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Expressions of Status, Economy and Nurture in 16Th Century Mexico By Mothers and Daughters at Imperial Crossroads: Expressions of Status, Economy and Nurture in 16th Century Mexico by Martín Vega A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Romance Languages and Literatures: Spanish) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee Associate Professor Gustavo Verdesio, Chair Associate Professor Lawrence M. La Fountain-Stokes Assistant Professor Daniel J. Nemser Associate Professor Teresa L. Satterfield Associate Professor Ryan W. Szpiech Dedication To Chela, Kari, Sandra, Janet and Sarah ii Acknowledgements Thanks go to the community of professors and graduate students at in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, foremost to my advisor Gustavo Verdesio for his guidance and his confidence in me piloting my own project. Fellow students and comrades inside and outside the University provided intellectual nourishment, political zeal, and a sympathetic ear when most needed. They are too many too name, and all dear to my heart. Since 2010, the instructors at the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas and at the recently formed Tlachamanaltianij Nahuatl provided me with the training to read the Nahuatl-language documents that form the basis of this dissertation. Without the generosity of these instructors and researchers, and their love for Nahua culture, this dissertation could never come into fruition. Lastly, thank you to my family for their unconditional support for my weird work. iii Table of Contents Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………...ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………...iii List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………….v Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………......vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1. Nobility and the Crisis of Government in Chimalpahin’s Chalco……………...10 Chapter 2. Chapter 2: Women Rulers in Chalco and the Colonial Emergence of the Macehual………………………………………………………………………………………...44 Chapter 3. Tribute Women and Noble Strategies in the Conquest of Mexico……………….76 Chapter 4. Feading Earth, Feeding Empire: Maguey Cultivation and Women at Imperial Crossroads……………………………………………………………………………………..132 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..192 Figures………………………………………………………………………………………….197 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………...210 iv List of Figures Figure 1. Accoutrements of judges and rulers………………………...……………………….197 Figure 2. New Fire ceremony………………………………………………………………….198 Figure 3. A teuctlahtoani, seated on a woven reed throne……………………..………………199 Figure 4. Scenes of execution………………………...………………………………………..199 Figure 5. Quauhpilli (“Eagle Warrior”) statue.………………………..……………………….200 Figure 6. A tlahtoani sits amid his sstock of war regalia…………….………………………...201 Figure 7. Scenes depicting noblewomen……….………………………………………………202 Figure 8. “Quitlauhtique” (“They gave him gifts”)…………………………………….……...203 Figure 9. Six of 20 deities of 80 days in Codex Fejérváry-Mayer.............……………………204 Figure 10. Five of the 20 deities of 80 days in the Codex Borgia……………………………..205 Figure 11. Tlahuizcalpanteuctli (representing Venus as “Morning Star”) attacks….…………205 Figure 12. Mayahuel/Ayopechtli sits atop a turtle……………………......................................206 Figure 13. In the Codex Borgia, first rectangular goddess…………………...………………..207 Figure 14. Second rectangular goddess………………………………………..………………208 Figure 15. Third and fourth rectangular goddesses and two splayed Earth goddesses………..209 v Abstract My dissertation, Mothers and Daughters at Imperial Crossroads: Expressions of Status, Economy, and Nurture in 16th Century Mexico considers an often overlooked but foundational aspect of colonization in the New World: the transfer of status and wealth through indigenous women in a confluence of political economy and ritual ceremony. Chapter 1 sets up this analysis through the Nahua historian Chimalpahin Quautlehuanitzin’s exposé on the crisis of government in Chalco, a formerly powerful Nahua state at the southern edge of the valley of Mexico. Chimalpahin’s insistence that colonial authorities recognize women’s nobility prompts an investigation, in Chapter 2, of the gendered dimensions of nobility between Spanish and Nahua societies. To this end, these first two chapters advance a triangular reading of Chimalpahin’s representation of nobility alongside the Florentine Codex, a 16th century encyclopedia of life in pre-Conquest Mesoamerica, and the legal codes propagated by Alfonso X in the Siete Partidas. While Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the stakes of nobility within the colonial regime, Chapter 3 explores the chameleon-like status of the tribute women given to the conquistador Hernán Cortés during his march to Tenochtitlan in 1519. The transformation of young common women into noble brides through body paints, feathers and fine clothing enacts a deliberate dissolution of hierarchies that prefigures the crisis of government in Chalco. Alongside Spanish and Nahuatl accounts of the Conquest, the Lienzo de Tlaxcala’s visual representation of indigenous tribute gifts to Cortés anchors this exploration of Mexico’s tribute women. In Chapter 4, the maguey plant in its deified form, as the goddess Mayahuel, becomes an avatar for a transfer of wealth that flows from women’s bodies to the imperial capital. The insistence of women, however, to vi harvest maguey and sell its products on their own terms challenges the limitations to their mobility and appropriation of their income—an intrusion into the masculinist historiographies and imperial spaces of 16th century Mexico. vii Introduction This project occupies itself with two problems: 1) how to tell the history of women in the Conquest of Mexico and in the early colonial period and 2) how to do so in a way that captures the resonances of pre-Conquest lifeways through the Conquest and beyond. In my work, the “Conquest” with a capital “C” refers specifically to the period between 1519 and 1521, from the arrival of Spanish conquistadors commandeered by Hernán Cortés on the Gulf Coast of Mexico in 1519 to the overthrow of the Mexica government in 1521. A number of scholars have written about women in the Americas in the in the early colonial period (from the 1520s to the end of the 16th century),1 but little has been written on women in the Conquest of Mexico (or of the Caribbean or Central and South America for that matter) beyond the figure of Malinche, interpreter and mistress of Hernán Cortés. If, as Camilla Townsend suggests, “there were many potential Malinches,” it bears asking what happened to those other “Malinches,” to the other women of the Conquest.2 Malinche, after all, had ample company—19 other young women, perhaps girls, accompanied her as a gift that Mayan leaders on the Mexican Gulf felt compelled to give to Cortés’ army in 1519. These 20 young women, and others collected by Cortés in his year-long expedition to Tenochtitlan, held any number of often overlapping positions: brides, slaves, sacrificial victims, and concubines. Camilla Townsend considers Malinche a case of noble-turned-slave: when she was still a child (between 8 and 12 years old), and amid hostilities 1 Key studies include those in Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, Indian Women of Early Mexico, eds. (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997) and Irene Silverblatt’s Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 2 Camilla Townsend, Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 6. 1 between hers and a neighboring community, before the arrival of the Spaniards, her parents thought it expedient to sell their daughter to Mayan merchants.3 With the arrival of the Spaniards, armed conflict once again motivated the use of Malinche as collateral, as something between tribute and gift. The gifting of indigenous women draws on ceremonial protocols and patterns of political economy already at play in Mesoamerica during the Mexica era. To address the second problem mentioned above, that act of gifting plays into what economic anthropologists have called “ritual economy,” the confluence of political economy and ceremonial life.4 The ritualized transfer of indigenous women from their home communities to the Spanish conquistadors furnishes us with one of the most dramatic examples of history’s unspoken secret: that where powerful men engage in conquest, colonization and the founding of states, women form the grist of their relations. David Graeber notes that “the histories we tell are full of blank spaces, and the women in them seem to appear out of nowhere, without explanation.”5 Remarking on the “bondsmaids” (women slaves) written into barbarian legal codes, Graeber asks “Who were they? How were they enslaved? Were they captured in war, sold by their parents, or reduced to slavery through debt? Were they a major trade item? The answer to all these questions would seem to be yes, but it’s hard to say because the history remains largely unwritten.”6 With slight modifications, we could ask the same questions about the tribute women in the Conquest of Mexico, whose history also remains unwritten. 3 Ibid., 22-24. 4 Patricia A. McAnany and E. Christian Wells, “Toward a Theory of Ritual Economy,” Research in Economic Anthropology 27: Dimensions of Ritual Economy (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing, 2008). 5 David Graeber, Debt: The First
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