The Pre-Hispanic in Landscape
Sandra Rozental
Abstract
Marcelo, a graphic designer in his late thirties when I first met him in 2005, is one of the founders of the Calpulli Macoyolotzin, a group of residents from San Miguel Coatlinchan who are interested in their town’s pre-Hispanic heritage. A few years earlier he had come across a facsimile of Coatlinchan’s oldest cartographic representation displayed in a bookstore window: a sixteenth-century painted manuscript known as the Mapa de Coatlinchan (also spelled Coatlichan) (fig. 1). He later described his find to me as oro molido (powdered gold), a metaphor that anticipated the ways in which the document has been activated by the Calpulli as a kind of treasure map.1 Using its own research methodologies, the group has repurposed the colonial document to explore the town’s territory, uncovering and reinstating hidden forms of knowledge and value left behind by the area’s pre-Hispanic inhabitants.2San Miguel Coatlinchan, thirty-five miles east of Mexico City, is a small town in the Texcoco municipality, State of Mexico. A prominent pre-Hispanic settlement, it is famous for a monumental object associated with Mexico’s national patrimony: a 167-ton stone sculpture representing an ancient water deity, known as Tlaloc,3 probably made in the era of Teotihuacan and transferred to the Museo Nacional de Antropología in 1964.4 Other traces of Coatlinchan’s pre-Hispanic prominence linger in the local landscape: architectural features such as ball court markers and tzompantli skulls are integrated into a colonial cloister, stone structures known as tlateles (earth mounds) pepper the town and its surroundings, and clay figurines and pottery shards are common finds in what is left of the town’s arable lands.The town and its territory have of course changed dramatically over time. During the colonial period and until the early twentieth century, townspeople were part of the labor force of several large agricultural haciendas that were dismantled during the Mexican Revolution through communal land grants or ejidos. Since then, the population of Coatlinchan was largely made up of campesinos growing maize on ejido plots, as well as merchants selling hay, firewood, and wooden beams from the town’s forested areas. Nahuatl, spoken until the late colonial period, has not been spoken in any living person’s lifetime, although as in much of Mexico, certain words are common in colloquial speech and Nahuatl place names remain widely used. In the past few decades, as a result of recent migration and the vertiginous expansion of Mexico City, Coatlinchan’s rural landscape, as well as the visible traces of its ancient past, are being swallowed by urban sprawl. The Calpulli Macoyolotzin’s interest in the pre-Hispanic is in many ways a response to this changing spatial and social context.Painted on a nearly square sheet of fig-bark paper or amatl (amate in Spanish), the Mapa de Coatlinchan roughly dates to the early postconquest period. It combines pre-Hispanic glyphs and pictorial forms of representation with Latin script glosses and European-style illustrations to depict the ancient señorio of Coatlinchan, an altepetl that flourished in the Acolhuacan region during the late Postclassic.5 The map shows six spiraling color lines emanating from a glyph portraying a serpent emerging from a calli (house glyph) atop an altepetl. The lines connect the cabecera, the largest and most central glyph, to its six dependent calpullis, each with its own estancias and barrios—hinting at a hierarchical system of political, social, and territorial organization.Little is known about the map’s history. Like many such manuscripts, it was probably made as part of a land claims case, but other documents supporting such a case have been lost.6 The first known written record of the map dates from 1880, when it was catalogued as part of the private holdings of Alfredo Chavero, a prominent scholar of pre-Hispanic Mexico.7 In 1892, it was purchased from the heirs of another private collector, Rafael Lucio, by Francisco del Paso y Troncoso for the Museo Nacional. Kept in the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia (BNAH)’s vault since then, it has only been on public display once, in 2014, as part of the Códices de México exhibition commemorating the INAH’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Nevertheless, the map has circulated broadly through copies made since the late nineteenth century, as well as its inclusion in a variety of publications.8Most recently, in 1994, the INAH and the Benemérita Universidad de Puebla published a glossy, poster-style, life-size facsimile alongside a scholarly interpretation by Luz María Mohar Betancourt. In this and other publications, the map is offered as an example of pre-Hispanic resistance to conquest, expressed through the endurance of Indigenous forms of spatial representation. This is the facsimile that Marcelo purchased years ago, which he and other Calpulli members have since studied and put to use. Enthusiastic about the map itself, they found Mohar Betancourt’s accompanying analysis, which is predominantly linguistic, problematic. In Marcelo’s words, “scholars write from a distance. They don’t even come here to experience the place. The map could be about anywhere.” For him and for others in the group, it isn’t enough to decipher glyphs and translate place names from Nahuatl; an intimate and embodied relationship to place and to landscape is key. In order to make the Mapa de Coatlinchan truly legible, the members of the group have spent several years doing fieldwork, walking in the landscape, looking for documents and land titles in institutional and personal archives, and conducting oral history interviews with family members and town elders. Through this research, they have been able to match places now named after Catholic saints and liturgy to the Nahuatl toponyms and sites marked on the map.Although only a handful of the Nahuatl toponyms are still used today, many of those that appear on the map were common knowledge only one or two generations ago, remembered by elders or figuring in nineteenth-century title deeds. At the same time, the older generation of town residents who grew up in Coatlinchan when it was a small agricultural village have spent their days traversing the town’s territory to tend to their fields, pasture sheep, or gather firewood. Their intimate knowledge of the landscape helped the Calpulli to identify topographical features such as rocks, caves, and bodies of water marked on the map. Elders also showed the group the remains of several tlateles, such as Ayapango and Tecalco, which appear on the map but have been largely destroyed. For much of the early twentieth century, these structures were well known because they provided town residents with supplementary income: idoleros would regularly come to buy pre-Hispanic figurines easily found nearby. Since then, many have considered the ruins of these tlateles mere cumbersome piles of rocks and have dismantled them to make way for local agriculture or construction. Using the map, Calpulli members have not only located tlateles that were fading from local memory but worked to “clean” them, excavating and rebuilding the structures to the best of their abilities. Through these efforts, they hope for more than preservation: they have incorporated the tlateles and sites identified on the map into a ritual itinerary that takes the Calpulli members to different locations over the course of the calendar year, following the colored pathways marked on the document.Like many groups associated with La mexicanidad, a neo Aztec movement that began in the Valley of Mexico at the height of indigenismo in the 1940s and has since expanded all over Mexico and beyond,9 the Calpulli Macoyolotzin’s designation as a calpulli is meant to rekindle the kind of localized collective, political, religious, and economic personhood that has been identified as the region’s main unit of social organization in pre-Hispanic times. The Calpulli Macoyolotzin is an offshoot (the name in fact is a nahuatlization of the term macollo, used in botany to refer to the bud or offspring) of another organization, the Grupo Cultural, which focuses mostly on historical research and preservation. In contrast to the Grupo Cultural, Calpulli members refer to their practices in ritual terms, describing their work as a way not just to study, but also to reinhabit, and thus, revive, ancient Indigenous lifeways. Theirs is, therefore, a very particular theory of cultural continuity: one that perceives the pre-Columbian past neither as fully past nor as having resisted or “survived” in linear time. For the Calpulli, this past lies dormant in the landscape, ready to be reawakened with the right kinds of research and embodied ritual work.This local theory of pre-Hispanic continuity in the landscape and the ways the Calpulli is making use of a colonial map to access ancient Indigenous ontologies contrasts with scholarly work that has claimed that conquest obliterated any kind of pre-Hispanic survival. For instance, in his 1961 essay, “On the Colonial Extinction of the Motifs of Pre-Columbian Art,” George Kubler was rather extreme in proclaiming the “extinction” of pre-Hispanic cultural forms, using eschatological metaphors to argue that all that remained were “corpses.”10 Only a kind of “archeological autopsy” could unearth the lifeless fragments of the “deep-lying shipwreck of Pre-Columbian civilization” (14/66). Yet in The Shape of Time the following year, Kubler, clearly interested in the question of continuity, somewhat contradictorily explored art objects’ capacity to endure over time—not through material survival per se, but through repetition or what he called their “replica-mass.”11 He described the latter as an open-ended sequence made up of “prime objects” and the many re-entrances and reworkings they might inspire in social life.12 It would seem, then, that Kubler, in spite of his 1961 assertion regarding the extinction of pre-Columbian symbolic forms, believed in the capacity of the social to generate and prolong an art object’s life through imagination, creativity, appropriation, and replication.As a social anthropologist interested in how local communities engage the pre-Hispanic past by collecting, interpreting, reproducing, and activating its material traces, I have long been fascinated by Kubler’s interest in replica-masses, but was not familiar with his 1961 essay proclaiming extinction as a paradigm for thinking about the pre-Hispanic after conquest. The invitation to engage his work for this journal made me revisit his texts and think of them in relation to my fieldwork in Coatlinchan. I thought of the map and the ways the Calpulli members have used it, because in his 1961 essay, Kubler included colonial maps that combined European styles with Indigenous forms of representation—of which the Mapa de Coatlinchan is one—within a list of “formal” survivals that constituted exceptions to his rule of generalized extinction.13 He specifically referred to the colonial “native”-illustrated manuscripts as a kind of “explant,” or what he compared (rather oddly) to chicken embryo cells grown in a New York lab: for Kubler, pre-Hispanic pictorial forms were made up of “cell tissue [that] is indeed Mexican, but their medium is European” (22/70). In scholarship produced since the 1980s, several art historians have vigorously argued that in fact, colonial maps document the survival of Indigenous ontologies after the conquest not only because of their formal properties—pre-Hispanic glyphs and other pictorial elements, as well as materials from which they are made—but also because of how they represent Indigenous ideologies and understandings of space and the cosmos.14The Calpulli’s approach resonates with these art historical studies,15 and even more so with scholarship concerned with the pragmatic uses of such documents on the part of the Indigenous communities throughout and beyond the colonial period. Historians have used a wide gamut of sources to elucidate how ancient maps were continually used, reproduced, and referenced in court cases as evidence to establish ownership over land and natural resources.16 These uses have endured well into the present, as a variety of communities in contemporary Mexico continue to appeal to ancient maps to sustain more recent territorial disputes.17 The use of ancient maps to justify sovereignty over land and resources to this day points to a vernacular understanding of continuity between the historical lands and communities represented and their present-day iterations, as well as to such a continuity’s recognition and legibility in both colonial Spanish and modern Mexican law, that far supersedes Kubler’s limited purview that focused on symbolic representations (including language), and simply ignored other kinds of possible survivals such as the enduring materiality of landscape.Although many of Coatlinchan’s residents are interested in historical maps and well versed in using archives to document land claims (as is the case throughout rural towns in Mexico), the Calpulli Macoyolotzin’s practices offer an entry point for thinking about these other forms of Indigenous “survival” or continuity that colonial objects such as the Mapa de Coatlinchan might exemplify. Indeed, its members are activating the map as a portal that uses space—the town’s landscape—to access knowledge from another time. The map, then, has a performative quality that, read in tandem with the present landscape, works to uncover pre-Hispanic ontologies. Indeed, the group’s use of the map echoes the ritual work undertaken by pre-Hispanic calpullis, who themselves enacted elaborate staging, drawing on the force of images and territorial representations to ensure social reproduction over time.18 For the Calpulli Macoyolotzin, pre-Hispanic materials and colonial artifacts like the map contain the possibility of continuity not necessarily framed as part of a continuum within linear historical time, but as an “essence” that can be accessed, manipulated, appropriated, and revived spatially.19 “For us, the past is not a closed chapter, but always here, lying under our feet, latent. It is our essence, we just have to work hard to find the pathways to access it,” Juan Manuel, a member of the Calpulli and the owner of a small sporting goods store in Coatlinchan, told me. “We disagree with scholars who just see maps and stones, dead objects. For us, these things are not dead at all. They are breathing; they tell us stories. We just have to learn how to listen to what they have to say.”For several years, every Sunday at daybreak, the Calpulli members met in Coatlinchan’s main square and embarked on multi-hour walks.20 Their preparation was similar for each expedition: they got together to study the map and discuss a specific landmark in relation to their research and knowledge of the place. The night before the walk, everyone had a good meal. The walk itself had to be done fasting; no food or even water could be consumed. The Calpulli members consider these walks a form of sacrifice, an offering of the body’s energy to the guardians of ancient sites. During one such expedition in 2011, Rosa, one of the older women in the group, explained: “This is about committing ourselves, our essence, our labor through our bodies and our souls. We don’t want to pretend to be what we are not. We are not indios; we can’t go back in time. But we can learn from our ancestors, feed their essence to create a balance, using our bodies to offer them our energy and our strength.” Other Calpulli members share Rosa’s sense of indigeneity that has little to do with time travel. They understand the landscape as being alive, as telling stories, as transmitting knowledge, that they can access using an ancient map to engage with their territory.Upon arrival at a site, the Calpulli performed both a literal and a ritual cleansing. They first changed their clothes from jeans and T-shirts to white cloth pants and blouses for men and embroidered huipiles for women, replacing hiking boots with leather sandals. They lighted copal in an incense burner and used its scented smoke to purify each participant. Saluting the four cardinal points and their associated divinities in pre-Hispanic cosmologies, Calpulli members asked permission from the site’s guardians to enter. They then placed an offering of incense, water from the town’s springs and from its wells, fruit, flowers, pulque, and a variety of seeds from local crops. The final element in the offering was each participant’s body: a dance to the rhythm of ayoyotes,21 rattles, and drums, all handmade. These dances were always simple, “not meant for show,” as Daniel, one of the younger members of the group who taught new members the dance steps, explained: “it is part of the work we are doing, an offering of ourselves, a sacrifice. No need for choreography and somersaults.” Both the attire—the handmade clothes and accessories—and the dance itself had to be invested with the body’s energy to actually produce “essence.”Having finished the ritual, each participant cleared brush, removed overgrown weeds, and picked up trash. “People come up to the monte (hills) to drink or dump all their trash; they don’t realize these places are sacred, that they contain our essence,” Daniel lamented as he picked up empty liquor bottles and beer cans. “So, we come and clean, trying to appease the of the guardians who for these places when most of us The Calpulli members use the to refer to this the term from local forms of to the region’s y or forms of local are central to what have studied as the each of is for his or labor for communal the Calpulli, walking and the landscape through as well as in ritual that their energy and it to the collective, are ways to a Indigenous past that is very much present in their to my knowledge of the members of the group identify as Indigenous per many in Mexico, they being Indigenous with an Indigenous language), they to access Indigenous through a particular kind of relationship to landscape and for them, then, is a somewhat a way of being that is not in time. it can be by activating like the Mapa de Coatlinchan to an embodied relationship to to Kubler’s The Shape of we might argue that what is not a colonial map is or is not an example of survival of pre-Hispanic symbolic forms, but the ways in which the landscape, changing but also can be by the for the pre-Hispanic to to this day in to and for their on of this