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Aztlán

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The seven caves of Chicomoztoc, from Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca

Aztlán (/as.ˈtlan/, from Nahuatl Aztlan /ˈas.tɬaːn/) is the legendary ancestral home of the Nahua peoples, one of the main cultural groups in Mesoamerica. "Azteca" is the Nahuatl word for "people from Aztlan."

The legend

Nahuatl legends relate that seven tribes lived in Chicomoztoc, or "the place of the seven caves." Each cave represented a different Nahua group: the Xochimilca, Tlahuica, Acolhua, Tlaxcalan, Tepaneca, Chalca, and Mexica. Because of a common linguistic origin, those groups also are called "Nahuatlaca" (Nahua people). These tribes subsequently left the caves and settled in Aztlán.

The various descriptions of Aztlán are contradictory. While some legends describe Aztlán as a paradise, the Aubin Codex says that the Aztecs were subject to a tyrant elite called the Azteca Chicomoztoca. Guided by their priest, the Aztec fled, and on the road, their god Huitzilopochtli forbade them to call themselves Azteca, telling them that they should be known as Mexica. Ironically, the scholars of the 19th century would name them Aztec.

The role of the homeland of Aztlán is slightly less important to Aztec legendary histories than the migration to Tenochtitlán itself. According to the legend, the southward migration began around 830 CE. Each of the seven groups is credited with founding a different major city-state in Central Mexico. The city-states reputed to have an Aztec foundation were:

These city-states formed during the Late Postclassic period of Mesoamerica (1300-1521 CE).

According to Aztec legends, the Mexica were the last tribe to emigrate and took 302 years to reach their destination. When they arrived at the Anahuac Valley, the present-day Valley of Mexico, all available land had been taken, and they were forced to squat on the edge of Lake Texcoco.

After the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the story of Aztlán gained importance and was reported by Fray Diego Durán in 1581 and others to be a kind of Eden-like paradise, free of disease and death, which existed somewhere in the far north. These stories helped fuel Spanish expeditions to what is now the Southwestern United States.

Places identified as Aztlán

While Aztlán has many trappings of myth, similar to Tamoanchan, Chicomoztoc, Tollan and Cibola, archaeologists have nonetheless attempted to identify the geographic place of origin for the Mexica.

Depiction of the departure from Aztlán in the 16th-century Codex Boturini

The name of Aztalan, Wisconsin (a Mississippian site) was proposed by N. F. Hyer in 1837 because he thought it might have been Aztlán, following a suggested etymology of "Aztatlan" by Alexander von Humboldt.

In the mid-19th century, fringe theorist Ignatius L. Donnelly, in his famous book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, sought to establish a connection between Aztlán and the fabled "lost continent" of Atlantis of Greek mythology; Donnelly's views, however, have never been recognised as credible by mainstream scholarship.

In 1887, Mexican anthropologist Alfredo Chavero claimed that Aztlán was located on the Pacific coast in the state of Nayarit. While this was disputed by contemporary scholars, it achieved some popular acceptance. In the early 1980s, Mexican President José López Portillo suggested that Mexcaltitán, also in Nayarit, was the true location of Aztlán, but this was denounced by Mexican historians as a political move (Jáuregui 2004). Even so, the state of Nayarit incorporated the symbol of Aztlán in its coat of arms with the legend "Nayarit, cradle of Mexicans."

Eduardo Matos Moctezuma presumes Aztlán to be somewhere in the modern-day states of Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán (Matos Moctezuma 1988, p.38).

It has also been proposed that Lake Powell was originally the site of Aztlán. Part of the migration legend also describes a stay at Culhuacán ('leaning hill' or 'curved hill'). Proponents of the Lake Powell theory equate this Culhuacán with the ancient home of the Anasazi at Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park.

There is currently no consensus among scholars as to whether Aztlan is a mythical location only or whether the myth also has an actual historical component, nor where such an historical location might have been (Smith, 1996:39)

Primary sources

The primary sources for Aztlán are the Boturini Codex, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and the Aubin Codex. Aztlán is also mentioned in the History of Tlaxcala (by Diego Muñoz Camargo, a Tlaxcalan mestizo from the 17th century), as well as Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca. It should be noted that all the documents mentioned above were written (in Spanish) after the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

Etymology

The meaning of the name Aztlan is uncertain. One suggested meaning is "place of egrets" — the explanation given in the Crónica Mexicáyotl — but this is not possible under Nahuatl morphology: "place of egrets" would be Aztatlan.(Andrews 2003, p. 496 and Launey 1986, p. 26). Another proposed derivation is "place of whiteness" (Andrews 2003, p. 496). J. Richard Andrews conjectures the translation "At the Place in the Vicinity of Tools", sharing the āz- element of words such as teponāztli "drum" (from tepontli "log").(Andrews 2003, pp. 496, 616).

Aztlán is the Spanish language spelling and pronunciation of Nahuatl Aztlan . The spelling Aztlán and its matching last-syllable stress cannot be Nahuatl, which always stresses words on the second-to-last syllable. The accent mark on the second a added in Spanish marks stress shift (from oxytone to paroxytone), typical of several Nahuatl words when loaned into Mexican Spanish.

Use by the Chicano Movement

Main article: Chicano movement
The unofficial flag of Aztlán, used by Chicano nationalists in San Diego and Denver during the Chicano Movement.

The concept of Aztlán as the place of origin of the pre-Columbian Mexican civilization has become a symbol for various Mexican nationalist and indigenous movements.

The name Aztlán was first taken up by a group of Chicano-separatists led by Oscar Zeta Acosta during the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. They used the name "Aztlán" to refer to the southwestern United States which was ceded to the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War. Combined with the claim of some historical linguists and anthropologists that the original homeland of the Aztecan peoples was located in the southwestern United states, Aztlán in this sense became a symbol of mestizo activists who believe they have a legal and primordial right to the land.

Groups who have used the name "Aztlán" in this manner include Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, "Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán"), and The Nation of Aztlan (NOA).

Many in the Chicano Movement attribute poet Alurista for popularizing the term Aztlán in a poem presented during the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado, March 1969.

In fiction

"Aztlán" has been used as the name of speculative fictional future-states that emerge in the southwest US or Mexico after the central US government suffers collapse or major setback; examples appear in such works as the novels Warday, The Peace War, and World War Z, as well as the role-playing game Shadowrun.

In Michael Flynn's alternate history story "The Forest of Time", Colorado is part of a nation-state called Nuevo Aztlán.

Aztlan is also used in House of the Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer, as the name of the former Mexico, with the country of "Opium" separating it from the United States.

Thomas Pynchon refers to Aztlan as the "mythic ancestral home of the Mexican people" in his latest novel "Against the Day":

"'Hallucinatory country and cruel, not hard to understand that Mormons might have found it congenial enough to want to settle, but this is much older--Thirteenth Century anyway. There were perhaps tens of thousands of people back then, living all through that region, prosperous and creative, when suddenly, within one generation--overnight as these things go--they fled, in every appearance of panic terror, went up to the steepest cliffsides they could find and built as securely as they knew how defenses against...well, something.'" (277)

In Gary Jennings' novel Aztec, his hero, Mixtli (Dark Cloud), finds Aztlan at one point in his explorations, and stays for a while. Later, he helps facilitate contact between Aztlan and the Aztec Triple Alliance, just before Cortez' arrival.

See also

References

External links


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