Aztlan Affirmed, Part III: Indigenous Informants

This thread continues my discussion of what indigenous sources have to say about Aztlan, the legendary homeland of the Aztecs.

In the first two parts of this series, I’ve looked at pictorial codices and works by Nahua historians.

Now let’s see what indigenous informants had to say.

Primeros Memoriales (“First Memoranda”) is an illustrated Nahuatl-language manuscript compiled between 1559 and 1561 by the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún and his trilingual indigenous assistants in Tepepolco, a large town northeast of Mexico City.

In a study now seen as an early template for anthropology and ethnography, they interviewed a series of elderly, upper-class informants, writing down their Nahuatl responses. Sahagún organized these into a draft of his evolving project to document pre-Columbian Nahua society.

Over time, of course, this would become his Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (General History of the Things of New Spain), a twelve-volume exploration of nearly every aspect of Aztec life before the Conquest more commonly known as the FLORENTINE CODEX.

It was in Primeros Memoriales that Sahagún recorded what the elders said about the origins of the Mexica, Acolhuah, and Tepenecah — the ruling cultures of the Triple Alliance or Aztec Empire.

They were originally Chichimecah, informants claimed, emerging from Chicomoztoc.