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Azteca or Mexica?

For this episode, I will be drawing heavily from the article “the word Azteca was not created by Von Humboldt” written by Ruben Ochoa, which originally appeared on the website Mexika.org.

Whenever some well-meaning individual posts a link to an article about any aspect of Aztec history to social media, they are inevitably met with a barrage of comments that usually sound something like this:

“actually, they never called themselves Aztecs.  They called themselves Mexica.”  

That refrain, or something very similar to it, has been repeated time and time again by countless Chicanos, Mexicanos, cultural practitioners, historians, etc., for who knows how long.  Hell, even I used to say it about twenty to twenty-five years ago.

Back then, the argument started innocently enough, I suppose.

“We didn’t call ourselves Aztec. That’s what an anthropologist called us ‘cause they didn’t know what we called ourselves.”  And that in turn turned into an anthropologist coming up with that name as an umbrella term to lump all the people of the Valley of Mexico together. That further changed to a white anthropologist decided to call us that, and then that white anthropologist became more specifically European.  At some point we even managed to identify the culprit who dared sully us with a name not our own, and that perpetrator has been identified as none other than Alexander Von Humboldt. People have become so confident that the above is true that the new chorus, with all the certitude in the world, is that Alexander Von Humboldt is to blame for the very existence of the word “Aztec,” a word that was presumably never uttered by our people.

But Is this really true? Is the word Aztec or Azteca solely an invention of 18th century scholars? Well, not exactly.

Your host:

Kurly Tlapoyawa is an archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and filmmaker. His research covers Mesoamerica, the American Southwest, and the historical connections between the two regions. He is the author of numerous books and has presented lectures at the University of New Mexico, Yale University, San Diego State University, and numerous others. He is currently a professor of Chicano Studies at the Colegio Chicano del Pueblo, a free online educational institution.
@kurlytlapoyawa

Cited in this podcast:

Ruben Ochoa, “The Word ‘Azteca’ Was NOT Created by Von Humboldt!,” Mexika.org (blog), May 31, 2014, https://mexika.org/2014/05/31/the-word-azteca-was-not-created-by-von-humboldt/.  

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Book: The Four Disagreements: Letting Go of Magical Thinking (Amazon)