Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México

Abstract

In a scholarly convergence of historiography and anthropology, Danna Levin Rojo's study has achieved what both disciplines have fallen short of: a more profound understanding of the collaboration of Spaniards and Mesoamerican Indians that enabled the conquest and settlement of northern New Spain. She demonstrates that Nuevo México—the vast northern realm, contiguous but not equivalent with the modern state—had to be jointly invented as a “transcultural object of desire” before it could actually be located and colonized (p. 176).Sixteenth-century documents make only scant and passing mention of the participation of legions of indigenous warriors and settlers in colonial projects. So historians have largely avoided speculation on what could have possibly motivated these natives. And the exotic and mythical qualities of postconquest codices such as the Lienzo de Tlaxcala have frustrated anthropologists in assessing their historicity. Levin Rojo offers a comprehensive, encyclopedic survey of documents and codices to ground her central argument—that Nahua origin and migration stories were prime intercultural motivators for colonial expansion north of the Valley of Mexico.The “return to Aztlán” is the major theme of the collaborative Indo-Hispanic project. A deluxe collection of color plates and maps supplements the arguments, but one in particular recapitulates the central thesis. A leaf of the Códice de Tlatelolco (plate 15) illustrates Nahua participation in the Mixtón War and the 1540 expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to Cíbola. Colorfully costumed and well-armed Tlatelolca warriors tower over detailed but diminutive, black-and-white mounted Spanish knights and Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza himself. The Spaniards appear as auxiliaries to a clearly indigenous campaign.Levin Rojo sets the preconquest stage with an ethnohistorical overview of the territories where the “quest for Nuevo México” unfolded, explaining how Nahua political organization and local identities emerge from origin and migration narratives. Stories from across Mesoamerica share a common structure: ethnogenesis of a group under a tutelary deity, the north-to-south odyssey in search of a promised land, and the foundational miracle that signified their legitimacy in the new place. The apparition of the eagle, serpent, and cactus of Tenochtitlán is the most famous, but there are other examples.Narratives from dominant colonial discourses draw from another family of myths that underlies European triumphalism. The greatest impediment to assigning indigenous agency in Mexican historiography is what Levin Rojo calls the “medieval hypothesis” of the conquest, first articulated by Enrique de Gandía in the 1920s and prevalent in the rest of the century. This idea that imaginary places like the earthly paradise and Seven Cities of the island of Antillia, populated with Amazons, noble savages, and monstrous creatures, could be as important as the imperial designs of the crown and the ambition for gold and spice was as compelling as it was unquestioned. After a close reading of well- and lesser-known chronicles and diaries, Levin Rojo finds no evidence of the marvelous or of the influence of the medieval hypothesis. Many students of Mexican history still assume the Seven Cities of Cíbola to be a European myth when it actually springs from a commonplace in Mesoamerican origin myths, the seven caves of Chicomóstoc from which emerged seven foundational tribes.Even when scholars like Tzvetan Todorov finally broke through the veil of myth to identify the centrality of European empirical ideology and praxis in the conquest of Mexico, there was still a reluctance to assign any agency at all to the natives. But postconquest, it was the encounter with indigenous thought that enabled the next phase of northern expansion. Such pragmatism was missing from the expeditions prior to the Mexican adventure. Explorers like Christopher Columbus used only deductive reasoning based on textual authority of writings like the journals of Marco Polo, whose place-names, from Cathay and Cipango, were directly imposed on the American landscape.Levin Rojo convincingly deconstructs the most important toponyms in the next phase of colonial expansion, Nueva España and Nuevo México. To name the Mesoamerican heartland after Spain implied more than the conquistador's nostalgia for snowy mountains and temperate climes. Similarities were also social and cultural—cities built of stone and people dressed in woven clothes, engaged in advanced agriculture, and ruled by monarchs, with a complex religion presided over by a hierarchy of priests. The encounter was also an engagement, the proof of which resides in one of the most hybrid and oldest place-names of North America, a Nuevo México in the north with wealthy city-states to be rediscovered. After the conquest of Mexico, Spaniards were profoundly influenced by native worldviews, history, and traditions. Mexican Indians were fascinated by the idea of a return to Aztlán, their place of origin. As expeditions headed north on pre-Hispanic trade and migration routes, the ruins of great cities were found, confirming the historicity of native myths. The Indo-Hispanic collaboration was not just military but also cultural, ideological, and political.