Aztlan Affirmed, Part I: Pictorial Sources

Aztlan. A word fraught with nuances, echoing differently in the minds of Chicano activists, Mexican scholars and a spectrum of folks in between.

But what did the “Aztecs,” the Nahuas believe about Aztlan?

This article is the first in a series reviewing the contents of indigenous texts and informant testimony during the first century after the Spanish Conquest.

Let’s review some basics. Most know Aztlan as the original homeland of the Aztecs. Some Mexican Americans use the term to [re]claim the US Southwest (though the Native nations occupying the land at the time of the Spanish Conquest have the better argument for sovereignty). I’m pretty sure the Chicano poet Alurista got that ball rolling in the 1960s, but we’ll come back to this debate at the very end.

Anthropology, archaeology and linguistics all support the idea that the indigenous Mexican groups speaking Uto-Aztecan languages first emerged from the area near Utah thousands of years ago, moving south in waves.

Speakers of Nahuatl — the Nahuas — reached Central Mexico by about 500 CE (AD). By the time Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519, the Nahuas had already been there a thousand years. There are some interesting implications about the facts of that migration, but I’ll save them for the final piece in this series.

Right now I’m interested in the PERCEPTION of the Nahuas about their place of origin.