Eduardo de J. Douglas - In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl, Painting Manuscripts, Writing the

IN THE PALACE OF NEZAHUALCOYOTL
IN THE PALACE OF NEZAHUALCOYOTL
PAINTING MANUSCRIPTS, WRITING THE PRE-HISPANIC
PAST IN EARLY COLONIAL PERIOD TETZCOCO, MEXICO
by eduardo de j. douglas
University of Texas Press Austin
Copyright © 2010 by the University of Texas Press
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First edition, 2010
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Douglas, Eduardo de J., 1957–
In the palace of Nezahualcoyotl : painting manuscripts, writing the pre-
Hispanic past in early colonial period Tetzcoco, Mexico / by Eduardo de J. Doug-
las. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (The William and Bettye Nowlin series in art, history, and cul-
ture of the Western hemisphere)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-292-72168-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Codex Xolotl. 2. Mapa Quinatzin. 3. Mapa Tlohtzin. 4. Manuscripts,
Nahuatl—Mexico—Texcoco de Mora. 5. Aztec art—Mexico—Texcoco de Mora.
6. Aztecs—Mexico—Texcoco de Mora—History—Sources. 7. Texcoco de Mora
(Mexico)—History—Sources. 8. Nezahualcóyotl, King of Texcoco, 1402–1472—
Homes and haunts—Mexico—Texcoco de Mora. 9. Palaces—Mexico—Texcoco de
Mora. 10. Texcoco de Mora (Mexico)—Antiquities. I. Title.
f1219.56.c642d684 2010
972'.52—dc22 2009046344
For my parents and grandparents, and for Dan.
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List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. Mixed Forms, Mixed Messages: The Codex Xolotl,
the Quinatzin Map, and the Tlohtzin Map 17
2. Cemanahuactli Imachiyo, “The World, Its Model” 41
3. Our Kin, Our Blood 95
4. Telling Stories 129
Conclusion: In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl 161
Notes 193
Bibliography 237
Index 249
Plates 1–25 follow page 166
CONTENTS
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map i.1. Map of the Valley of Mexico, circa 1520 4
figure i.1. Tetzcoco coat of arms 3
figure 1.1. Codex Xolotl, fragment 1A 20
figure 1.2. Codex Xolotl, fragment 1B 21
figure 1.3. Codex Xolotl, fragment 1C 21
figure 1.4. Codex Xolotl, page 1 bis 21
figure 1.5. Tlohtzin Map, detail of drawing on reverse 24
figure 1.6. Codex Mendoza, folio 2 recto 27
figure 1.7. Tlohtzin Map, detail of mountain-cave of Huexotla 29
figure 1.8. Quinatzin Map, leaf 1, top-center detail 29
figure 1.9. Codex Xolotl, page 1, bottom-center detail 29
figure 1.10. Codex Xolotl, page 1, lower-left detail 30
figure 1.11. Quinatzin Map, leaf 1, center detail 30
figure 1.12. Tlohtzin Map, left section detail 31
figure 1.13. Maize plot details, Tlohtzin Map and Quinatzin Map 32
figure 1.14. Codex Féjéváry-Mayer, page 1 33
figure 2.1. Oztoticpac Lands Map 42
figure 2.2. Quinatzin Map, leaf 2, top-center detail 82
figure 2.3. Codex Mendoza, folio 69 recto 83
figure 2.4. Quinatzin Map, leaf 2, right-side detail 85
figure 2.5. Codex Mendoza, folio 66 recto 85
figure 2.6. Codex Mendoza, folio 67 recto 86
figure 2.7. Quinatzin Map, leaf 2, bottom-center detail 87
figure 2.8. Quinatzin Map, leaf 2, left-side detail 88
figure 2.9. Codex Mendoza, folio 70 recto 88
ILLUSTRATIONS
In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl x
figure 3.1. The Great Temple of Tetzcoco 99
figure 4.1. Codex Mendoza, folio 61 recto 141
figure 4.2. Quinatzin Map, leaf 3, bottom-left detail 155
figure c.1. Genealogical Tree of the Royal Line of Tetzcoco 164
table 2.1. The Southern Half of Acolhuacan 71
table 2.2. The Northern Half of Acolhuacan 72
table 3.1. Sites with Genealogies on Codex Xolotl, Pages/Maps 2–6 104
First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to Theresa May
and her colleagues at the University of Texas Press for their editorial acu-
men, good cheer, and patience. I had the good fortune to have Kathryn R.
Bork as my copy editor, and I thank her for the unerring intelligence and
kindness with which she saved me from more errors than I can count.
Also, I am deeply indebted to the two reviewers who read the original
manuscript for the University of Texas Press and whose careful, insightful
comments and criticism have made this a much better book. The infelici-
ties of argument, logic, and style that remain are my responsibility.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; the Bodleian Library,
Oxford University; the Ethnologisches Museum (Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin), Berlin; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and the World
Museum Liverpool (National Museums Liverpool), Liverpool, graciously
provided photographs and permission to reproduce them. Stanford Uni-
versity Press granted me permission to reproduce a map of the Valley of
Mexico from Charles Gibson’s The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of
the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1964), and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, permitted
me to reproduce a plate from Esther Pasztory’s Aztec Art (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 1983). Stanley M. Sherman kindly offered to produce a map
for me. JJ Bauer and Gail Goers provided much-needed help with photo-
graphs and scans. I thank them all for their invaluable assistance.
Without the encouragement and support of family, friends, colleagues,
and institutions, I could not have written this book or the dissertation
on which it is based. Generous financial support from the Department of
Art and Art History and the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas
at Austin made possible the initial research in Mexico City and Paris. A
Foreign Language Area Studies Grant awarded through the Institute of
Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin allowed me
to study Nahuatl. A 1996–1997 Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship
from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council
of Learned Societies funded by the Ford Foundation permitted me to
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl xii
return to Mexico City and Paris. A 1997–1998 Junior Fellowship in Preco-
lumbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection,
Washington, D.C., provided the time, library resources, and intellectual
companionship needed to put pen to paper. As I completed my disserta-
tion, I was a visiting lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at
Duke University, where I benefited from excellent and patient colleagues
and students. The College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the
University of California at Riverside, where I began life as an assistant
professor, made it possible for me to participate in conferences and initi-
ate the process of transforming the dissertation into a book. A 2002–2003
Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago
furthered the process considerably. A publication subvention from the
University Research Council at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill helped defray the costs of illustrations. I am deeply grateful to all
these agencies, institutions, and programs for their generous support.
I received invaluable and unfailingly courteous assistance from the
staffs of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the Univer-
sity of Texas at Austin; the Département des Manuscrits Orientaux at
the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; the Archivo General de la
Nación, Mexico City; the Department of Precolumbian Studies, Dumbar-
ton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C.; and the
Newberry Library, Chicago. I am especially indebted to Mme. Monique
Cohen, former conservateur en chef, Département des Manuscrits Orien-
taux at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, who kindly facilitated con-
sultation of the Codex Xolotl, the Quinatzin Map, and the Tlohtzin Map.
Neither the dissertation nor the book would have been feasible with-
out the efforts and example of numerous scholars past and present.
I am indebted to the work and keen insights of J.M.A. Aubin, Ellen T.
Baird, Frances Berdan, Elizabeth Hill Boone, Louise Burkhart, Alfonso
Caso, Delia Cosentino, Charles E. Dibble, Jacqueline de Durand-Forest,
Joaquín Galarza, Charles Gibson, Serge Gruzinski, Joanne Harwood,
Doris Heyden, Fernando Horcasitas, Frances Karttunen, George Kubler,
Jongsoo Lee, Dana Leibsohn, Miguel León-Portilla, Patrick Lesbre, James
Lockhart, Alfredo López Austin, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Luz María
Mohar Betancourt, Barbara E. Mundy, H. B. Nicholson, Jerome A. Offner,
Edmundo O’Gorman, John M. D. Pohl, Donald Robertson, Alessandra
Russo, Mary Elizabeth Smith, Susan Spitler, Karl Taube, Marc Thouvenot,
Richard F. Townsend, and Emily Umberger. I would like to express my
special gratitude to and admiration for Elizabeth Hill Boone, Donald
Robertson, and Mary Elizabeth Smith, whose work is the bedrock for
the study of Mexican manuscripts; and Patrick Lesbre, Jongsoo Lee, and
Jerome A. Offner, whose scholarship has elucidated the culture, history,
historiography, and literature of pre-Hispanic and colonial Tetzcoco.
Four teachers changed my life. As an undergraduate, I had the oppor-
tunity to study Latin lyric poetry with the late Prof. Henry Steele Com-
mager, Jr. Professor Commager introduced me to the beauty and com-
Acknowledgmentsxiii
plexity of language and to the pleasures of reading carefully and closely.
Although I have strayed very far from classical philology, I have never
forgotten these lessons. Prof. Mary Ellen Miller introduced me to the art
and culture of Mesoamerica and encouraged me to travel in Mexico, and
I have continued to benefit from her intellectual generosity, commitment
to students, and distinguished scholarship. The late Prof. Linda Schele
was my second guide to the art and culture of Mesoamerica and the origi-
nal supervisor of my dissertation. Linda’s extraordinary scholarly gifts,
deep passion for Maya art and epigraphy, good humor, and irreverence
continue to inspire all who knew her as a colleague, friend, and teacher.
Prof. Terence Grieder, my first guide to the pre-Hispanic Andes, gra-
ciously stepped in as supervisor of my dissertation committee after the
death of Linda Schele. Terry always had an open office door and time to
talk about art and its history; our conversations over the years have been
among the most enjoyable and effective of educations.
In Mexico City, the late Prof. Doris Heyden took me in and shared with
me her deep experience and knowledge of and love for Mexico. I, like
so many others before me, could not have had a more gracious or gifted
friend, hostess, and teacher. It is with great sorrow that I, again, like so
many others, contemplate the prospect of a Mexico City without Doris.
The members of my dissertation committee, Profs. Jacqueline Bar-
nitz, Susan Deans-Smith, Terence Grieder, Joan Holladay, and Jeffrey
Chipps Smith, all of the University of Texas at Austin, and Prof. Barbara
E. Mundy of Fordham University skillfully guided me through the first
stages of research and writing. I am especially grateful to Jacqueline Bar-
nitz and Susan Deans-Smith, who, through their inspired teaching and
publications, introduced me to two very different aspects of Latin Amer-
ica: modern and contemporary art and colonial history, respectively. Bar-
bara E. Mundy, a colleague, friend, and distinguished scholar, has always
listened to, challenged, and helped me refine my often dubious and ill-
formed arguments and ideas with grace, intelligence, patience, and wit.
Classmates and colleagues offered much-needed advice, criticism,
friendship, and support over the years. At the University of Texas at Aus-
tin, Charles Cramer, Nancy Deffebach, Saundra Goldman, Kim Grant,
Julia Guernsey, Marianne Kinkel, John-Marshall Klein, Marguerite May-
hall, Elizabeth Pope, Lynn Ransom, and Khristian Villela helped in ways
great and small. In Mexico City, Luisa Elena Alcalá, Ilona Katzew, and
Nora Jaffray provided companionship in and out of the archives, and
they, like Debra Nagao, continue to be a source of friendship, scholarly
guidance, and intellectual stimulation. At Dumbarton Oaks, Prof. Jef-
frey Quilter, then director of Precolumbian studies and curator of the
Precolumbian Collection, made my fellowship year richly rewarding, as
did Elizabeth Benson, Warren Church, Charles Dibble, Vittoria di Palma,
Bridget Gazzo, Veronica Kalas, Jodi Magness, Jorge Marcos, Scott Red-
ford, William Saturno, Gabriel Vail, Janice Williams, and Jason Yeager.
I am especially indebted to Vittoria di Palma, Scott Redford, Gabrielle
In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl xiv
Vail, and Jason Yeager for both their friendship and their intellectual gen-
erosity. At Duke University, Stanley Abe, William Broom, Caroline Bru-
zelius, Mary Cash, Sheila Dillon, Richard J. Powell, C. T. Woods-Powell,
Betty Rodgers, Anne Schroder, Sarah Schroth, Khristine Stiles, Gennifer
Weisenfeld, and Annabel Wharton made me feel at home and helped me
to see my way to the end of the dissertation.
As an assistant professor, I have had extraordinary colleagues: at the
University of California, Riverside, Wendy Ashmore, Françoise Forster-
Hahn, Ginger Hsü, Amelia Jones, Patricia Morton, Caroline Murphy, John
Ochoa, Steven Ostrow, Tom Patterson, Ken Rogers, Conrad Rudolph, Karl
Taube, and Catharine Wall; and at the University of Wisconsin at Milwau-
kee, Kenneth Bendiner, Derek Counts, Jeffrey Hayes, Christina Maranci,
Melanie Mariño, Jill Baum, Andrea Stone, Tanya Tiffany, and Ying Wang.
I am grateful to all for their friendship, guidance, insights, and intel-
lectual companionship over the years. I would also like to express my
gratitude to my new colleagues in the Department of Art, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who made it possible for me to finish this
manuscript during my first semester as a new faculty member.
My brother, Gregory, and sisters, Mary Lou and Rosy, have assisted
me in ways great and small, as have my aunts Haydee Michel and María
Eulalia Douglas Pedroso. Jasmine Alinder, Steven Atkinson, David
Barquist, Mark Bradley, Judith Coffin, William Forbath, Anne Hansen,
Michael Maas, Ussama Makdisi, Aims McGuinness, Jeffrey Merrick, Carol
Quillen, Paula Sanders, Ellora Shehabuddin, Claire R. and Stanley M.
Sherman, Carolyn Suzuki, and Anne Swedberg have been goods friends
and have offered wise counsel and much hospitality over the years.
I dedicate this book to my parents, Eduardo de Jesús and María de la
Luz Douglas, and my grandparents, Leopoldo and Teresa Domínguez and
Eduardo de Jesús and Mercedes Douglas, and to my partner, Daniel J.
Sherman, who made it possible.
IN THE PALACE OF NEZAHUALCOYOTL
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D[on] M[art]yn Enríquez. I make it known to you, Juan Gutiérrez de
Liébana, corregidor [magistrate] of the pu[eblo] of Tepeapulco, that don
Fran[cisco] Pimentel, the son of don Hernando Pimentel, cacique [indig-
enous lord] of the city of Tezcuco, has reported to me that, being the son
of a father [made] a knight by the most illustrious Viceroy don Luis de
Velasco in a public ceremony, by grant of His Majesty, as it is known,
he [don Francisco] as his legitimate son, enjoys the continuance of
such privilege. Carrying a sword by reason of his honor, [when] passing
through said pueblo you [Juan Gutiérrez de Liébana] took it from him,
because of which [act] he [don Francisco] received offense, as his quality
[status] will be known, and he requested of me that I command you to
return it to him and, lest another judge ignorant of the same [fact] take it
from him, that I declare that he has the right to carry it.
In 1575, in New Spain, the Spanish colony founded in 1521 in central
Mexico after Hernán Cortés defeated the last independent rulers of the
Aztec Empire, don Francisco Pimentel knew and defended his rights and
privileges.1
As a scion of one of pre-Hispanic Mexico’s most illustrious
aristocratic families, the ruling dynasty of Tetzcoco, don Francisco, a full-
blooded Indian, understood that he had the freedom to dress, to carry
arms, and to ride a horse like a Spaniard: the freedom, essentially, to be a
Spaniard.2
An “Indian, noble and ladino [Hispanized], and fluent in [the] Castil-
ian language,” don Francisco was the product of the “mixed culture”
of indigenous aristocrats in mid-sixteenth-century New Spain, a cul-
ture shaped by men and women such as his own father, don Hernando
Pimentel Nezahualcoyotzin.3
A grandson of Nezahualpilli (1464/1465–
1515), the last ruler of Tetzcoco to reign entirely in the pre-Hispanic
period, don Hernando had, from 1544, corresponded in Spanish with
Charles V and Philip II to petition for the return of patrimonial lands,
and, in 1554, he had even requested permission to travel to Spain in
order to argue his case in person.4
Although Charles V did not permit
INTRODUCTION
In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl 2
him to cross the Ocean Sea, the king had three years earlier granted don
Hernando and the city of Tetzcoco a coat of arms (Fig. i.1), and he com-
manded that the rights and privileges of Nezahualpilli’s descendants—
the very ones asserted by don Hernando’s son don Francisco in 1575—be
respected.5
Don Hernando’s arms were based on those of the Counts-Dukes of
Benavente in Spain, who were of the Pimentel family, after and in honor
of whom the indigenous Pimentels of Tetzcoco were named.6
In the
rhetoric of heraldry, the coat of arms orders indigenous symbols (signs
of “Indianness”)—ethnic and toponymic qualifiers, pictorial metaphors
for war, eagles, a coyote, feathered warrior outfits and shields, war clubs
with obsidian blades, the decapitated heads of enemy warriors, and so
forth—according to a European visual syntax.7
The aristocratic conceit,
like the names of men such as don Hernando Pimentel Nezahualcoy-
otzin, indexes social status in the colonial present to the pre-Hispanic
past, the knowledge of which don Hernando and his ancestors had pre-
served in written form.
From the time of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, Europeans
described the “New” World to the Old World. Between 1492, the date of
Columbus’s first voyage, and 1519, the year in which Hernán Cortés and
his men landed in what is today Mexico, the Spaniards confronted and
wrote about peoples “without history.”8
Defined by European percep-
tions, these first “Indians” became for European readers the figures they
encountered in Spanish texts: savages fit only for manual labor, not, like
don Hernando and don Francisco Pimentel, nobles accorded rights and
privileges.9
Once Cortés and his men came into contact with the peoples
of central Mexico, who could and did write, the new arrivals no longer
held the monopoly on literacy, history, or civilization.
The Spanish Franciscan missionary in New Spain, Fray Toribio
de Benavente (circa 1490–1569), known as Motolinía, explains in the
“Epistola proemial” (Prefatory Letter) to his Memoriales (Notes) of circa
1536–1543: “There were among the natives [of central Mexico] five [types
of] books, as I said, of figures and characters: the first spoke about the
years and the [past] epochs; the second, of the days and feasts that they
had throughout the year; the third spoke about dreams and auguries,
tricks and vanities in which they believed; the fourth was of baptism and
the names that they gave to children; and the fifth is of rites, ceremonies,
and auguries that they had in marriage.”10
In the Late Postclassic Period (circa 1200–1519 ce), in and around
the Valley of Mexico (Map I.1), the heartland of the Aztec Empire and,
after 1521, of New Spain, books “of figures and characters” recorded and
sustained cosmic, divine, and human order among speakers of Nahuatl,
the Aztec language, and their neighbors. Reading and writing were
exclusively within the purview of the interrelated political and religious
elites of the numerous ethnic polities, or, as they were known in Nahuatl,
altepemeh (literally, “water-mountains,” singular altepetl).11
In state-
Introduction3
sponsored schools...