DRAFT IN PROGRESS: PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE Founding Inequalities in Acolhuacán, Mexico: 1453-1540s Benjamin D. Johnson, UMass Boston Starvation, the central Mexicans knew, came in the middle of the year as the new corn grew to maturity in the ground. It was during this time of hunger and waiting that the political and religious elites of the Triple Alliance saw fit to congratulate themselves for another harvest well-administered, during the celebrations of the Greater and Lesser Feast of Lords. These were the feasts of exclusion, social distance, and submission. In Texcoco, the capital of Acolhuacan, the lesser feast began with a popular exchange of gifts and flowers, evoking the collective effort necessary for the harvest; but the principal attraction came with the lords and nobles solemnly crowning themselves with diadems and setting their concubines free to dance in the streets. During the Greater Feast of Lords, the performance of social distance was even more striking, as an effigy representing political power was crowned in gold, while a dancer paraded through the streets with a fresh corn tortilla, showing to the multitude the plenteous outpourings flowing from the combined forces of the political and religious order. A virgin was killed, first fruits were laid before the altar, and everyone took the first bite of a fresh tamale in months.1 Or, at least this was how things were supposed to go. In the year 13 House (1453) as misfortune would have it, crops failed miserably at exactly the time of yearly hunger and lordly celebration. Starvation had hit the valley before, but 13 House was particularly bleak. There was no food for either sustenance or ritual, people died in much larger numbers than usual, and the 1 Duran (OLD), around 287. As will be the case throughout this chapter, almost all historical reports of the Triple Alliance come from early colonial sources, produced in a changed political and intellectual environment. Nevertheless, these sources can be usefully mustered. For a deeper methodological discussion, see Federico Navarrete Linares, “Los libros quemados y los nuevos libros. Paradojas de la autenticidad en la tradición mesoamericana” in Alberto Dallad, La abolición del arte: El Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte (Mexico City: UNAM, 1998), pp. 53-71 and the Various entries in Elzabeth Hill Boone and Gary Urton, eds., Their Ways of Writing: Scripts, Signs, and Pictographies in Pre-Columbian Americ (Washington, Dumbarton Oaks, 2011). 1 DRAFT IN PROGRESS: PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE cosmic and temporal orders were called into question. Things became even worse in 1 Rabbit (1454), and Texcocan annals like the Codex en Cruz recall this and the following year with the image of a naked individual vomiting profusely. Nezahualcoyotl, the leader of Acolhuacan at the time, responded as he could. He raised a temple to the Mexica god Huitzilopochtli, as a sign of his allegiance to and leadership within the consolidating power of the wider Triple Alliance; he sacrificed some foreign dignitaries in a plea for full harvests; and he celebrated the eventual return of good yields on the top of the pyramid of the rain god Tlaloc.2 The poor cultivators of Acolhuacan, for their part, experienced the drought not as a problem of order, but of survival. New expressions entered into the popular Nahua lexicon: necetochhuiloc—roughly, “there was 1 Rabbiting”— became a jarring and poetic testament to the horrors of that year. Across the lake in the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlán, Huehue Moteuczoma erected his famous “hunger stone” monument, and freed individuals from tribute and other commitments to seek survival where they could. Annals from neighboring regions show the Figure 1. “1 Rabbiting.” Códice de Huichiapan, f. 37r. Used by permission of twisted forms of commoners lying in the dust, as stray the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Histoira, Mexico. (There is a slight error in this text’s calendar, but the image still holds.) dogs scavenged the bodies of the deceased. “The 2 Codex en Cruz, 2 vols. Charles E. Dibble, ed. (Salt Lake City: Utah UP, 1981). 2 DRAFT IN PROGRESS: PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE famine was very rigorous and people ate each other,” noted one record from the hills far northwest of Texcoco. In this year in particular, death was brutal and survival even more so.3 During these lean years, slavery became a viable option for commoners and their children. “There was Totonacing,” netotonachuiloc, is what people said; referring to the rising exchange of slaves, both adults and children, for food with the Totonac people of the Gulf Coast. This trade expanded during the killing famine of 1453-5, and once again during the subsequent appearance of the 13 House-1 Rabbit calendar sequence in AD 1505-6. The Codex en Cruz is unmistakable in its reference to Totonacing, depicting a Texcocan heading off to the Gulf Coast (marked as such by the distinctive “bird person” motif) with a carrying frame and strap, ready for manual service and hauling. Other illustrations Figure 2. “Totonacing.” Codex Telleriano-Remensis, f. 41v. Used by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale are even more explicit, such as those of the Codex de France. Telleriano-Remensis, where a tearful noble laments as a trader carries a slave toward the bird people of the lowlands.4 3 Judging by its appearance in sources as varied as the Codex Aubin, the Codex Chimalpahin, the Florentine Codex, and the Anales de Tula, the term necetochhuiloc seems to have been in wide popular usage in the sixteenth century. Matthew D. Therrell, David W. Stahle, and Rodolfo Acuña Soto suggest (“Aztec Drought and the ‘Curse of One Rabbit’” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 85: 9, pp.1263-1272) that there was a deeper memory for 1 Rabbit droughts, reaching back to perhaps even the ninth century. This seems unlikely, however; only a horrible drought would have entered the lexicon as “1 Rabbiting.” and this term seems to have appeared after 1454. Nevertheless, following this date, the stigma of 1 Rabbit became so troublesome that, at the subsequent recurrence of this year sign in 1505-6, the younger Moteuczoma (Xocoyotzin) postponed the epoch-marking New Fire ceremony by a year in order to avoid the curse. 3 DRAFT IN PROGRESS: PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE The Dominican friar Diego Durán, an early Spanish arrival who grew up in Texcoco a few decades after the events in question, remarked in the 1570s that “those who left for the land of the Totonacs never came back to the cities they left, so that even today you find neighborhoods of [the central Mexican ethnicities] Mexica, Chalca, Texcoca, Xochimilca, and Tepaneca in that land.” He continues, stating that since the time of the famines of 1453-5 the central Mexican groups listed above, “went away to live there, and there they remain down to today. They didn’t want to return to their places of birth, fearing another similar disaster and knowing that the central Mexican provinces lacked land for planting.”5 PEOPLE IN MOTION Totonacing was not a new phenomenon. For centuries if not millennia, migration has been one of the principal forces behind many major changes in Mesoamerican history. People moved around, escaping one situation or seeking another, and this had a profound impact on the structures of politics and society. For instance, baseline archaeological excavations from 4 A few notes on the image in Figure 2: The Codex Telleriano-Remensis makes a direct connection between diminishing food and foreign trade—the bottom two elements of the image refer to the grain reserves of Tenochtitlan; which, like those in Texcoco, fell to dangerously low levels over the years in question. Regarding the “bird-person” pun, one of the words for bird in Nahuatl is tototl, which shares beginning syllables with the word Totonac, totonacatl. The pierced septum references the Huastec people, who lived just north of the Totonacs. Finally, Eloise Quinones Keber, in her commentary on the Codex—Codex Telleriano-Remensis: ritual, divination, and history in a pictorial Aztec manuscript, Eloise Quiñones Keber, ed. (Austin: Texas UP, 1995), p. 228—suggests that the bound individual in Figure 2 is a mummy bundle. This seems unlikely, however, given several important divergences from the canonical form: the eyes are open instead of closed, and the head and the feet are uncovered. Particularly given the context, this individual was being sold as a slave on the Gulf Coast. 5 "los que salieron para la provincia de Totonacapan . nunca mas voluieron á las ciudades de donde auian salido, y así se hallan oy en dia en aquella tierra barrios de mexicanos, chalcas, tezcucanos, xuchimilca, tepanecas, que desde aquel tiempo se fueron á vivir allí y permanecen hasta el dia de oy. No quisieron voluer más a su natural, temiendo otro semejante suceso y sauiendo que la provincia mexicana carecia de tierras para poder sembrar.” DURAN old 249 4 DRAFT IN PROGRESS: PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE Acolhuacan, which we might expect to show some type of consistent trend over time, instead suggest alternating patterns of consolidation and dispersal, rising remarkably at least four times over some 2500 years, only to fall again. Population sizes careened between large peaks and desolate valleys according to the politics of the day. Figure 3. Population Estimates for Acolhuacan, 800 BCE- 1960 CE Time Frame Number of Sites Hectares Min. population Max. population Change from previous 800-600 BCE 19 74 790 2150 -- 500-300 BCE 29 251 3860 9000 Rise 200 BCE-100 52 747 10,070 20,200 Rise CE 200-400 CE 37 197 1335 4000 Fall 500-700 CE 23 144 855 2675 Fall 800-900 CE 24 1059 15,820 31,900 Rise 1000 CE 59 442 2670 6515 Fall 1300-1500 CE 110 4609 57,585 116,395 Rise 1960 CE 70 3219 73,476 -- Fall, then rise Source: Jeffrey R.