Finding Hope and Balance in the Indigenous Past

This piece was originally published in Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media (2022).

When the Spaniards first looked down at Tenochtitlan, that gleaming city on an island in the Valley of Mexico, they were dumbfounded. Hundreds of thousands of people lived in that metropolis, crisscrossed with canals, burgeoning with chinampa gardens that seemed to float on the water, cleaner and more efficient than any European city. A careful system of dual dikes kept brackish water out. Human waste was efficiently recycled.

Such careful integration of humans and environment isn’t surprising in hindsight. At the heart of Aztec (and more broadly, Nahua) thought was the importance of balance between chaos and order, creation and destruction. That duality was personified in the two brother gods of creation: the trickster Tezcatlipoca and the savior Quetzalcoatl.

It took the gods five tries, the Aztecs believed, to get the world right, to find an equilibrium between the needs of hungry, greedy humans and the biosphere. Four times the experiment had been a disaster. The world had ended in darkness, in floods, ravaged by winds, scoured by flame. Even this fifth attempt, they suspected, would one day fall as well, wracked by earthquakes as humanity digs deeper and deeper…