Mexican History

A Primary Source Reader

Nora E. Jaffary, Edward W. Osowski, Susie S. Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429978609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Mexican History is a comprehensive and innovative primary source reader in Mexican history from the pre-Columbian past to the neoliberal present. Chronologically organized chapters facilitate the book's assimilation into most course syllabi. Its selection of documents thoughtfully conveys enduring themes of Mexican history (land and labor, indigenous people, religion, and state formation) while also incorporating recent advances in scholarly research on the frontier, urban life, popular culture, race and ethnicity, and gender. Student-friendly pedagogical features include contextual introductions to each chapter and each reading, lists of key terms and related sources, and guides to recommended readings and Web-based resources.

PART 1

Pre-Columbian Mexico (200–1519 CE)

Knowledge of Mexico’s Pre-Columbian period, the time prior to 1519, when the Spaniards arrived on the mainland, is essential for understanding modern Mexican culture. Mexicans’ knowledge about ancient indigenous civilizations continues to influence national identity, architecture, the arts, and official state policy toward indigenous people, among other things. The primary sources in this section document the histories of the Mayas, the Nahuas (Aztecs), and the Mixtecs, the three major ethnic groups who formed Mesoamerica and are still represented in significant numbers in Mexico’s population today. A fourth group, the people of central Mexico who built the city of Teotihuacan, is identified here by the city name because the historical record does not tell us what they called themselves. Despite the fact that each group spoke a separate language, they shared a set of common attributes, identifiable in the primary sources here: intensive agriculture that produced surpluses, sedentary populations, urbanized social life, hierarchies, writing systems, religious justifications for politics, and a vision of a nondualist universe governed by creation/destruction cycles. A fifth indigenous group whose history is also included here, the Seris (Comcáac), was one of many nonsedentary and semi-sedentary tribes that lived beyond the frontiers of the Mesoamerican zone (Source 9). As is illustrated here, in many ways the Seris were as different from the sedentary indigenous people as they were from the Spaniards.

Historians and archaeologists have created the historical periods of Pre-Columbian history to track the fluctuations of state formation. Historians used to speak of the rise and fall of entire civilizations. Now scholars understand that during the Pre-Columbian period was the rise of Maya, Nahua, and Mixtec state governments in particular cities. Cities like the Maya city of Chichén Itzá consolidated their power by allying with or conquering independently governed city-states belonging to other Mayas on the Yucatán Peninsula. With the falling of central governments that had incorporated other city-states, the ethnic groups did not disappear. Instead, they practiced their lifeways on a smaller scale back in their city-states.

This section covers the Classic (200–900 CE) and Post-Classic (850–1519 CE) periods, when the growth of powerful states fostered cultural achievements that left their marks on posterity with monolithic ruins and hieroglyphs. During the Classic age, the dynastic ruling families of Maya city-states such as Tikal in Petén (modern-day Guatemala) and Palenque (modern-day Chiapas State) allied with neighbors and expanded their power. To the north, on the outskirts of contemporary Mexico City, Teotihuacan built massive pyramids and palaces along straight avenues (sources 1 and 3). The Post-Classic period began with the collapse of Maya Tikal and the central Mexican Teotihuacan states. The contemporaneous Toltecs of Tula in central Mexico and Mayas of Chichén Itzá rose in their places (Source 8). In the last century of the Post-Classic period, Nahuatl-speaking people rose to prominence, and one nation, the Mexica, created what was later known to history as the Aztec Empire. By 1470 CE, Mexica state power encompassed the territories of the Valley of Mexico and much of central Mexico from the eastern Gulf Coast to the western Pacific Ocean. The Mexica built their empire outward from their city of Tenochtitlan, the remains of which are buried beneath modern-day Mexico City (sources 5 and 6). In all these instances, Mesoamerican rulers used not only warfare but also the expansion of kinship through marriage alliances to expand their kingdoms (sources 5, 7, and 8).

Like all of the earlier centralizing governments, the Mexica’s state-level society concentrated its most important political, economic, and religious institutions in its capital city. The earliest settlements were constructed around a central cluster of high ceremonial and administrative buildings, and every subsequent culture copied this plan. The cities were designed as models of the cosmos. Most Mesoamerican cities had square or rectangular ceremonial centers that represented the four cardinal directions of the universe: north, south, east, and west. A major god was associated with each of the directions. Often found in the middle of these city squares were pyramids that represented the center of the world, imagined by the Nahuas as the hearth-fire in the center of a house or the hole where the Maya world-tree grew (Source 3). City plans were also grids that zoned people according to social inequalities and political hierarchies (sources 5, 6, and 8).

Many of the sources in this section illustrate the deeply political nature of indigenous cultural achievements. Rulers justified their power over territories through writing, maps, and art that traced their lineages back to mythic origin places, the first people or gods in creation stories, and fabled golden age cities (Source 7). Ruling elites also used religion to justify the class systems of their authoritarian states (Source 3). Pre-Columbian land tenure is not fully understood, but it was most likely a combination of private and public ownership. All land technically belonged to the lord because of his divine origins, but residents possessed it when they cultivated it (sources 7 and 8). When imperial states like the Mexica expanded, they harnessed the labor of subject peoples by demanding raw materials and manufactured goods as tribute tax and did not conquer land per se (Source 5).

Mesoamericans were able to produce the agricultural surpluses needed to support cities because of civil engineering and human planning, which needed the coordination of leaders. At the same time, these agriculturally based societies operated under environmental constraints. Some of the forces of nature necessary for agriculture were predictable and came in cycles, like the sun, but others, like water, could be unpredictable. People turned to the gods, who were personifications of these fickle natural forces, to secure fertility. Readers can explore how a people’s desire to secure fertility might lead them to consent to the rule of hereditary elites (sources 2 and 3).

The Nahuas, Mayas, Mixtecs, and Teotihuacans all had rain, maize, and sun deities, whom they called by different names depending on their language (Source 1). Distant divinities who ruled the heavens were almost abstract principles. The heroic friend of humankind, the Feathered Serpent, was found in all of these mythologies (sources 2 and 4). No Mesoamerican god, however, was purely good or evil. Like the forces of nature they personified, divinities could be both helpful and harmful to people. Most Pre-Columbian gods and goddess had multiple forms and guises. Pairs of divinities were often shown as opposites (Source 4). These agricultural peoples also saw that fertility was helped by decay and that life came from death. In both the Nahua (Source 4) and the Maya (Source 2) stories about the creation of humanity, gods struggle with the lords of the underworld to rescue or animate humans and bring them to the land of the living.

Anyone who studies archaeological and written sources for Pre-Conquest religion will be bewildered by the different versions of the same stories, often with different gods and goddesses involved. Much of the confusion stems from the fact that each written source presents, not a standard “Aztec” or “Maya” mythology, but a local version of the myths. They are “official” myths in the sense that they belonged to the most politically powerful of the indigenous city-states at the time they were written down. The authors of the histories often made their tribal divinities play starring roles. When the Mexica of the island of Tenochtitlan consolidated their power in 1428, they declared that their tribal war-god Huitzilpochtli was now also the sun-god. As in Europe, even in Pre-Conquest times, the winners wrote history, not the weak. The term “Aztec” was not coined until the early nineteenth century and is a historical anachronism. We use the general “Nahuas” to refer to all communities speaking the Nahuatl language and “Mexica” to refer to the Nahuas who created the empire based in Tenochtitlan. Much confusion has resulted from the use of this term because the written and archaeological sources on these people are all local sources, not documents of one unified Aztec nation.

Many of the primary sources in this section and the following one on the Spanish Conquest can be used for a dual purpose: to understand the Mesoamerican cultures in Pre-Columbian times and to understand how indigenous people deployed their culture to make sense of European contact. Standing in the waters of Post-Contact written primary sources, archaeologists often methodologically go “upstream” to corroborate archaeological evidence about Pre-Columbian cultures. They use written sources that indigenous people produced in the Post-Conquest period, almost always with some help or influence from Spanish churchmen, in order to draw conclusions about indigenous society in the time before Contact. All of the written sources in this Pre-Columbian section, except for artifacts in the photographs, fall into this category. Are these sources too tainted by contact to use? Perhaps this is the wrong question. The fact that indigenous people had a history means that their culture was always evolving, never static. Before Contact, they too shaped their own history as times changed. Things changed rapidly with the arrival of the Spaniards in 1519. How might the upheaval of the early sixteenth-century conflict and contact have been the impetus for indigenous people to make more powerful statements of indigenous history and identity than during the times when they knew nothing of the Europeans?

1. Copán and Teotihuacan: Shared Culture Across a Great Distance (200–900 CE)

The two images with which this reader begins show objects with shared iconography found in two geographically distant ancient cities: Teotihuacan and Copán. During the Classic period of Mesoamerican civilization (200–900 CE), the Maya city-states of Copán (Honduras), Kaminaljuyu, and Tikal (both in Petén, Guatemala) flourished, with Tikal acting as the dominating power. Over 600 miles northwest, Teotihuacan (30 miles north of modern Mexico City) was a city with a population of around 150,000 and an equally impressive culture. It is not known what the people of Teotihuacan called themselves, or even what language they spoke, although it was not Maya. During the 700s CE, both Teotihuacan and Tikal went into decline. Although it is not clear what happened to Teotihuacan, the strains of increased war may have brought the city down in 750, when the temples and palaces were burned. As a hegemonic state, Tikal most likely collapsed at the end of the 700s because of environmental degradation caused by the lethal combination of overfarming, famine, and endemic warfare.

In 1936, archaeologists uncovered a quadratic architectural feature called taludtablero, distinctive of contemporaneous Teotihuacan, from the ruins of Kaminaljuyu and Tikal. This arrangement of platforms and slopes can be found in the image (on page 14) depicting the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, Teotihuacan. The next image (page 15) is of a ceramic tripod vessel from the Margarita tomb of Copán, which was executed with major Teotihuacan features, including the talud-tablero. Atomic analysis has revealed that the materials came from somewhere in central Mexico, but the artistic style of the Copán vessel is a blend of Teotihuacan and Kaminaljuyu.

Painted on the Copán tripod vessel (page 15) are two eyes peeping out of the doorway of a temple or palace. They are the goggle eyes of the ubiquitous rain god, called Tlaloc in Nahuatl and Chac in Maya. The Teotihuacan temple image features the goggle-eyed deity, who continued to be central to Mexican religion even into the Post-Conquest period. The direction of cultural exchange may not, however, have been one-way. Archaeologists also discovered that an entire quarter of Teotihuacan was decorated with Maya artistic styles.

The Copán vessel painting also includes the name K’inich Yaax K’uk’Mo, the Maya king who founded the ruling dynasty of Copán in 426 CE. A frieze on Copán Altar Q depicts K’inich Yaax K’uk’Mo being inaugurated wearing a warrior costume from Teotihuacan that included goggle eyes and a serpent shield. He is called Lord of the West, and evidence suggests that he arrived in Copán after a 152-day journey from an unspecified “lineage house.” Scholars still ask: Did he come from Teotihuacan? Was he a Maya ruler “crowned” there? Or does the vessel simply reflect the movement of culture rather than the relocation of an actual person?

Clearly the people of Teotihuacan and those of the Maya city-states within the political orbit of Tikal shared culture during this period of time, but what was the nature of their encounter? For many years, the prevailing view among archaeologists was that the central Mexican people from T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Central Themes
• Introduction
• Part 1. Pre-Columbian Mexico (200–1519 CE)
• Part 2. The Spanish Conquest and Christian Conversion (1519–1610)
• Part 3. The Consolidation of Colonial Government (1605–1692)
• Part 4. Late Colonial Society (1737–1816)
• Part 5. The Early Republic (1824–1852)
• Part 6. Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Porfiriato (1856–1911)
• Part 7. The Mexican Revolution (1910–1940)
• Part 8. The Institutionalization of the Revolution (1940–1965)
• Part 9. Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (1968–2006)
• Glossary
• Index