Long before the Spanish colonizers established it in 1598, the “Kingdom of Nuevo México” had existed as an imaginary world—and not the one based on European medieval legend so often said to have driven the Spaniards’ ambitions in the New World. What the conquistadors sought in the 1500s, it seems, was what the native Mesoamerican Indians who took part in north-going conquest expeditions also sought: a return to the Aztecs’ mythic land of origin, Aztlan. Employing long-overlooked historical and anthropological evidence, Danna A. Levin Rojo reveals how ideas these natives held about their own past helped determine where Spanish explorers would go and what they would conquer in the northwest frontier of New Spain—present-day New Mexico and Arizona. Return to Aztlan thus remaps an extraordinary century during which, for the first time, Western minds were seduced by Native American historical memories. Levin Rojo recounts a transformation—of an abstract geographic space, the imaginary world of Aztlan, into a concrete sociopolitical place. Drawing on a wide variety of early maps, colonial chronicles, soldier reports, letters, and native codices, she charts the gradual redefinition of native and Spanish cultural identity—and shows that the Spanish saw in Nahua, or Aztec, civilization an equivalence to their own. A deviation in European colonial naming practices provides the first clue that a transformation of Aztlan from imaginary to concrete world was taking place: Nuevo México is the only place-name from the early colonial period in which Europeans combined the adjective “new” with an American Indian name. With this toponym, Spaniards referenced both Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the indigenous metropolis whose destruction made possible the birth of New Spain itself, and Aztlan, the ancient Mexicans’ place of origin. Levin Rojo collects additional clues as she systematically documents why and how Spaniards would take up native origin stories and make a return to Aztlan their own goal—and in doing so, overturns the traditional understanding of Nuevo México as a concept and as a territory. A book in the Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The book combines historical, anthropological, and survey data to construct a vivid and comprehensive picture of the social dynamics of contemporary Mexican migration to the United States.
... Miera y Pacheco. The maps drawn by Miera y Pacheco graphically featured rivers, salt lakes, place- names, and mountains seen on the expedition (see map 4). The myth of Teguayo, as it related to Copala and the Siete Cuevas, was now tied ...
In In Search of a Day in Paradise: Aztlan, author Dr. Moises Venegas analyzes the history of Hispanics in the southwest and makes a call for change in New Mexico's education, policies, and politics.
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, language: English, abstract: Diese Bachelorarbeit untersucht die Darstellung von „Queer Aztlán“ in ...
Mexica's princess initiation has begun.
Based on comments made by David Hilliard, Elaine Brown, Erick Huggins, and Fredrika Newton during a five-day colloquium honoring the fortieth anniversary of the Black Panther Party, the University of New Mexico, February 16–21, 2006.
During the early 1940s, young Mateos favorite pastime is exploring the mountains near his home.
... Return to Aztlan , 56 ; Levin Rojo , Return to Aztlan , 56–57 . 5 . Coe and Koontz , Mexico , 160–78 . 19. Indigenous laborers suffered compared to Spaniards, that is. A. 6. Levin Rojo , Return to Aztlan , 128–30 ; Coe and Koontz ...
... Return to Aztlán, but scholars gave studied communities fictional names in order to protect any undocumented immigrants that had left from the region throughout the rest of the twentieth century. 19. Massey, et al., Return to Aztlán, 55 ...
Massey et al., Return to Aztlan. 41. Lucas and Stark, "Motivations to Remit"; Taylor, "Differential Migration, Networks, Information, and Risk"; Marc Fox and Stark, “Remittances, Exchange Rates, and the Labor Supply of Mexican Migrants ...