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Throwback Thursday: AZTLAN! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: You must excuse me.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: But you've learned a lesson.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: A lesson in honesty.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Honesty to yourself.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Honesty to others.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Benjamin could step on the money.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've always heard that honesty is the best honesty.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm catching on to why that's so why that's so why that's so why that's so why that's so.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome, dear listeners, to Tales from Oclantis.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And Ruben Ariano Tlacateka.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: Today we're going to be bringing you episode 12, The Lost Episode.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, we're going to be covering the concept of Aslan historically, mythohistorically, and what it means to the modern Chicano movement.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to start off with my co-host, Lacatekat, reading a synthesized version of an introduction to the book The Lost Land, The Chicano Image of the Southwest by John R.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Chavez.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Afterwards, we'll go into some information on the historical meaning of Aslan and how it's being used today.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Also, criticisms of the word itself.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we are proud to bring to you, dear listeners, the last episode of Ostlan.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: Alright, well, uh full disclosure, John R.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: Chavez was my dissertation advisor in graduate school, and uh his book was influential in my own work and my own study on Chicano indigenity.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so his book uh was published in 1984 from the University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, and as Curly just mentioned, it's called The Lost Land, the Chicano Image of the Southwest.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so what I'm about to read to you is a synthesized version of his introduction to sort of frame what we Chicanos, at least in the traditional Chicano sense, uh have meant and continue to mean those of us that still do this, uh, by Astlan.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: To the Anglo-American majority of the United States, the Southwest is vaguely identified as that group of states located at the corner of the country toward Mexico.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: Before the war between the United States and Mexico, which ended in 1848, present-day California, Texas, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, more than half of Colorado, the southern and western portions of the state, the Oklahoma Panhandle, and the southwestern corners of Wyoming and Kansas were all parts of Mexico's national territory.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: Because of Mexico's prior possession of the Southwest, Chicanos consider themselves indigenous to the region.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: Their claims are supported by the fact that their ancestors not only explored and settled parts of the Southwest as early as the 16th century, but thousands of years earlier permanently occupied the region or migrated through it on their way south.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: The belief that the Southwest, especially the areas long settled by Mexicans, is the Chicano homeland, and the belief that Mexicans are indigenous to and dispossessed of the region are beliefs that have had a formative and continuing influence on the collective Chicano mind.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: Within the individual Chicano mind, the image of the Southwest is in the most literal sense a picture of a particular barrio street, of a specific rural adobe, of a particular brown child, or any number of other sensory perceptions that are peculiar to the Chicano Southwest.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: At its most sophisticated, the collective Chicano image of the Southwest and other ideas concerning such matters as race and culture together form a guiding myth that has affected Chicano history from earliest times to the present.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: Aspects of this myth can be traced from the Chronicles of the Aztecs through the Spanish language newspapers of the 1850s to the literature and social thought of Chicanos in the 1980s.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: The Chicano myth, however, does bear important similarities to the Native American image of the United States.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: Both Indians and Chicanos see themselves as indigenous to and dispossessed of their homelands, which in the Southwest means they claim the same territory.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: Nevertheless, in the 20th century, these overlapping claims have caused little conflict, for Anglos have simply possessed the land.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: Instead, these claims have led two minorities to recognize that they have common backgrounds.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: In 1971, Armando Rendon, a Chicano journalist, acknowledged just that point.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: We maintain that there exists blood and cultural bonds to the land of the Southwest.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: We do not deny the Indian people's claims to the land.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: We believe we have had at least a share in its perpetuation through the hands of those who originally worked the land and who have historical claims to it.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: This issue of land and its relationship to the Chicano should be discussed with Indian tribesmen.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Chicanos have a blood relationship to our Indian forebears.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Descendants of early Spanish colonists who reject such an alliance with the Indian natives of the Americas also reject the most obvious claim to the retribution for the misdeeds committed by the Anglos who stole the land.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: That knowledgeable Native Americans recognize such Chicano claims is evident from the following statement made in 1973 by Jack D.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: Forbes, a Native American scholar.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: The Aztecas del Norte, and Azteca is a person of Aslan or the Southwest, compose the largest single tribe or nation of Anashinabeg Indians found in the United States today.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Some call themselves Chicanos and see themselves as a people whose true homeland is Aslan.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: Since Chicanos are racially 70 to 80 percent Indian, they do indeed have much in common with Native Americans, a fact that must be considered in discussions of claims to the Southwest.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: Along with race, culture, and historical experience, the Chicanos' image of the Southwest is an important element in the overall self-image, self-identity of that people.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: The Chicano's present view of the Southwest had its beginning in 1848, as did their current self-image.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: In that year, on signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico surrendered the region and most of its inhabitants to the United States.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Before that, the Mexican view of the region, as far back as the 16th century Aztec Chronicles, had been focused on the feature of the homeland.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: The earliest Spanish conquistadores had, of course, seen the borderlands as foreign conquests, but their mestizo descendants came to call the region home.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: After the Anglo-American invasion, however, the Mexican image of the region incorporated the feature of the lost land, and Mexicans in the Southwest soon viewed themselves as a conquered people.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: Thus, though modified with time, the picture of the lost homeland came into being and was handed down to the present.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: Over the last 130 years, the myth of the lost land has served as a focus for Mexican nationalism in the Southwest.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: In the late 1960s, this deep wish reappeared in repeated Chicano allusions to the ancient Astric homeland of Astlan, traditionally located in the Southwest.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: Noting this phenomenon, Armando Rendon commented, The concept of Astlan is undergirded by a desire for restitution of the land of Astlan.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: The Chicano does not wish to have merely an empty dream.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Just as for other displaced peoples in the world's history, the cry of the land is keen in our ears.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: We too have had title to the land which was violently taken from us.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Geography and culture make the vision of a new state for the Chicano not quite so wild an idea.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: The direct roots we have sunk into the land can burgeon once more.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: The desire of the Southwest Mexicans for recovery of the region has always been tied to their desire for cultural, political, and economic self-determination.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: A self-determination they believe can only be achieved through control of the space they occupy.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: The story of the struggle for that environment is central to Chicano history.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: And this is the end of the year.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's a good intro.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: So the one of the things that I wanted to say before we continue is that Chavez, if I'm not mistaken, is the one that introduced the idea of the Lost Land into the Chicano scholarship.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so those people that are familiar with Chicano scholarship might understand and might have heard of the The Trope of the Lost Land before.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: And that's that's basically the period between 1848 and uh leading up into uh the late 1800s and early 1900s.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: So now what we're gonna do is uh transition to what I have to say about this in my dissertation, and uh it's an adaptation that is based on partly on Chavez's work, but it's also based on the work that Jack D.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: Forbes did, which influenced Chavez.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I should also mention that Chavez was possibly the first and one of the few Chicanos that read uh Forbes' ideas of Chicanos being indigenous and applied it to his scholarship.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: Not that many Chicanos picked up on it after Chavez did, and in fact, uh I think most of the scholarship moved away by the time that his book was published in 1984, and so by the time we get into the late 80s and the 90s, uh Chicano scholarship had moved away from these ideas of the lost land and ideas of uh indigeneity, and they had other issues that they were dealing with, which is fine, but I'm just wanted to put that out there that these two people figure largely in the notion of Chicano, Mexican indigenousity.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's Jack D.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: Forbes and John R.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: Chavez.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Now to my summary from my dissertation.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: From the onset, Aztic iconography and the Nahuatl language have predominated in Chicana Chicano indigenous aesthetics.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: The idea of Astlan as a symbolic name for the Southwest was one of the first memes that merged both language and imagery into one single powerful concept, one that was simultaneously abstract and concrete.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: It influenced many groups such as Mecha, and its persistent longevity is a testament to its allure and power.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: However, contrary to popular belief, the original appeal of Aslan was not necessarily tied to a Chicana Chicano understanding of Aztic origin mythology.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: The native scholar Chicano ally Jack D.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: Forbes first introduced the idea of Aslan as a Chicana Chicano homeland as early as 1962, years before Chicanos and Chicanos embraced it.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: He did this through one of his many mimeographed essays, which his organization, which was called the Native American Movement, a precursor to AIME, and Indians of all tribes, distributed throughout the Southwest.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's very likely that Forbes' early writings on Aslan planted the seeds that later blossomed during the Chicano movement.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: By the mid-1960s, ethnic Mexican youth had grown tired of their systemic oppression, racism, and sheer neglect of their communities by the government and society at large.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: They took to the streets to demand immediate corrective action for these injustices.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, ethnic Mexican people had been politically active in one way or another since the US-Mexico War of 1846 and 1848.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I should add here that the term ethnic Mexican in the scholarship usually refers to people who are of ethnic Mexican descent, whether they are here legally or not, or whether they're third, fourth generation U.S.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: citizen or not.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: It just means that you have descent from Mexican people.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: Among the distinct political activities of the 60s was not that Mexican Americans suddenly quote unquote woke up, but rather that they reappropriated the once disparaging term Chicano and wore it as a badge of honor.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: Whether striking in the fields, walking out of class, or protesting the unequal justice system, Chicanos and Chicanos made three universal demands.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: They wanted better schools, increased political representation in all levels of government, and an end to police brutality.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: The various actions used to achieve these ends were collectively called the Chicano movement, and one of its unifying symbols was the cultural homeland called Astlan.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: From the onset, the adoption of Aztlan as a Chicano homeland translated into an act of collective defiance and gave the movement a land base on which to ground itself.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: During the Chicano movement, the idea that the land taken from Mexico in 1848 was a Chicano homeland had set into the minds of many cultural activists and especially among those who were ethno-nationalists.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: This was especially true of those who espoused indigenous ideologies.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: Native people who were indigenous to the Southwest understandably scoffed at the notion that Chicanos had rights to the land of their ancestors.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: However, as Chavez points out in The Lost Land, if we approach this from the internal colonial analytical frame, it can be argued that Mexican Americans who descend from the people who were conquered by the United States are, by definition, indigenous.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: Furthermore, the many generations of the inter-ethnic proximity and intermarriage between ethnic Mexicans and Native Americans in the Southwest allows for a genetically and biological connection to indigenity.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: As times change, so do the definition of terms, and so in the years since the decline of the Chicano movement, the toponym of Astlan has been repurposed to accommodate various agendas and meanings by several Chicana and Chicano scholars and organizations.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: Depending on who you ask, Aztlan is construed as either an actual place from where ancient Nahuatl-speaking peoples migrated south into the Valley of Mexico, or as a utopia that can be molded to fit the desired need at the moment.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: During the Chicano movement, LGBTQ and Chicana feminists voiced their criticisms of the Aslan narrative, and rightfully so.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_02: Other critics perceived Aslan as a kind of toponymic imperialism that subsumed the indigenous peoples of the Southwest.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: Thus, in their attempt at redeeming the concept of Aslan from its problematic associations, some scholars redefined the term into abstract notions concerning quote-unquote personal feeling and quote unquote state of mind.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: By this point, the term had been completely disassociated from its original meaning and intention.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: The Aztecs regarded it as their point of origin, their ancient homeland.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: The notion of an ancient northern homeland was noted by the early Spanish chroniclers who documented the culture and the history of the Aztecs.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: Native informants stated that their ancestral and remote place of origin, Aslan, was located somewhere to the north of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: Explorers tried to locate Aslan's precise geographic location beginning in the 16th century, an endeavor that accelerated the initial exploration and settlement of what is now New Mexico.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Some scholars have suggested that the place is a metonym for Tenochtitlan and Mexica social structure.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: The name itself is usually translated as quote unquote place of herons or whiteness.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: And in some versions of the migration story, Aztlan is represented as an island city similar to Tenochtitlan itself.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: During the Chicano movement, Aztlan came to symbolize the territory ceded by Mexico to the US in 1848.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: When Jack D.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: Forbes first theorized Aztlan in the late 1950s, he envisioned it as incorporating Northwest Mexico and the southwestern United States.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: In his estimation, they constituted a singular geographic region connected by culture and history.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: In an early essay on the subject entitled Mexican Heritage of Astlan, the Southwest to 1821, he says, Astlan is the Aztec Mexican name for their original homeland far to the north of the Valley of Mexico.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: It is used to refer not only to the United States Southwest, but also to Northwest Mexico, both of which are part of a common geographical, cultural, historical unit.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: When he was interviewed decades later in 1999 for the In Search of Aslam project by Patricia Gonzalez and Roberto Rodriguez, he elaborated further.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's mostly a desert area, very similar native cultural traditions, overlapping language boundaries, the common history, of course, of all the modern peoples living there.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: And as a result, I decided to try to come up with a name that could be used to refer to that region, because Southwest obviously is an ethnocentric term.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Northwest also is not accurate if you include the US area.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: So it came to me to call this region Austlan.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so I thought it was a large enough region that it would certainly embrace the original Ostlan.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's obvious that Forbes did not initially conceive of Astlan in ideological and political terms.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: He meant it to refer to the US Southwest and parts of northern Mexico.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: He intended the term to do for this area what Paul Kirchhoff's Mesoamerica did for Central Mexico.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: More specifically, the Aslan that Forbes envisioned encompassed parts of the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, and Nuevo León.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: On the US side, it encompassed New Mexico, Arizona, and California, as well as the southernmost parts of Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: He also included parts of West Texas and stopped right around the area known historically as the Comancheria, an area which includes parts that were originally within Coahualtegan territory prior to the Comanche incursion to that area.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, those familiar with Chicano ideology know that Astlan eventually came to symbolize all of Mexico's ceded territories, including Texas.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: Some thought of it as the lost land, and the notion gained wider attention throughout the Southwest, most notably after the Denver Youth Conference in 1969.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: End.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I really like that idea of Aslan sort of being used the same way as Kirchhoff's Mesoamerica.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: I never really considered it like that, but when I thought about it, I was like, yeah, that's because generally we we just refer to that as the Southwest.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the Southwest is thought of as being the area, you know, from an archaeological, anthropological standpoint, we think of the Southwest as being from Durango, Mexico, all the way up to Durango, Colorado, and Las Vegas, Nevada to Las Vegas, New Mexico.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: Generally.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's like kind of like the general idea of when we refer to the Southwest.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because of those reasons that Jack Forbes stated, right?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like cultural and agricultural and and all of these things that sort of united those areas in the same way that Mesoamerica as a term described this shared cultural area of central Mexico.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I really like that.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: I know some anthropologists refer to it, especially in Mexico, they just call it the um the Gran Chichimeca.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I I I dig it.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: I like the idea of Astlan.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: But I think the Gran Chichimeca uh would be east of Astlan.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: The way that I understand it is that the place that Astlan, uh that Forbes called Astlan, was sort of north of Mesoamerica and and east of uh Gran Chichimeca, with some overlap, of course.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: There's always over none of these are strict, you know, lines.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're not actual lines in the sand.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: So there's overlap between both, but I think in general that I think that's what he meant.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_02: It would be it would have been more of a western Mexico, northwestern Mexico.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's why he didn't include uh most of Texas in in his conception of Islam, because going back to what I just read, he wasn't thinking of it in terms of politics.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: This is way before the Chigana movement, even things ground when he's already thinking this stuff.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: He's thinking more as a historian, because that's what he was, and he was also thinking in terms of uh anthropologist and archaeologist, and and how would someone frame this collective area in the same way that, for example, the Coabultecan peoples uh of Texas and and northeastern Mexico are called all Coabultecos, even though they have different individual identities and but they share a similar cultural space, similar societies, the nomadic uh hunters and their spiritual activities uh uh surrounding uh the peyot and the ceremony, and you know, all that is is very common and very related, but they're not all the one same people, the same way that Mesoamerica shared that same cultural understanding of themselves, and the same thing was happening in what he called Aslan.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: And if you look at the way he frames it, he's saying, I was looking for a term that wasn't going to be very ethnocentric from the American point of view, because when you say Southwest, well, Southwest from where?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_02: From whose point of view?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: It prioritizes the United States as the center of the universe when you say Southwest.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: So so for him, Aslan, he was looking for a term that would that would be indigenous in nature, but that also encompassed this notion of antiquity, right?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: That there's this ancient place that has existed for a long time and it used to have a name, so why not go with Astlan?
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he could have gone with any other name.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: And and I guess the question here is had he not popularized the notion of astlan in the late 50s and early sixties, would Chicanos have used it to call the Chicano homeland Aztlan?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like, would have Alurista even writ written that poem the way that he did?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: It wouldn't have been El Plan de Aztlan, right?
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: It would have been El Plan de w whatever else.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, whatever else we could have come up with.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: El México del Norte or something, right?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: El Plan de los Chicanos.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: Chicano Landia.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well I would Chicano Tlan.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: Chicanotlan, how about that?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's funny because one of the the things that I've been trying to uh I've been playing with, because we've talked about just using Chicano as our the framework of of our indigenous identity instead of calling ourselves mexicas or or all these other things.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: In response to the whole Latin X thing was well, you know, we're using like European conventions to describe ourselves, right?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: The whole Latin invented colonialist thing.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, well, why don't we just call ourselves um Chicantecat, right?
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: Or Chicanteca.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Because at least that's like taking our root, right?
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: Chicano and using an indigenous grammar system to define ourselves in a way that is non-binary, that is gender neutral.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: Chicanteca.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been playing around with that.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I'll throw it onto a forum just to see how people react.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: And uh But wait, isn't the A at the end making it feminine though?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: No, because it's not by Spanish speaker.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well I mean yeah if you're a Spanish speaker, but you know I mean you can't win with these debates because there's always someone that's gonna find something to nitpick about whatever it is that that it's being proposed.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: Oh absolutely um but what I think it's interesting is and with the term Aslan and and honestly this is my personal opinion I don't know if you share it but I think uh there's a lot of people today on that get on social media and that attack the concept of Aslan and the and attack Chicanos who use it and some of these people happen to be indigenous or maybe even Chicanos or I'm not really sure.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: But there's this sort of anti-Chicano hatred that permeates a lot of these online circles that are critical of Chicanismo, that are critical of Chicano indigenity that are critical of of terms like Aslan and I'm thinking but why are you being so you know negative about this?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: Because I mean it's like you were saying in a previous conversation that we had Aslan is a term that we use to name the land in our culture.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't mean that we're imposing it imperialistically on other indigenous people who happen to have their own name for the land itself, right?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah we're not saying no, you need to call it this as well.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah and I don't know where this stems from like what is the pushback against calling this place Austlan?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_02: Those of us that still call ourselves Chiganos and identify with the legacy of the Chigano movement, you know, that still you know call this place Ostlan, would it be imperialistic also to say that calling North America Turtle Island is imperialistic?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: Because not all indigenous people use the the term Turtle island to refer to North America.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly I mean if you talk to the Coahuiltecans in Texas they have their own name for the land and it's not Turtle Island.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah or so these people that choose to do this specifically target Chicanos it's almost like an anti-Chicano stance that they're taking because they're not doing it to anyone else they're just doing it to Chicanos as far as I can tell.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah exactly yeah and and I see it a lot I do see it a lot and it's funny because I just tell them you know well Aslan is just the Chicano nickname for what we call the Southwest.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a great quote and I I can't remember who said it um but they said um astlan is everywhere that I've ever walked and I'm probably misquoting it but I always thought that was a cool quote because it's like it's something that you just carry inside of you, right?
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know like if you take a a person out of Hopi Land and they move to New York and they say like well you know I I carry Hopi Land inside me.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know to me it's that's the same thing as saying Aslan.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Aslan is everywhere that I go because I carry it inside me and it means something to me.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah it's it's just the name that we we have for this place as a cultural group and we're not trying to impose it on people.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean there are you do have the extreme Chicano nationalists who are like we need to take over the Southwest right and form a you know a new government but I mean that kind of thinking is very small and it doesn't define everyone who uses the term astlan either.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah I think there's this blanket assumption that anyone who still refers to the Southwest as astlan is thinking along those ultranationalist Chicano mindsets, right?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly that's not the case.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: We're just doing it from a cultural understanding of ourselves as a people in this space.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you see people say um the Chicanos they they need to have a discussion about Aslan.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's like we've been having this this these discussions from the get-go about what it means what what it means to us what we want it to mean.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: These have been ongoing discussions people act like well one they're coming from a perspective where they obviously don't know anything about Chicano history.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly they've never studied it and they're very dismissive of it.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: And they're not listening to us not us specifically but us as a people.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly I wanted to uh add to this episode by reading an excerpt from a paper written by Dr.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: Magnus Farohanson and myself co-written by the by the two of us and this was published geez I don't even remember a few years ago but the paper is called Astlan and Mexican Transnationalism Language Nation and History just to give some background on the the historic Astlan, right?
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: Or the mythohistoric.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: So this comes from our paper a section called Aztecs and Aslan Mythology, history and metahistory.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: The concept of Astlan has its origin in the ethnohistoric and mythohistoric narratives recorded by Nahuatl speakers in the Spanish colonial period.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: As with most Mesoamerican origin myths, these narratives present a migration motif in which Nahuat speaking ethnic groups shared a common origin in a place that they eventually abandoned in search for a place in which to build their own city state the best known descriptions of these Aslan migrations have been recorded by authors representing the Mexica, Teshkoka, Akolwa, and Atlashkalteca ethnic groups the meaning of the word Aslan is a matter of some debate the locative suffix means something like the place by X or the place by something but there is no clear match for the root as it could be a shortened form of the word asat which is egrit or haron which you mentioned in your piece and some sources also describe the place as astatlan which would fit the place of the Heron or it might be an old or shortened form of the word asli, wing.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: In any case the word Aztec Nawat for the English form of the word Aztecat is Aztec is derived from the place name and means inhabitant of Astlan.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: Note that in this work we distinguish between the original Nahuat word astlan which stresses the first syllable and pronounces the second syllable as a long vowel and the Chicano usage astlan which adds an acute accent to mark word stress on the second syllable.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: Colonial documents differ on the ethnic identities of the various Aztec groups that participated in the migration but it is interesting to note that each of these groups were considered politically autonomous.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: Three of the groups the Mexica, the Tepaneka and the Texkoka joined forces to form the Triple Alliance that formed the so-called Aztec Empire.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: But several of the other Azteca groups prominently the Tlashkalteca were political and military opponents of the Azteca of the Triple Alliance.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: The term Aztecat then was an identity that joined together separate political communities under a single pan ethnic identity based on a shared language and a shared myth of origin.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: These myths have been preserved in several colonial manuscripts.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I wanted to read that is because I hear a lot um in fact somebody just messaged me about this the other day that the word Aztec you know was invented by white people by a German anthropologist or historian.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: Humboldt yeah so you know the word Aztec is you know they never called themselves Aztecs it's invented and that's not necessarily well I mean it's not true at all.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: He he certainly popularized the use of the word Aztec but he got the word from Azteca which is a traditional word.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean the word was used by the Mexica to describe their ancestors and for this we go to the uh one of the codices the Codex Albin and it makes reference to the time and this codex is written in Nahuatl by Nawat speakers by uh Nahuat nobility who were taught to write in Latin form and they were asked to record their histories.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so they wrote this in Nahuatl from the Codex Albin from 1576 and here's the translation of what is written.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: The Codex Albin says and then there he, Huitzilopochli, changed the name of the Azteca He told them you are no longer called Azteca now you are Mexica there he put feathers in their ears.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: In this way the Mexica took their name so we know that the word Azteca is a traditional word so hopefully we could debunk and eliminate that erroneous urban legend that that Aztec is a fake term invented by Humboldt.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean isn't it also found in the Kronika Mexicayot by Tesosomok doesn't he also in this that was written sometime in well I think it's in dispute exactly when it was penned but it was definitely before his death also Chimalpain right well there's a controversy right there's a controversy that some people think that Chimalpain had a hand in uh writing LaCronica there's a debate apparently whether it was uh Fernando Alvarado Tesosomok or if it was Chimalpain um and I think I even read some somewhere that someone thought these were one and the same person.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I don't know if that's correct.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: But in any case that's a side point the point is that that if if it was either Chimalpain or Tesosomok they were both using the word uh Azteca.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: And these are indigenous authors with some of the earliest indigenous and they're using the term right so it's not like it was invented by Humboldt who came in the early 19th century right early 1800s apparently so it couldn't have been invented by him but yeah he definitely popularized it in the more anglophone world maybe in the public imagination he wrote about it and this was a time when you know all of these new lands were being discovered and people were reading these travelogues and becoming interested in the mysterious jungle civilizations and everybody wanted to read his stuff so you know the the word caught on right and um you know hopefully we could put that to bed I was thinking the same thing I don't think this needs an entire episode.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah like there's not much to say on this folks I mean there it is it's right there.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah it's it's uh you you were misinformed if if you think that it was invented by uh by Humboldt.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: So before we um end the episode we've also had a few people ask us about the name of the episode uh do we want to say a few things about that?
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: Sure yeah um but before we do I want to kick it old school uh to my first book We Will Rise published published in uh the year 2000.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: So 21 years ago as a young man I wrote this book.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I gotta admit I got a lot of stuff wrong because I was being very heavily influenced by Mechikayot and the MCRCA and stuff but when I thumb through this book which I you know I wrote it when I was like 18 years old so there's that.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: But when I thump through it for every uh every part that I cringe I come across something where I'm like damn I I was right moments of clarity?
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah moments of clarity brief moments of clarity but there's a part in here where I talk about you know astlan and uh this is what I had to say back in the year 2000.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: It should be noted that during the Chicano movement the name Astlan took on a politically assertive meaning.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: Those in the movement used the concept of astlan to identify the entire southwestern United States.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: In this socio-political context represents the land which was invaded occupied and stolen from the Mexican nation in 1848.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: This includes the modern states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, California, Arizona, Texas, and others.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: While I certainly acknowledge the impact this broad concept of Aztlan has had in helping to form the cultural identity of many Chicano Mexicanos, I do not take this view myself.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: The Southwest is home to many non-Mexican indigenous nations, each with the universal right to govern over themselves and exist as a sovereign and autonomous people.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: So basically I was saying the same thing back then that you know I d I don't look at like we need to take over the Southwest and name it Astlan because it doesn't belong to us but we we do have our own name for it and we call it and it's it's just part of who we are as a people and we're not trying to be imperialist or force this identity on everybody else.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's just the name that we have I think the issue is that people that are new to this because I've noticed that it it tends to gravitate towards a younger demographic the people who are denouncing Chicanismo and denouncing Naslan and denouncing those of us who are not authentic indigenous or whatever yeah we're not whatever the frames these people have not read previous material your work the work of Forbes Chavez's book and other people that came before us that have been theorizing and debating these things I mean going on 50 years now right and so there's so much stuff out there that that gets overlooked and missed over the years as as time goes on people's priorities change and the way that they look at things change which is fine but at the same time if you're gonna be critiquing someone's ideas you have to at least have had some exposure to them to know what they are actually saying, what the those authors are saying what these people are saying before you can critique it instead of just like going on a board and commenting I haven't listened to your podcast or I haven't read your book but this is what I have to say about it.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah before you critique somebody's ideas you should actually know what those ideas are.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly and it seems like people you know especially the anti-Chicano crowd they create like this straw man this Chicano boogeyman that doesn't exist doesn't exist and they attack that instead of attacking you know or engaging with or examining the uh the actual ideas of and history of the Chicano movement and the people that came before that.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: They're just uh what you know I I come from the barrio of Dogpatch and uh there we call it they're talking a lot of shit.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yep can agree more.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: But what you were saying about the uh the name Ostlantis Tales from Ostlantis.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: So how does it relate to Astlan?
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: So how do we come up with that name Curly?
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well I first heard the word uh back when I was in college from my homeboy um Antonio Tomasek shout out to uh Chex Mex yeah shout out to Chex Mex he still pops up on my Facebook every every now and then to give me shit um so hopefully this assuages his anger at me using the wordis because when we when we uh were in college and he's got a funny way of talking he was like yeah bro have I ever told you about my theory of Aslantes the the Asland of Aslantes and you know he was being funny he was making a joke because Astlan is you know in the Codex Boturini it's it's depicted as an island with a city on it and we don't know where it is so he's like just logically you know if you want to look for Aslan you gotta look under the ocean and our ancestors are like a race of supermen who came from the Atlanteans.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um and this is a guy who hadn't been exposed to the MCRC and Luna Cardana's yeah as far as I know I mean we were still bat still back in college right like we were just young young punks but I always I always thought that was funny astlantis because it works right the the idea of Atlantis and and astlan you just mix the words together so I always held on to that but then later in life uh I started reading and I I realized that some people actually thought that at Atlantis and Astlan were the same thing and they would make references to you know lost continents like Memoria and then you have um Paredes um Martinez uh Paredes uh going off with his uh and he doesn't specifically say Atlantis but if you read his works he's like yeah and the Maya came from a a sunken lost continent in the Gulf of Mexico which sounds suspiciously like Atlantis to me.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: It sounds a lot like uh Ignatius Donnelly being channeled.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah yeah the antediluvian world exactly but you know in the Mexicayot my first and going back to what you were saying about about books written through the Mexicayot tradition I'm holding in my hand right now a book called Mexicayot Mexicanidad in Mexicayot Yalistli IC Ish poliwis La Mexicanidad Hamas Perecerad which is basically the MCRCA's uh their slogan and there's no date to the book I've I've searched it and I think the latest date that I've uncovered um is like 1988 maybe there's no specific author or editor attributed there's a few names dropped in here and there but this book and I think you have a copy of it and a lot of people in the Mashikayot if if you're listening look on your shelf you probably have a copy of this book and when I started reading it I I just couldn't believe the stuff that was in here and one of the things that they that they include in this book is like allusions to Lemuria allusions to to Atlantis and the term Atlantis itself is never as far as I can tell doesn't come up is never mentioned but you kind of have to have like like make your own association that that's what they're trying to say and and I only say this because during ceremony when I started you know on this Mexicayod path various people that I came in contact with through ceremony would often make the same kind of connection right that there's that if you look at the myths of Austlan and how it's portrayed as being this city on the lake and a place where there was uh vast riches and you know immeasurable knowledge and advanced technologies and all this stuff that and that and I'm thinking why does that sound like Atlantis and then they would say because if you think about it just makes connections bro connections and you know that's funny because that's what I tell my students in class make connections make connections but yeah like there's that connection that's being made and so so it will it was kind of a natural fit to to name the podcast astlantis because the subject matter that we were going to discuss in the podcast at least for now I mean eventually it might change but for now is uh we're we're touching upon the stuff that we know for a fact at least the things that we have researched that we have determined conclusively to a high degree that have been influenced or have been completely lifted from occultists and esotericists that date to the late 19th century, middle to the late 19th century people that came out of the theosophical tradition uh some of those early archaeologists like Le Plan Jean and uh Bourbon who were in the early stages of the field that later became archaeology.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: So back then things were still kind of open and loose and oh yeah they were playing fast and loose with their ideas with their ideas for sure.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so they you know it hadn't been systematically scientifically uh framed yet so it was still very loose ground there to play with a lot of ideas and some of these ideas that these folks were playing with was the idea of Atlantis.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_02: And and this goes back all the way to some of the early Spanish chroniclers.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think we've talked about this before right I mean some of these folks were having debates back then about the the provenance of the indigenous peoples of the America you know different ideas were bandied about were they the one of the lost tribes of Israel which is where the Mormon tradition got its the ideas from from some of those early debates that were being held by those early Spanish thinkers and writers.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not that it started in the 19th century but like it's been a long progression over the course of 500 plus years and unfortunately for us as Chicano mexicanos and for the Mexican people who in Mexico were were fooled by a lot of this stuff and the people themselves that propagated this material were fooled.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_02: They fooled themselves into believing some of this material they wanted to believe you know like the the old X Files uh slogan I want to believe this stuff because it makes me feel good I want to believe in astlantis bro and astlantis so that's where so those of you that were that have been asking um about the name why that name that's why because a lot of the things that we discuss correlate directly to some of those astlan um not astlan but uh Atlantis proponents well what they need to do my friend is uh step back and uh seek out the truth because why?
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: Because the the truth it's like medicine it doesn't always taste good but it's always good for you