The nine reincarnations of Matlatzinco. Comments on the structure of the altepetl and the riddles of Matlatzinca-related terminology

Abstract

Long before ethnographers, linguists, historians, and archaeologists discovered them as a study subject, the Matlatzinca of central and western Mexico had already been stigmatized as a culture on the verge of extinction, marginalized or assimilated by more powerful neighbors. The more remote past of Matlatzinca speakers can be glimpsed only with difficulty through sources written in Nahuatl or Spanish, or through archaeological research. There are several distinguished works on the subject, but the number of researchers devoted to it – especially within the same generation and the same discipline – continues to be very limited. As a result, Matlatzinca studies have scarcely benefited from vigorous public and interdisciplinary debate. Nadine Béligand’s article “El señorío matlatzinca: una manera de abordar el altepetl,” posted in the electronic journal Americae on 15 November 2016 is symptomatic of this state of affairs. It suffers from the author’s unwillingness to frame her arguments with respect to the existing historiography of the Toluca Valley, in particular the published works of René García Castro. Postulating a profound and irreversible usurpation of the power of Matlatzinca lords in the wake of the conquests by the Aztec and Spanish Empires is an exaggeration based on a series of minor errors of judgment relating to the identity of certain places and characters that are in the foreground of the political history of the Toluca Valley in the 15th and 16th century. My disagreements with Béligand have deeper roots in the regional literature, but these have not been the subject of explicit debate. For this reason, I use the critique of this particular paper as a starting point to contrast and amend some prior reconstructions of settlement patterns on the basis of documentary and archaeological information, and to outline more firmly the different meanings of the words matlatzinca and Matlatzinco, as they refer to people, places, or things.