Outsiders and Outcasts in the Mexica World (Jaime Echeverría García)

Outsiders

and

Outcasts in the Mexica World Jaime Echeverría García

Author: Jaime Echeverría García Editorial director: Nathalie Armella Spitalier Editorial assistant: Vicente Camacho Lucario Assistant editor: Natalia Ramos Garay English translation: Rose Vekony Art directors: Emmanuel Hernández López and Alexandra Suberville Sota Design and layout: Jovan Rabel Guzmán Gómez Design assistant: Berenice Ceja Juárez

Outsiders and Outcasts in the Mexica World Volume 1 in the series The Other Original title: Extranjeros y marginados en el mundo mexica First Spanish edition: 2012 First English edition: 2013 © CACCIANI, S. A. de C. V. Prol. Calle 18 No. 254 Col. San Pedro de los Pinos 01180 México, D.F. +52 (55) 5273 2229 / +52 (55) 5273 2397 contacto@fundacionarmella.org www.fundacionarmella.org /english ISBN (Spanish version): 978-607-8187-36-2 ISBN (English version): 978-607-8187-44-7 All rights reserved. Reproduction of this work in whole or in part, in any medium and by any method, is prohibited without the authorization of the copyright holders.

Cover design: Jovan Rabel Guzmán Gómez

Outsiders

and

Outcasts in the Mexica World Jaime Echeverría García

Prologue

In describing its own society, a dominant culture often identifies itself with the highest values of civilization. Mexica nobles, artisans, and merchants, whose worldview is reflected in several sixteenth-century sources, gave details of their lifestyle, their bodily care, their bearing, and their manner of walking, eating, greeting, laughing, and crying.

Certainly they recognized differences between the customs of nobles and commoners, but both were inscribed within the realm of an urban society, ordered and contained by the law. The Nahua-Mexica considered themselves a civilized people.

The Mexica coexisted with other groups and neighbors whose customs they condemned. The differences between them and these others strengthened their idea of civilization and positioned them at its center. Every difference, every contradiction presented the opportunity to affirm themselves as an urban society, heirs to an ancient and prestigious way of life passed down from the Toltecs. Even the Huastecs, who centuries before had scandalized the lords of Tula with their immodesty, embarrassed the Mexica with their crude sexuality. The Mexica had incorporated into their morals the notion of restraint.

Foreigners offered a useful contrast against which the Mexica could delineate the qualities of their social and moral order; it was as if their presence served to exemplify the deviations that were to be avoided. For instance, the Mexica always wore the same ensemble: for men, a loincloth called a maxtlatl and a cloak; for women, a skirt and a blouse, or huipil. This was the correct way to dress, not the way “the others” did. Those “others” included Purépecha men, who wore a long closed shirt instead of a cloak. It was supposed that they wore no loincloth underneath, so their genitals would brush against their thighs as they walked.

In addition to this image, which helps give shape to the notion of Mexica identity, Jaime Echeverría also makes use of his expertise in anthropology and psychology to explore another type of alien relation: that which arose between the Mexica who were guided by the precepts of their society and those individuals who, lost in the hubbub of the hectic metropolis, hazarded a living by wandering, begging, or committing crimes.

In recent years we have come to recognize the importance of this population of marginalized figures in the Nahua cities of the central basin, and surely there were many like them in other Mesoamerican cities as well. Their presence betrays certain cracks in the social structure: worker communities and noble lineages are not the whole picture.

There were also those with no neighborhood, no home, no lineage; men who roamed the marketplace looking to help carry a merchant’s sacks in exchange for some food; acrobats and jugglers; and many more.

In the improvised lifestyle of marginals, Mexica ideology found the perfect contrast to demonstrate the value of their orderly customs. Vagabonds went about filthy and unkempt, while some marginals were trapped in the vice of drink or earned their living through practices that ranged from irregular to illegal. The habitual drunk, according to Nahua descriptions written in the sixteenth century, did not even resemble a person, with his puffy face, his shouting, his tattered clothes covered with excrement... His image is one of all that is removed from the orderly customs of a civilization.

The scandalous contradiction of norms relating to the body that the prostitute produced with her lascivious public presence and the temporal and verbal incoherence that the lunatic projected are other behaviors explored in this book, which brilliantly shows us how the Mexica constructed their notion of “the other” to affirm themselves, with satisfaction, as being on the right side of difference.

But antinomies are present in all civilizations, since each one constitutes a wide net that holds not only the standards that structure society but also the conflicts, the traditions that preceded the civilized state, and even the dysfunctional practices.

Dr. Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México November 2010

Contents

7 11

Introduction

19

38

Mexica Moral and Behavioral Systems The Proper Way to Walk Clothing and Personal Grooming Speaking Eating Habits Sexuality

The Portrayal of Foreigners and Interethnic Relations The Otomi and Other Highland Dwellers The Cuextecs The Michoacanos Other Foreigners The Mexica’s Nahua Enemies

Marginals vis-Ă -vis the Mexica Social Order The Vagabond The Lunatic The Drunkard The Prostitute

52

Conclusion

54

Glossary

60

Notes

63

Bibliography

69

List of Illustrations

71

Photo Credits

Introduction

T

he Mexica1 made up one of the most significant groups of people in ancient Mexico. The consolidation and expansion of this group dates to the Late Postclassic (A.D. 1200–1521), the period preceding the conquest of Tenoch­ titlan. The Mexica arrived in the basin of Mexico after other Nahua tribes had already occupied the best lands. They settled temporarily in various places until, free of all subjugation, they established their definitive settlement on a small islet that Huitzilopochtli, their tutelary god, had designated for them.

Huitzilopochtli, tutelary god of the Mexica, ordering them to abandon Aztlan. Tira de la peregrinación.

In spite of their precarious beginnings, they achieved great strength in a short time and became one of the major powers of pre-Hispanic Mexico. The warring and expansionism of the Mexica state, along with the systematic practice of sacrificing foreign captives, enabled them to come into contact

* In Nahuatl all words are naturally stressed on the penultimate syllable, making the addition of accents (generally used in Span­ish transcriptions of Nahuatl) unnecessary. This work omits the accents accordingly.

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7

with a great variety of people having different languages and customs, on whom they imposed tribute. War and tributary subjection were among the catalysts for interethnic relations among Nahua groups2—those who lived in the basin—and foreign-speaking people.

Expansion of the Mexica Empire (based on López Austin and López Luján).

MEXICO

MEXICO

ME

TZ

Tuxpan

TI

Texcoco Tlacopan Tzintzuntzán

TL

ÁN

Gulf of Mexico TLAXCALA

MICHOACÁN

Tlaxcala

Tenochtitlan

TEOTITLÁN DEL CAMINO

YOP I

TZI

NCO

COATLICÁMAC MIXTEC LORDLY Oaxaca DOMAINS TUTUT EPEC

Pacific Ocean Mexica Empire

Triple Alliance

Independent political units

SOCONUSCO

Road to Soconusco

But these peripheral cultures presented a great many customs that were not in keeping with Mexica practices: those concerning food, bodily treatment, styles of dress and adornment, and the characteristics of sacrifices, among other features. The fact that foreigners spoke a language other than Nahuatl was one of the essential criteria that formed their alterity. We need only read Introduction

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book 10, chapter 29, of the Florentine Codex—compiled by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún in the second half of the sixteenth century, with the collaboration of Nahua informants—to see what the Mexica, and the Nahuas in general, thought of their foreign neighbors, both near and far. This text exposes their Nahuacentric view of different ethnic groups, for it does not stop at describing the physical characteristics and cultural ways of these people but also criticizes them, measuring them against the Mexica’s own ideals. This can be seen very clearly and schematically in references to the Otomi and the Cuextecs.3 While pointing out their supposed faults, instead of giving an objective description of those aspects, the text exalts the Mexica moral system. Everything that does not agree with that system becomes a transgression. Thus, the foreigner was made out to be an immoral being, moreover characterized by dullness and ineptitude.4 At the same time, the way in which the Mexica spoke of non-Nahua foreigners reflected the wars they waged against them, since all were considered enemies of the Empire for continually countering their military attacks and resisting their tribute.

Foreigners were incorporated not only in the moral system but also in rituals, myths, and war; they played important religious and social roles.

Human sacrifice through heart extraction.

Florentine Codex.

Introduction

Contents

9

Outsiders

and

Outcasts in the Mexica World Year of publication: 2013 contacto@fundacionarmella.org www.fundacionarmella.org/english

Jaime Echeverría García

Antinomies are present in all civilizations, since each one constitutes a wide net that holds not only the standards that structure society but also the conflicts, the traditions that preceded the civilized state, and even the dysfunctional practices.

-Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo The study of pre-Hispanic societies focuses not only on their most remarkable aspects—their technological developments, military exploits, political events, and economic achievements—but also on the everyday phenomena through which their ideology and identity are reproduced. One such element is the interaction between members of a community and foreigners or socially marginalized figures—those persons on the periphery of a culture who permanently transgress the prevailing social, ethico-moral, and behavioral norms.