Aztlán

His miraculous conception.

Aztlan, the land of seven caves, and Colhuacan, the bended mount.

The maid Xochitl and the rose garden of the gods.

Quetzalcoatl as the white and bearded stranger.

His virgin mother, Kamalmatl.

His miraculous conception.

Aztlan, the land of seven caves, and Colhuacan, the bended mount.

The maid, Xochitl, and the rose garden of the gods.

Cahokia is one of the most mysterious sites in America.

It had an outpost called Aztlan, which I've seen.

Jim says Cahokia was also a central hub for the Plume Serpent religion, a belief that stretched all the way south into Mexico.

Some experts believe the Plume Serpent religion connects this Iowa effigy mound site with Cahokia.

I mean, they were on picket lines, so they weren't in a kind of professional theater space.

So they're thinking about what's around, how can we repurpose it to make theater? And so one play that's in volume three is Herbert Sequenza's El Henry, and it's an adaptation of Henry IV Part 1 that's set in a post-revolutionary space called Aztlán, but it's also a dystopian space.

It's a post-pandemic space where all the White people have left what was once San Diego.

And in any case, there's all this, like, garbage around, and there are all these, like, you know, abandoned, like, iPhones and all this technology that's not really working, but it's all then, like, put together by the people in the play, but also as the set.

Yeah, so it kind of goes back to, like, kind of, like, ancient Aztec culture.

But really, like, what, like, the concept of Aztlan does is it, like, unifies Chicanos in, like, a territory.

In which, you know, it's not based on, like... you know, just like some random idea, Chicanos actually make up a very large portion of the Southwest because historically of what has been happening in that region, Chicanos actually make up very large sections of different counties throughout the Southwest.

Even to this day, uh, where, um, you know, in my, in my city, uh, in Denver and the Aurora area, um, uh, you know, you can look at census data and it talks about like Hispanic population that makes up, uh, over like a third of the population.

It's called Strange Rumblings in Aztlan.

A-Z-T-L-A-N, Aztlan.

It's included in the Great Shark Hunt volume of his Gonzo papers.

It's a long one.

See Pre-Adamites, page 380.

The Toltecs of Mexico traced themselves back to a starting point called Atlan or Aztlan.

The Aztecs also claimed to come from Aztlan.

See Bancroft's Native Races, Volume 5, pages 221 and 321.

The Popol Vuh, page 294, speaks of a visit paid by three sons of the king of the Quiches to a land in the east on the shores of the sea whence their fathers had come, from which they brought back amongst other things a system of writing.

And then further to the idea of, I don't know what I was calling the mother of Mexican poetry, but it, proper pronunciation is Auxilo, just as the proper pronunciation is Jáuregui.

Anyway, Perla tells of a moment when she comes upon, um, Arturo, who she takes horseback riding, and he theorizes that there are pyramids beneath the land, which echoes this idea that we're going to encounter later of Aztlán, of some kind of lost Atlantis or Aztec paradise beneath the hell that Mexico has become.

But she comes upon his poetry, and she reads his poetry.

It was a poem about Narcissus and a nearly endless forest inhabited by hermaphrodites.

I'll see you at the CP.

You won't see Aztlan, though.

[sighs] Don't be that way.

I would say-

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

Greetings,

dear listeners, and welcome to yet another episode of Tales from Aztlantis.

We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.

And Tlacatecat.