Carrasco's Response

[Leeming, Ben]

Dear Colleagues:
   My former student Ben Leeming alerted me to the conversations about the article that appeared in several places in which I'm quoted about the relationship of the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan #2 and the Chicano movement. I've read your comments and find them stimulating and important and will try, as soon as classes get going here at Harvard, to subscribe to the Nahuatl-L list.
    As you've figured out, there was a fair amount of mis-communication between me and this journalist. When I was saying "Some Chicanos interpret the location of Aztlan or images in the Mapa ....such and such a way," he took it as either me saying that I UNDERSTAND matters this way.... or as some kind of claim to historical fact. I never said that Aztlan or Chicomoztoc IS in the southwest, except in symbolic claims by some Latinos.   I'm not just blaming him-or me-it's the mode of communication-on the phone or quick written messages-that led to some mis interpretation of what I was saying. I never got a follow up from him or saw the article before it was published. Like H.B. Nicholson used to say, "I'll try not to spread to much confusion around."
If we can put that article aside and focus back on the matters Michel, Gerardo, David and Michael have raised , perhaps we can learn more about the differences, similarities and conflations of Chicomoztoc and Aztlan? I've looked at this matter for some time now and have come to believe they both point to a more underlying pattern of orientations in many parts of Mesoamerica, namely the power and role of the 'altepetl'. As Lopez Austin writes about it in the third chapter of Tamoanchan/Tlalocan: Places of Mist.  Michel makes some pointed comments and he's right, I think, about the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca which our group of 15 scholars depended on a lot during our examination of the MC2 Codex. Yet there are many, many images and events in the MC2 that are not covered in the HTC and invite an even broader conversation about these places of orientation, origin and pilgrimage. Michel, who knows a lot about the matter also writes  "One could argue that the Mexica tried to equate Aztlan with Chicomoztoc and so in some sense Aztlan is Chicomoztoc, but it certainly doesn't work the other way around."  I wonder about this in terms of 'from whose point of view' doesn't it work that Chicomoztoc is not also in some cases an Aztlan? Of course I'm an historian of religions trained in looking at symbolic and sacred places in various religious traditions so our disciplines may also play a role here.
    Thanks for your comments thus far and I'll look forward to other comments.

Saludos
David Carrasco
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