Aztlán

I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.

Now I'm catching on to why that's so.

Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Aztlantis, where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and along the way we push back against the misinformation that so often surrounds these topics.

I am your host, Kurly Tlapoyawa, and...

Recently, I gave another talk at Bow and Arrow Brewing Company here in Albuquerque.

They were only given the name Aztec in the 1800s by German scholars looking for a word to describe the entire civilization.

It was inspired by the myth of Aztlan, the legendary homeland of their people.

They lived here for ages until it became unstable, and people began to flee.

They hid in caves, and when they emerged, they were new people.

Linguistically, the Nahua language closely groups with the languages of the American Southwest, a land which coincidentally has a lot of cave dwellings.

The Mexica themselves say they wandered from north down into central Mexico.

But just how far is the question? The real mystery is if the city of Aztlan was ever real, and if it was, could it be found as far north as Nevada, or much closer to the Valley of Mexico? Archaeologists genuinely don't know, but we could find out someday.

Next, we're moving on to another pre-Columbian topic, the lost dogs of the New World.

Greetings,

dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Aztlantis, the podcast where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and along the way, we challenge pseudo-historical distortions and confront the disinformation that too often surrounds these very topics.

We are your hosts, Kurly Tlapoyawa,

And Ruben Arellano Tlakatekatl.

That's right.

And when you see some of the connective tissue from the Aztec legends of where do you come from? How did you come to be? They talk about their ancestors coming from a land called Aztlan.

And it was an island surrounded by the water.

And they made a great migration to these lands where they now lived and then spidered out into the Toltecs, the Olmecs, the Aztecs, the Mayans.

But they all came from one single source, this place called Aztlan.

And if you think about that, Aztlan is not very far off from Atlantis.

It's just a linguistic twist.

So we see a lot of these linguistic archaeological finds and can trace them through cultures to say, no, Atlantis is not a myth.

Before they were given the name Aztecs by other powers that be, they were called the Mexica people.

So the legend is that the Mexica people were told by one of their main gods, Huitzilopochtli, that wherever you see an eagle eating a snake on a cactus is where your city will be f- called the land of the Aztlan, basically.

Hmm.

So these, these people, they were migratory people going all over Mexico trying to find this symbol.

So the legend is they found an eagle, a golden eagle, eating a snake on a cactus on a rock in the middle of a lake, and that is literally where they built the city of Aztlan, uh, which is Tenochtitlan, which is now Mexico City.

So today, uh, if you ever visit Mexico City, there's portions of the city that's actually sinking a little bit.

Wow.

Is that correct?

The basic story is that they, uh, came from somewhere in the north, in a place called Aztlan.

Aztlan, the name of the Aztecs' mythical homeland, has a couple of possible meanings, place of herons or place of whiteness.

According to legend, the Aztecs' ancestors lived in Aztlan, until their god, Huitzilopochtli, told them to head south until they saw an eagle on top of a cactus devouring a snake.

The eagle eating the snake, or the serpent, I mean, I've seen that imagery before.

Yeah, no, the, and the reason you have, and most people have also, is that in the Mexican flag-

We just didn't find it today.

I'm disappointed I didn't see pyramids in Rock Lake, but I've got one more lead that could help me connect the Aztecs with Wisconsin.

And, uh, today, uh, it really shows, Dennis, when people come together, you know, they can create something.

And, and in some circles, Chicano Park became the inspiration for other Latino Chicano community, Indigenous communities, you know, to take back piece by piece, you know, Aztlán.

To take back piece by piece what was, you know, taken in, in f- you know, from the people.

So today, they're celebrating the director that kept that dream alive, created the museum.

Theorists like Sandra Messenger Cypress and creative writers like Cherie Moraga and Sandra Cisneros looked at the traditional story and asked a fundamental question: Why has the narrative of a grieving indigenous mother been framed entirely through the lens of colonial patriarchy? In Cherie Moraga's landmark 1995 play, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, the myth is fused with Greek tragedy and Aztec cosmology to reframe the act of infanticide.

Set in a dystopian future where Chicana revolutionaries have built a patriarchal nation called Aztlán, Moraga's protagonist does not kill her son out of hysterical jealousy over a man.

She does it to prevent him from returning to a heteronormative, oppressive society that would corrupt him into an agent of male domination.

Moraga transformed La Llorona's story from a tale of female shame into a radical critique of gender, race, and nationalism.