On the Lips of Others: Moteuczoma’s Fame in Aztec Monuments and Rituals

Abstract

This intriguing and intelligent book is a testimony to what a creative and persistent scholar can do with a single word. As Patrick Thomas Hajovsky reveals in the preface to On the Lips of Others, while studying Nahuatl as a graduate student he became fascinated by tenyotl. Literally meaning “lip-ness,” the term is translatable as “fame.” Such a gloss requires an explanation, of course, and this Hajovsky provides over the course of ten chapters.If that sounds as if the book is a work of philology or linguistics, it is not—or not quite. The linguistic turn in all Mesoamerica’s disciplines has by no means subsided, and it continues to evolve and expand in ways that encourage increasing varieties of methods and foci. Hajovsky, for example, is an art historian, interested equally in text and image. He is able to turn an interest in a single Nahuatl term into a full-length and fully realized monograph by focusing on the tenyotl of one Nahua in particular—Montezuma, or Moteuczoma. The Aztec emperor, or huei tlahtoani (Great Speaker), is well chosen not simply because his fame prevails to this day, but because sixteenth-century sources on Moteuczoma are contradictory. We would expect the Great Speaker’s death in 1520 to divide preconquest and colonial-era perspectives on his status and life, but Hajovsky shows how dramatic that division is. Ethnohistorical sources, both written and visual, gave Moteuczoma a bad reputation, making him famous—or infamous—for his failure to defend his empire from invaders. Yet preconquest representations of his name hieroglyph suggest a completely different image.Only eight examples have survived (or been discovered thus far), all on Aztec stone sculptures. But Hajovsky does a great deal with those eight, three of which appear on sculptures with portraits, three without. His exploration of “Moteuczoma’s name and fame” (10) (a phrase that, arguably, would have made a better book title) juxtaposes these eight name glyph examples with early colonial ethnohistorical texts; to his credit, he reads sources like Diego Durán’s Historia and Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia general (the Florentine Codex) with appropriate distance and care, never losing sight of the complex cultural context in which such texts were generated. Although Hajovsky pays lip service to anthropological theorists like Marshall Sahlins, he is more indebted to historians of Aztec art like Elizabeth Boone, Susan Evans, and Emily Umberger, as well as scholars of colonial-era Nahuatl documents (ranging from James Lockhart to Miguel León-Portilla).This multidisciplinary positioning of the study within sixteenth-century Mexican ethnohistory/art history is important to making this a monograph (rather than an article or two; only one chapter, “The Chapultepec Portrait,” overlaps with another publication—an essay in a 2012 edited volume). It is also crucial to the book, considering that the source base of eight name glyphs is tiny and, as Hajovsky’s concedes, the kinds of sculptures on which they appeared were “not widely viewed, and significant parts of them were never seen” (10). But Hajovsky persuasively explores Moteuczoma’s “mystique”—to show how his imperial mystique was maintained and exploited to promote the status and power of both the office and its holder—by using both preconquest and ethnohistorical sources to contextualize his close reading of the emperor’s name, name glyph, speech glyph, and portraits.Hajovsky’s attention to colonial filters is sensitive throughout the book but is the specific focus of the short closing chapter. Thus while this book is obviously compulsory reading for scholars of the Aztecs, Latin Americanist ethnohistorians should also find it rewarding and worthy of serious attention.