Think, imagine, picture yourself, Your Excellency, as that tree of great shade. How, in this little room, out of my little intellect, in the little time the gods-the Lord God-may have vouchsafed me to finish my roads and my days, how can I evoke the vastness of what was our world, the variety of its peoples, the events of the sheaves upon sheaves of years? That is correct? Then Your Excellency asks no easy thing of me. Your Excellency desires to learn what my people, this land, our lives were like in the years, in the sheaves of years before it pleased Your Excellency’s king and his crossbearers and crossbowmen to deliver us from our bondage of barbarism.

Your Excellency is attired and arrayed and assured in your conspicuous excellency, and I am only I.īut Your Excellency wishes to hear of what I was. Common report throughout the city, and these your servitors here, have made plain to me how august a man you are, Your Excellency, while I am but a threadbare rag, a frayed raveling of what once was. It impresses me the more that a personage of such eminent excellency should have summoned such a one as myself to speak words in Your Excellency’s presence.Īh, no, Your Excellency, do not demur if I appear to flatter Your Excellency. So, my lordĪyyo, even more illustrious-what we of these lands would call an ahuaquáhuitl, a tree of great shade. You are a man, and not one man of all the men I have met in my life has ever resented being addressed as a lord. Therefore, in order to establish a seemingly coherent plot of the past that would overcome fragmentation and chaos, the indigenous witnesses appearing in our sources relied heavily on unique visual schemata that assisted them in assembling the mental shreds and remnants of past experiences to restore them within the traditional framework and formulae of information transmission only modestly affected by the Spanish conquest.Pardon me, my lord, that I do not know your formal and fitting honorific, but I trust I do not hazard my lord’s taking offense. It emphasizes that early colonial Cohuixca testimonies were deeply influenced by what are called, in Western terms, cadastral maps or cartographic histories or, in Nahuatl, amoxtli tlalamatl altepeamatl (' land papers, ' titles of each town and district) in the former Cohuixca province of Tepecoacuilco (Cohuixcatlacapan), these geographical elements being heavily reinforced by oral retelling. To do so, it introduces a qualitative methodological approach into ethnohistory, which discerns pervasive patterns of special understanding that guided indigenous testimony in the Colonial Spanish courtroom. This article aims to fill in some of the lacunae that still exist regarding the Cohuixca ethnicity of the northeastern part of the State of Guerrero.

Aztec by Gary Jennings