Alliance in order to disperse the crowds

that continued to gather around them. Mendieta, for instance, argued that it was only after

breaking “the wings of [the Acolhuas’] hearts” that they would come to attend church in

significant numbers.27

But Mendieta might be giving too much credence to the power of collective culture—

temples burned in Central Mexico long before the arrival of the Spanish. The Códice en Cruz, for

instance, records the destruction of the pyramid to the rain god Tlaloc in Texcoco on March 2,

1505, at the height of the dry season. The temple burned on the last day of Atlacahualo, the

month dedicated to calling down the rains, and 1505 had been a very bad year. Drought and the

calendar had coincided again to produce the dreaded 13 House-1 Rabbit sequence, and although

this document does not specify who set Tlaloc ablaze, internal unrest seems the likeliest cause.

Culture is, of course, full of shared meanings. But culture also bursts with contradictory and

conflicting interpretations: Tlaloc was indeed the main rain deity in Acolhucan, and enjoyed not

only the full apparatus of official devotion, but a wide popular following as well. The immediacy

of his attributed power, however, made absences or failures all the more noteworthy.28

27

”quebradas las alas (como dicen) del corazon, viendo sus templos y dioses por el suelo.” Gerónmico de Mendieta,

Historia eclesiástica indiana, book 3, ch. XX. Available at Cervantes Virtual,

http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/historia-eclesiastica-indiana--0/html/ (Accessed April 23, 2013).

28

The date for the burning is 12 Motion, 13 Motion of the tonalpohualli, or day calendar. Because this is the day

calendar and not the year calendar (xiuhpohualli), two dates are possible: March 5, 1505 of the Julian calendar, or

November 17. Internal clues—such as the burning occurring at the beginning of the year’s narration, and then

followed by a number of other events, including Totonacing—suggests the March date.


23

NESTED HIERARCHIES

The symbols and institutions of imperial Acolhuacan—from Tlaloc and his celebrations

to the everyday patterns of coercion supporting nearly all aspects of collective life—proved to be

remarkably durable, however, and lasted well beyond the empire itself. For generations after the

fall of the Triple Alliance, Spanish officials and a host of others continued to mobilize the forms

and patterns of rule to their own, different ends. Patterns of coercion and belief were particularly

durable, largely because they operated on the level of regular personal interaction. For

generations now, scholars have privileged the wider institutions of regional politics, particularly

the altepetl and its early colonial Spanish cognates (cabecera, doctrina, pueblo, etc.), as the

primary forms of social and political life in central Mexico in the sixteenth century and beyond.

This is where the majority of local documents were produced or archived, and this is how central

administrators, whether of the Triple Alliance or the Spanish crown, conceived of their subject

domains. More than this, commoners also used such affiliations, particularly when dealing with

strangers or enemies, but also in more mundane occasions such as marketing.29

Further complicating matters, Frederic Hicks has argued that political institutions in the

late postclassic and early colonial periods did not necessarily adhere to a fixed set of terminology,

particularly in the confusion following the fall of the Triple Alliance in 1521. Altepetl, for

instance, could refer to both the local constituent parts of a regional political hierarchy or the

hierarchy itself. The tlatoani was the sovereign ruler of an altepetl, except when he or she was

subsumed to the ambition of another more powerful ruler from farther away. Calpolli was a

neighborhood; or perhaps a migratory group, or a temple, or a craft guild, or a labor gang.

29

Cite// on marketing: Chimalpahin?? Who else? Anales de Tlatelolco


24

Tlaxilacalli, often used in similar contexts as calpolli, is a bit more consistent; but still a hazy

term to nail down. Nevertheless, on a more relational level, the terms made perfect sense: the

altepetl was the sovereign bureaucracy, the tlatoani was at its head, and the tlaxilacalli and

calpoltin (both deriving from the Nahuatl word for “house”) were the self-referential constituent

parts feeding into the wider regional hierarchy. Things only changed depending on the wider

web of relations describing the term in question.30

Of course, documents in general varied widely over the periods in question and the

inconsistency of terms might not pose a problem in itself. Things become more interesting,

however, when similar variations appear in other important social institutions—most particularly,

the family. It has been widely remarked that a word for “family” seems not to have appeared in

Nahuatl sources from the period, whereas terms of familial relation (mother, father, child, older

brother, retainer, etc.) abound. Relationships shaped institutions, down to the level of language;

and how things looked and functioned depended in a very real way on where you stood and who

you were. This also means that histories of this period are perhaps more susceptible than most to

widely diverging interpretations based on the perspective taken. The altepetl, which might

dominate the world of a tlatoani, could appear to an outlying commoner as an incidental or

changeable affiliation—and to a mid-level rural administrator as a troublesome if unavoidable

commitment.31

30

Hicks doc. Specific case of Calpolli. First two solved by HUEI, rarely attested in docs (Barely any appearance in

corpus like UOREGON)// Pizzigoni, p. 9

31

Lockhart/ Pizzigoni/ Carrasco/Julia MadaJczak


25

Further, the rigorous standardization of terms can also obscure important and real

differences between polities. Fargher, Heredia Espinoza, Blanton, and others, in a series of recent

articles, have argued for the profound difference between even closely neighboring polities in the

Postclassic. For example, both Acolhuacan and Tlaxcala referred to themselves—and,

incidentally, their constituent regional parts—as altepeme, despite the fact that the former was

governed by a sovereign ruler and his bureaucracy and the latter by a republican-style council

open to commoners. These differences played out in such important aspects as the built

environment, the level of centralized administration, and the patterns of revenue open to the state.

The reason Texcoco or Tlaxcala or Tenochtitlan centralized and other places (like the Valley of

Puebla) didn’t owed as much to internal politics as anything else.32

In all of these situations, the argument goes, commoner production can be taken as the

primary input, with differences arising as this activity is organized hierarchically. But the

argument can go farther: documents from Acolhuacan suggest that functional patterns of

inequality operated even on the level of commoner-to-commoner relations. Coercion, and

therefore by extension empire, didn’t necessarily need elites to function. Scholars have long

asserted the preeminence of the altepetl in the social and political organization of the region,

emphasizing the modular nature of both this political entity and its constituent parts. The altepetl

sustained the power of the tlatoani, and supported important bureaucratic structures such as the

tecpan (palace and attending administrators), the primary temples, and the main war apparatus.

In terms of the structure of local inequality, however, the tlaxilacalli, or neighborhood—one step

32

Lane F. Fargher, Richard E. Blanton, Verenice Y. Heredia Espinoza, John Millhauser, Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli

and Lisa Overholtzer" Etc.


26

down from the altepetl—seems to have been the primary engine of political coercion and

economic differentiation. At least in Acolhuacan, this was the political unit where subjects paid

their tribute and labor, where farmers divided up their land, and where worshippers congregated.

Despite the “difficult” prospect of analyzing tlaxilacaltin in many central Mexican regions, few

such problems present themselves for Acolhuacan—indeed, certain key documents seem to have

been produced and kept at the level of the tlaxilacalli, not the altepetl.33

Key among these surviving Acolhua registers are a set of purpose-made but broadly

suggestive tax and land documents for the neighboring tlaxilacalli of Chimalpa and

Cuauhtepoztla in the marginal altepetl of Tepelaoztoc. These separate but twinned registers, now

known as the Códice de Santa María Asunción (Cuauhtepoztla) and the Códice Vergara

(Chimalpa), were created in the early 1540s—some twenty years after the first Spanish invasions

of the region—and originally destined as evidence for a court case protesting the abuses of an

early colonial grantee. Despite their initial provenance, however, these two documents

powerfully express many key aspects of earlier Acolhua administration. For instance, Alfonso

Lacadena and others have mobilized the Vergara to argue for the existence of a broad and mostly

syllabic pattern of writing in Acolhuacan—countering the belief that the Triple Alliance had no

written script—while Barbara Williams and colleagues have used these documents to illustrate

Acolhua skill in such fields as mathematics, geography, and agronomy. Taken together, these

codices represent Acolhua administration as exacting and technically advanced, keeping close

tabs on even such peripheral areas as the outlying tlaxilacalli of Tepetlaoztoc. Indeed, judging by

such things as their triple-entry cadastral system and their careful calculation of both land

33

Pizzigoni, 9; on altepetl Lockhart, etc.


27

boundaries and surface area, Acolhua administrators seem to have been the most exacting of any

in the Triple Alliance.34

But more than even this, Williams and her collaborators have shown the precise ways in

which patterns of inequality reached down through the tlaxilacalli into the very foundations of

Acolhua settlement, to the household level. Each tlaxilacalli was itself divided into separate

named wards (called by Williams and Hicks “localidades,” in absence of a viable term in

Nahuatl) of between XX and XX households, which were themselves further subdivided into

detachments (“blocos censales”) of around XX households. Each of these detachments

converged around the household of a slightly more prominent individual, identified as such by

their comparatively larger landholdings. This was a political, and not a spatial, organization:

dependent households did not necessarily abut those of their superiors, but rather were politically

attached to the wider coercive apparatus through these intermediary individuals. Importantly,

few if any of these local leaders belonged to either the Acolhua nobility or high administration—

although many of the poorer tlaxilacalli members also work designated parcels of elite land as

assigned dependent laborers.35

34

WILLIAMS et al HAVE PUT OUT EXCELLENT SCHOLARLY EDITIONS OF THESE DOCS. Quote

Williamsn and Lacadena and Whittaker and all the rest. // One of the tlaxilacalli is in the center of Tepetloztoc., all

the rest outlying.They were written before the Spaniards’ enthusiastic if irregular efforts toward forced grouping

(reducción); before disease, agricultural disruption, and out-migration had completely changed the patterns of

people on the land; and even before churches began to dot the countryside in the mid-sixteenth century.

OZTOTIPAC/ Asuncion/ VERGARA

35

El códice Vergara, ed. Barbara J. Williams and Frederic Hicks (Mexico City: UNAM, 2011), p. 53. Cf., Carrasco,

Estructura político-territorial; Berdan, et al., Aztec Imperial Strategies. FOR ELITE LANDS, SEE GARRATY’S

EXCAVTIONS OF TEOTI// CERAMIC INDICES OF AZTEC ELITENESS/ Christopher P. Garraty/ Ancient

Mesoamerica / Volume 11 / Issue 02 / July 2000, pp 323 340 DOI: null, Published online: 07 February 2001// p.

335


28

The most powerful coercive relationship at work in imperial Acolhuacan was local,

commoner on commoner. Following the suggestions of the Vergara and the Asunción, we can

imagine commoner bosses mustering tribute payments or work gangs among their designated

parcel of families, and this feeding up through the parcialidades, to the tlaxilacalli, and then to

the altepetl. Or, as that early chronicler of colonial Texcoco, fray Diego Durán, put it:

There was no child who at birth was not assessed by the neighborhood officials and

captains. For this, there were people responsible for 100 or 500 or 400 [households]; and

some were responsible for 20 houses, and others for 40, and others for 50, and others for

100. Those who managed 100 houses would choose and constitute another five or six of

their subjects [as secondary officials]. In this way they divided up the entire city and all

the neighborhoods—so that those with 100 households would guide and direct those with

15 or 20, in order to appear with their tribute and laborers for public functions.

The tlatoque therefore stood at least four steps removed from the extractive labor of their

dependent realms, suggesting perhaps some of the ease with which Nezahualcoyotl and others

could depose them. A tlatoani could be relatively easily replaced; the underlying coercive

mechanism was much more difficult to change.36

A QUICK INTRODUCTION: TEPETLAOZTOC MAPPING PROJECT

[This is one of the most exciting pieces of my research for me, and also one of the slowest. I

believe I can (almost) fully map landholding in Tepetlaoztoc using the Vergara and Santa María

Asunción codices. The measurements of each register are generally solid, and by following the

36

“así no les falta niño que en naciendo no esté empadronado por los oficiales de los barrios y capitanes para lo qual

auia centuriones y quinquajenarios y quadrajenarios, y era que uno tenia cargo de veinte casas, otro de quarenta, otro

de cinquenta, otros de ciento y así tenian cien casas á cargo escoia y constituia otros cinco ó seis de los que tenia por

suditos y repartida toda la ciudad y todos los barrios, porque el que tenia cien casas, para que aquellos, á las veinte

casas ó quince que le cauian, les guiase y mandase y acudiese con sus tributos y hombres de seruicio á las cosas

públicas.” Fray Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e islas de tierra firme, 2 vols., ed. Rosa

Camelo y José Rubén Romero (Mexico City, CONACULTA, 1995), p. 372; Gibson, Aztecs, pp. 136-7; Hicks,

“Calpolli,” p. 243.


29

techniques in the more transparent Oztotipac Lands Map (right nearby); as well terrain maps and

such, I can simply puzzle the neighborhoods together. This is tedious work, but it’s progressing.

I haven’t written it up yet because I want to be sure I can actually finish the task. Here is the

biggest sub-neighborhood I’ve done so far. Each “piece” is a plot of land; each color or pattern

marks a separate family. Black dots are Otomí houses, black triangles are Nahuas, red outlines

are elite holdings (sometimes with dependent laborers living on them).

Some tenative conclusions: Although it’s less visibile in this subsection of the map, I think that

Nahua and Otomí commoners were not completely segregated; or rather, that Otomís didn’t have


30

a separate exclusionary barrio. However, elite lands were in fact set apart. I have yet to breach

the family yet, but I imagine this being particularly fertile to see how this tlaxilacalli worked

internally. Now, back to the academic narration…

STARVATION

These underlying inequalities were matters of life and death. Data from the Asunción,

also analyzed by Williams, suggests that in the early 1540s, this tightly-administered tlaxilacalli

produced 141% of the necessary calories for normal social reproduction. In normal years, this

meant that around 84% of the population was consistently well-fed (60% with a surplus) and

16% chronically hungry. In a moderately poor harvest year, however, 61% of the tlaxilacalli

population would be undernourished, with 52% at risk for famine. In contrast, during times of

modest agricultural failure 39% of the population would remain well-fed, 20% with a surplus.

This meant that at this district level significant minorities were both consistently well-fed (20%)

and chronically hungry (16%) regardless of climatic conditions—a clear indicator of the political

nature of agricultural production. The prime reason for feast or famine was access to productive

fields; in bad years, the well-off had access to roughly twice the land as the poorest of the poor.37

The gap between well-fed commoners and starving ones was perhaps the most important

relationship sustaining political hierarchies in imperial Acolhuacan—it certainly was in

37

Thomas M. Whitmore and Barbara J. Williams, “Famine Vulnerability in the Contact-Era Basin of Mexico: A

simulation” Ancient Mesoamerica, 9 (1998), pp. 83-98. Almost by definition, only commoners participated in

tlaxilacalli land regimes.


31

Tepetlaoztoc. Under this arrangement, favored commoners received extra land in exchange for

fine-grained oversight and control of even marginal areas like the foothills of Cuauhtepozta and

Chimalpa. As might be expected, quotidian relationships between commoners are difficult to

recover for this period, but something of the feeling of these unequal interactions is suggested by

the opening sequence of the Bancroft Dialogues, that early colonial compendium of right speech

from Texcoco. The scene begins with a woman passing by the house of a female relative on her

way to the market. The woman is of a lower social rank than her relative: she lives farther away

from the market, she is the one making the visit, and she addresses her relative as “my lady,”

even though neither one of them can claim noble title. She begins to speak:

Do stay seated, my lady. I won’t disturb you, for I’m just passing by your place to ask

about you, whether you are enjoying a bit of the Lord’s health, for it’s been a while since

I’ve seen your faces. I came by to look for some things in the market, for so it is with we

the sick, we the sufferers.38

As befits her higher stature, the relative stays seated throughout the entire dialogue,

invites the woman into her house, and addresses her as “my child” and “my daughter,” a classic

sign of comparative power and prestige. The relative replies, with a certain sense of performed

humility, that she herself is only “scraping by” and then asks after the health of the woman and

her family. The woman replies that all are healthy, and then asks for forgiveness for only visiting

sporadically: “Even though we live here (in the area), it’s quite a distance between our houses.

That’s why we neglect you and don’t come to ask about you; forgive us before our Lord.”39

38

“Tlā ximēhuiltìtiecan nocihuāpiltzin, namēchonnomòcihuiliz (aqui es mas usado, namēchonnàmanilīz) ca çan

nican amopantzinco niquīztēhua amocatzinco nitlàtlantiquiça, àço tepitzin anquimomàcēhuìzinoà in

ītīchicāhualiztzin in tlācatl in totēcuiyo, ca ye īxquich cāhuitl in in aoquīc amīxtzinco amocpactzinco nitlachia”

Bancroft Dialogues, p. 100???

39

“mācihui izçan nican, ca ăchi onānticatqui, ca yè inic tamēchontoxiccāhuilia in àmo amocatzingo tihuāllàlănì: mā

xitēchmotlapòpolhuilīcān in īxpantzīnco in tlācatl in totēcuiyo.” Bancroft Dialogues, p. 100???


32

So this is what social inequality looked like at the bottom of the social pyramid: One

woman, sick and suffering, runs this way and that to make her living; another, her relative, sits

by piously waiting for a visit. There is familiarity and even affection, but also separate spheres of

work and action, and lines not to be crossed—it seems that the relative would never visit the

woman in her home. And the language of family is crucial: what other institution could mediate

inequality with such close and effective precision? At very base, coercion in imperial Acolhucan

was a family affair.

founding inequalities in acolhuacán, mexico:...

Documents