Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Special Throwback: Last of the Aztecs!

Transcript

Special Throwback: Last of the Aztecs! · Tales From Aztlantis

0:00
SPEAKER_05: This episode of Tales from Ostlanthis is brought to you by Ostlantis Premium.
0:05
SPEAKER_05: Don't you just hate having your favorite podcast interrupted by ads like this?
0:09
SPEAKER_05: Well, dear listener, you're in luck.
0:12
SPEAKER_05: Because starting at just three bucks a month, you can support independent Chicano Media and receive ad-free episodes, premium episodes, bonus content, and access to our Discord server.
0:25
SPEAKER_05: Just visit talesfromastlantis.com and click Go Premium or follow the link in the show notes.
0:33
SPEAKER_05: And now, on with the show.
0:37
SPEAKER_01: You must excuse me.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: Lesson easy and humble.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: But you learn the lesson.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: A lesson in honesty.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: Honesty to some honesty to others.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: Honesty.
1:08
SPEAKER_05: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to yet another episode of Tales from Ostlantis.
1:15
SPEAKER_05: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
1:17
SPEAKER_05: And Ruben Ariamat Lakate Kat.
1:20
SPEAKER_05: So what is up, man?
1:21
SPEAKER_05: How are you doing?
1:23
SPEAKER_04: You know, just uh doing the things.
1:26
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I see your cool shirt.
1:29
SPEAKER_04: Uh yeah, is that Viva La Rasa?
1:32
SPEAKER_04: I got this over at the um the recent uh production by Karamia here in Dallas of uh Crystal City.
1:39
SPEAKER_04: Nice that they did back uh a few months ago and um got this shirt image of uh service and then it's got uh you can see like the silhouettes of uh marchers with their hands up and their fists clenched doing the the brown Chicano Power symbol.
1:55
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's a dope shirt.
1:56
SPEAKER_04: And uh yeah, they they had these for sale at the uh at the event.
2:00
SPEAKER_04: Nice.
2:01
SPEAKER_04: And uh they had another t-shirt too that I got that it's it's this is a black one with with the image, and then the other one is a white t-shirt that says Chicano Power, and it's got like the the head of uh I think it's supposed to be Ketzalcoan, I think.
2:15
SPEAKER_04: I need to go back and double check, it's been a minute.
2:18
SPEAKER_04: Um, and so that one's just all white and says Chicano Power.
2:21
SPEAKER_04: Nice, badass.
2:22
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I'm also representing.
2:24
SPEAKER_05: I got my uh my astlan libre press uh special t-shirt that I'm rocking.
2:32
SPEAKER_05: So shout out.
2:33
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
2:35
SPEAKER_04: Shout out to Astlan Libre Press uh Juan Tejeda and his wife Anisa.
2:43
SPEAKER_04: So what else is new?
2:45
SPEAKER_04: What's happening?
2:46
SPEAKER_04: Your neck of the woods.
2:47
SPEAKER_05: You know, it's grilling season has begun, so we uh had some friends over and I threw on some T-bones and just had a nice day yesterday.
2:55
SPEAKER_04: It was some T bones with some green chili.
2:59
SPEAKER_05: You know what?
2:59
SPEAKER_05: We didn't have any green chili with it.
3:01
SPEAKER_05: Um no, you ain't you ain't a true New Mexican.
3:04
SPEAKER_04: We don't eat it with green chili.
3:06
SPEAKER_04: Hey, you could have fooled me, man.
3:09
SPEAKER_04: Last time I was there, even my daughter's like, I'm tired of all this green chili, it's in everything.
3:16
SPEAKER_04: It's true.
3:18
SPEAKER_04: It's true.
3:18
SPEAKER_04: That's that's that's the New Mexican state.
3:21
SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
3:23
SPEAKER_05: So this uh today's episode, um it's it's one I've been wanting to do for a while because um this this story just fascinates me.
3:33
SPEAKER_05: And um uh for this episode, I'm going to be drawing a lot from this book.
3:38
SPEAKER_05: It's a really good book called Freak Show Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit by Robert Bogdan.
3:48
SPEAKER_05: If people are interested, I'll uh I'll throw a link to the where you could buy the book in the show notes.
3:55
SPEAKER_05: Um but it's a really good book, and this is just something that I've been wanting to talk about for a while.
3:59
SPEAKER_04: So so when you say freak show, Curly, are we talking about the creatures of the night?
4:04
SPEAKER_04: Because you know the freaks come out at night.
4:06
SPEAKER_04: The freaks come out.
4:13
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and then you know, uh I used to be a big fan of the well, I still am a big fan, but I was also used to be a big fan of the 1930, I think it's 1931 film Freaks by uh Todd Browning.
4:26
SPEAKER_05: That's uh that's an amazing movie.
4:28
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's like the one that kicked it off, right?
4:30
SPEAKER_05: Like the whole genre.
4:32
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's uh it's a really and and it's a good movie too.
4:35
SPEAKER_05: It's well made.
4:36
SPEAKER_05: Um Right.
4:38
SPEAKER_05: For the time too, right?
4:39
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely amazing what they were able to pull off with that movie.
4:44
SPEAKER_05: So let's dive right in to today's episode.
4:49
SPEAKER_05: The last of the Aztecs.
4:55
SPEAKER_05: What would you say if I told you that the transatlantic slave trade never happened?
5:02
SPEAKER_05: That the mass enslavement of African people who had been brutally kidnapped in Africa and brought to the Americas in chains was all a hoax perpetrated by Native Americans working together with white settlers to cover up the fact that black people are the true original inhabitants of the Americas.
5:23
SPEAKER_04: Well, Curly, I would say that you're out of your goddamn mind is what I would say.
5:27
SPEAKER_05: And you would be right.
5:30
SPEAKER_05: Claiming that the transatlantic slave trade never happened is despicable and deserves to be met with the same disdain and condemnation as denial of the Jewish Holocaust.
5:42
SPEAKER_05: But sadly, the transatlantic slave trade is a hoax conspiracy is being actively pushed by a small but growing subset of black identity extremists who are both highly vocal and increasingly hostile to native people, who the extremists view as the beneficiaries of a stolen identity.
6:07
SPEAKER_05: Now, for simpli simplicity's sake, I will refer to the collective members of this group as the Aboriginalist movement.
6:15
SPEAKER_05: For the most part, these groups share a common lineage from the Moorish Science Temple, a black identity religious movement established in Newark, New Jersey in 1913 by a self-declared prophet calling himself Noble Drew Ali.
6:32
SPEAKER_05: Modern-day followers of this movement have blended sovereign citizen conspiracies, black identity extremism, and pseudo-historical narratives, resulting in a bizarre mashup of racial conspiracism.
6:47
SPEAKER_05: The so-called evidence presented by members of the Aboriginalist movement consists almost entirely of misinterpretations of the historical record simply because they don't understand the context of what they're looking at, and deliberate misrepresentations of the historical record by cherry-picking antiquated and long disproven information that appears to support their claims.
7:14
SPEAKER_05: In other words, there is zero evidence to back up their assertions.
7:19
SPEAKER_05: Nonetheless, they remain undeterred.
7:23
SPEAKER_05: Now, I'm not going to delve into every bit of pseudo-history promoted by the Aboriginalist movement, but I do want to focus on one topic in particular.
7:33
SPEAKER_05: Maximo and Bartola, also known as the Aztec Children or the Last of the Aztecs.
7:40
SPEAKER_05: One of the more common practices of those in the Aboriginalist movement is this continued promotion of photographs from the late 1800s depicting two people identified as the last of the Aztecs.
7:55
SPEAKER_05: These photos feature two individuals, Maximo and Bartola, who are both of diminutive stature and display unusual physical characteristics.
8:07
SPEAKER_05: They are often dressed in clothing intended to appear exotic to Western audiences.
8:13
SPEAKER_05: Aboriginalists love to use these photographs because the individuals in them, the alleged last of the Aztecs, appear to be at least partially black, and both sport Afro-style hairdo's.
8:26
SPEAKER_05: To the Aboriginalists, these photos are the smoking gun that proves their claim.
8:32
SPEAKER_05: You see, if the last of the Aztecs were black, then black people must be the true indigenous people of the Americas.
8:41
SPEAKER_05: It's a very convoluted and disturbing conspiracy, to say the least.
8:46
SPEAKER_05: This, of course, is pure nonsense.
8:49
SPEAKER_05: But we're left with the question, and it's the question I want to explore in this episode.
8:55
SPEAKER_05: Who were the individuals in these photos?
8:57
SPEAKER_05: What's their story, and why are they referred to as the last of the Aztecs?
9:03
SPEAKER_05: The Aztec Children.
9:06
SPEAKER_05: The alleged discovery of the Aztec children is retold in a short pamphlet published in 1850, the title of which is worth quoting in full, sir, if you would be so kind.
9:24
SPEAKER_05: Have you picked up your Mexica calendar for the year twelve Flint?
9:28
SPEAKER_05: Or how about a paperback copy of the Four Disagreements?
9:32
SPEAKER_05: Just visit talesfromostlantis.com for all the latest merchandise and show some love for your favorite podcast.
9:41
SPEAKER_05: That's TalesFromostlantis.com for all the latest merchandise.
9:46
SPEAKER_05: Now, back to the show.
9:54
SPEAKER_04: Memoir of an eventful expedition in Central America, resulting in the discovery of the idolatrous city of Ishimaya in an unexplored region and the possession of two remarkable Aztic children, descendants and specimens of the sacerdotal caste, now nearly extinct, of the ancient Aztec founders of the ruined temples of that country.
10:22
SPEAKER_04: Described by John L.
10:23
SPEAKER_04: Stevens Esquire and other travelers, translated from the Spanish of Pedro Velasquez de San Salvador.
10:28
SPEAKER_04: That's a title.
10:30
SPEAKER_04: Hold on, hold on, before we continue.
10:32
SPEAKER_04: Like I don't know.
10:34
SPEAKER_04: Um when when I read the name Bartola, um for some reason it kind of reminds me of that commercial, you know which commercial I'm talking about?
10:43
SPEAKER_04: The cough drop commercial.
10:54
SPEAKER_05: I knew as soon as you said that, I knew what you were gonna do.
10:59
SPEAKER_05: I'm just a child.
11:00
SPEAKER_05: I'm sorry.
11:03
SPEAKER_05: So the pamphlet begins with the introduction of Mr.
11:07
SPEAKER_05: Huertes and Mr.
11:09
SPEAKER_05: Wait.
11:10
SPEAKER_05: Is Huertes?
11:10
SPEAKER_04: Isn't that supposed to be like are they are they trying to say Huerta, like Mr.
11:14
SPEAKER_04: Huerta?
11:15
unknown: I don't know.
11:16
SPEAKER_05: This is what it kind of seems like to me, right?
11:18
SPEAKER_05: It's two fictional people.
11:20
SPEAKER_05: So these are fictionalized people.
11:25
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah.
11:26
SPEAKER_05: So this it's the pamphlet that's you know tells the story of the discovery of the Aztec children.
11:31
SPEAKER_05: So it's all fiction.
11:33
SPEAKER_05: Uh the pamphlet begins with the introduction of Mr.
11:36
SPEAKER_05: Huertis and Mr.
11:37
SPEAKER_05: Hammond, two men who are supposedly the only ones capable of reaching the mythical Maya city of Ishimaya, located somewhere in Chiapas.
11:49
SPEAKER_05: The narrative traces their journey from Belize to Ishimaya, with Senor Pedro Velazquez of San Salvador as their guide.
11:57
SPEAKER_05: Velazquez keeps a manuscript journal of their journey, and this journal was purportedly translated into the pamphlet with that really long name.
12:10
SPEAKER_05: So in the pamphlet, the discovery of Ishimaya is described along with the finding of two small children, the only remaining members of an ancient and singular order of priesthood called Kanas.
12:26
SPEAKER_05: I think that's how it's uh right.
12:29
SPEAKER_05: Kanas, K-A-A-N-A-S.
12:32
SPEAKER_05: The Ishimayans venerate them as living specimens of an antique race so nearly extinct.
12:42
SPEAKER_05: The legend of the Mayas of Ishimaya killing all white intruders is also upheld in this account, and only Velazquez leaves alive, kidnapping the Kana sister and brother and returning to El Salvador.
12:58
SPEAKER_04: Velazquez describes the children as diminutive in stature and imbecile in intellect.
13:07
SPEAKER_05: You know many times I've been called that?
13:11
SPEAKER_04: But they are also referred to as the greatest ethnological curiosities in living form, as specimens of an absolutely unique and nearly extinct race of mankind, that they claim the attention of physiologists and all men of science.
13:30
SPEAKER_05: Impressive.
13:31
SPEAKER_05: Right?
13:32
SPEAKER_05: The pamphlet describes how Velazquez sends the children who are 8 and 10 years old to the United States to be exhibited as specimens of this almost lost race.
13:44
SPEAKER_05: While details of their early life are scarce, it is generally believed that Maximo and Bartola were siblings of mixed indigenous African and European heritage who suffered from microcephaly and severe intellectual disability.
14:01
SPEAKER_05: And for listeners who don't know, microcephaly actually kind of made a comeback um not too long ago.
14:07
SPEAKER_05: Remember the Zika virus in Brazil?
14:11
SPEAKER_05: The mosquitoes were biting people, I guess pregnant women, if they got bit by this mosquito, they would get the Zika virus.
14:18
SPEAKER_05: And one of the um outcomes of this disease was they were having children born with microcephaly.
14:25
SPEAKER_05: Right.
14:26
SPEAKER_05: Wow.
14:27
SPEAKER_05: And uh yeah, it's it's pretty wild.
14:29
SPEAKER_05: And and it basically it shrinks their heads, like it makes their heads really, really tiny.
14:34
SPEAKER_04: So i is this evidence of there being some kind of um sort of uh virus at play here with the the with the the lost Aztec children of the kanas?
14:47
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I don't know what causes this specific strain of microcephaly.
14:51
SPEAKER_05: If we have any listeners out there that are virologists or uh biologists, please uh contact us and let us know.
15:00
SPEAKER_05: Um and then, you know, it also be because of the size of their head, um they have these this severe intellectual disability, right?
15:08
SPEAKER_05: So they're basically helpless.
15:10
SPEAKER_05: Uh they were born in the province of San Miguel in El Salvador.
15:15
SPEAKER_05: A Spanish trader named Ramon Selva purchased the children from their mother.
15:21
SPEAKER_05: He had promised her that he would take them to the United States where they could be cured of their condition, which is so fucked up.
15:30
SPEAKER_05: That's one of the it's such a horrible thing to do to human beings.
15:34
SPEAKER_05: Right.
15:35
SPEAKER_05: But once he had possession of the children, he immediately sold them as human curiosities to an American named Morris.
15:45
SPEAKER_05: Morris.
15:47
SPEAKER_04: You know this Morris is like whenever there's something nefarious involved in in these kinds of tales, there's always a Morris.
15:55
SPEAKER_04: Is there?
15:55
SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
15:56
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
15:57
SPEAKER_04: Well, it's Maurice, Morris.
16:01
SPEAKER_04: But it's always a variation on a theme of Morris.
16:04
SPEAKER_05: All I think of is uh Morris Day and the Time when I hear the name Morris.
16:10
SPEAKER_05: Morris.
16:11
SPEAKER_05: Ohio.
16:14
SPEAKER_05: Morris Morris took advantage of public interest in ancient Mesoamerica and lost civilizations by publishing the previously mentioned 48-page pamphlet with that ludicrously long title that recounted the completely fabricated origin story of Maximo and Bartola as being discovered in a temple in the lost city of Ishimaya.
16:41
SPEAKER_05: Ishimaya, yeah, yeah, yeah.
16:43
SPEAKER_05: I wonder where they came up with that name.
16:45
SPEAKER_04: The pamphlet served as the perfect promotional material, and the children's physical attributes were exploited in order to build them as remarkable Astric children, descendants and specimens of sacerdotal caste, the nearly extinct of the ancient Astric founders of the ruined temples of that country.
17:10
SPEAKER_05: Morris and others compared their look as strikingly similar to engravings in Stephen's Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán, of ancient Mayas depicted in stone within various Maya ruins.
17:27
SPEAKER_05: It is unclear why these children were referred to as Aztec rather than Maya, but presumably Aztec was being used to mean, you know, pre-Columbian Mexico in general, as was common in the 19th century.
17:42
SPEAKER_05: Right.
17:43
SPEAKER_05: Dressed in pseudo-Aztec costumes, the Aztec children first appeared in the United States in the early 1850s to an electrified American public and medical community.
17:57
SPEAKER_05: The mayor of Boston attended and promoted an early appearance of the children.
18:03
SPEAKER_05: They were brought before the Boston Society of Natural History, and papers about them appeared in subsequent years in medical journals such as the American Journal of the Medical Sciences and The Lancet.
18:16
SPEAKER_05: Good grief.
18:18
SPEAKER_05: Members of the Senate and House of Representatives met with Maximo and Bartola, and they were invited to the White House to meet President Millard Fillmore?
18:32
SPEAKER_05: There has to be photos of that somewhere.
18:34
SPEAKER_05: There has of this meeting.
18:46
SPEAKER_04: Lillipusians?
18:47
SPEAKER_04: Or is it Liliputtians?
18:48
SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
18:49
SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
18:49
SPEAKER_04: I've always like in my head I've always pronounced it as Lilipushians, but yeah.
18:53
SPEAKER_04: Really?
18:53
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
18:54
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
18:54
SPEAKER_05: You know what?
18:54
SPEAKER_05: I've never heard I know there has to be like a movie version of Gulliver's Travels, right?
18:59
SPEAKER_05: Where they say the word out loud.
19:01
SPEAKER_05: But I've only ever read it.
19:02
SPEAKER_04: Maybe that's where I heard it actually, because I do remember seeing that movie when I was a kid, and maybe it's just kind of one of those things that just kind of sticks in your head and you don't know why.
19:09
SPEAKER_04: And that's probably why.
19:11
SPEAKER_05: Well, I'll uh I'll concede you uh the pronunciation.
19:14
SPEAKER_05: Aztec Lilipushians.
19:17
SPEAKER_05: And for anybody who doesn't know what we're talking about, there's a book called Culliver's Travels.
19:22
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
19:22
SPEAKER_05: And uh he wakes up in uh uh Lilliput, right?
19:28
SPEAKER_05: I think so, yeah.
19:29
SPEAKER_05: The land he he wakes up in and everybody's tiny.
19:32
SPEAKER_05: Right.
19:33
SPEAKER_05: And so he's like a giant to these people.
19:35
SPEAKER_05: Exactly.
19:37
SPEAKER_05: So they were exhibited at the Ethnological Society and met the royal family at Buckingham Palace before continuing a tour of Europe and meeting with other royal families.
19:52
SPEAKER_05: And this is what blew my mind in in the book uh Freak Show by Robert Bogden.
19:59
SPEAKER_05: I I meant to put this in the script, but uh he goes on and and he lists like all of the places that they were taken, and it's wild because a let you know apparently they were taken all over Europe and met with like royal families in Russia, in in Paris.
20:20
SPEAKER_05: Uh here it is.
20:22
SPEAKER_05: The pair toured the continent, appearing before the Emperor Napoleon and his Imperial family in Paris, the Emperor of Russia and his family, the kings and queens of Prussia, Bavaria, Holland, Hanover, and Denmark, the end the Emperor of Austria and his family, the King of Belgium, the Count of Flanders, the Duchess of Brabant, and other members of royal families and noted natural scientists and philosophers.
20:56
SPEAKER_05: Wow.
20:57
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so this this guy Morris like just ri was really taking advantage of uh the story he had concocted.
21:07
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
21:08
SPEAKER_05: And basically exploiting these these poor kids, you know.
21:13
SPEAKER_05: I mean, that's what they were, right?
21:14
SPEAKER_05: I mean, they were children.
21:17
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, at the time when they first took them out, they were s they were still children.
21:20
SPEAKER_05: It's it's mind-blowing.
21:22
SPEAKER_05: After returning from their European tour, the Aztec children were employed by P.
21:28
SPEAKER_05: T.
21:28
SPEAKER_05: Barnum.
21:29
SPEAKER_05: Of course.
21:30
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, right.
21:31
SPEAKER_05: They were first exhibited at the American Museum in New York City and eventually joined the Barnum and Bailey Circus, touring until the 1890s.
21:41
SPEAKER_05: Maximo and Bartola's story illustrates the negative impact of American and British post colonial attitudes towards Mesoamerica.
21:51
SPEAKER_05: Following Spain's removal in the 1820s, there was increased exploration and study of the region and its ancestral archaeological.
22:00
SPEAKER_05: Sites, European scholars sought to unravel the mysteries of the ancient cities, disregarding the possibility that indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica could be the direct descendants of these civilizations builders.
22:15
SPEAKER_05: Right?
22:16
SPEAKER_05: It's like, well, these native people couldn't have possibly built these massive structures.
22:20
SPEAKER_04: I mean, that's that's they're basically um planting those seeds that will later blossom into the ancient aliens nonsense.
22:29
SPEAKER_05: In his book Romancing the Maya, Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, R.
22:35
SPEAKER_05: Trip Evans Evans describes Evans.
22:39
SPEAKER_05: Evans.
22:39
SPEAKER_05: R.
22:39
SPEAKER_05: Trip Evans describes the cultural climate.
22:42
SPEAKER_04: Attempting to reconcile the coexistence of pre-Columbian civilization with ancient cultures of the old world, authors either implicitly or explicitly linked the two, discrediting ethnic continuity in Latin America as well as accounts of parallel creation, proposing various theories of transatlantic migration.
23:06
SPEAKER_04: Early writers on Mexican antiquities supported the commonality of man's descent from the old world, an assistance that justifies Mexico's cultural colonization in the wake of Spain's departure.
23:22
SPEAKER_04: So that's the this this is kind of like the early, early justifications of why it was okay for the Europeans, for the Spanish, and later the French, the English, the Dutch, etcetera, to make their way to the Americas and colonize, subjugate, oppress, commit genocide, uh rape and plunder uh the indigenous people and the land.
23:48
SPEAKER_04: Because hey, those people are just, you know, they're us, but from an earlier time.
23:56
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, they're just baiting more primitive.
23:59
SPEAKER_04: And you know, that's funny because when I was in in in college, um when I took uh my first philosophy course, um, and we were reading John Locke and and his ideas of natural man, and and you know, I'm sitting in class and I'm thinking, why does this remind me so much of Native American you know, descriptions of Europeans of Native Americans?
24:26
SPEAKER_04: And my instructor at the time was actually a graduate student who he wasn't a full professor, um, he was a graduate student who was basically kind of like doing his um uh I'm I'm blanking out on what it's called now, but when when a graduate student does their uh their training, right?
24:43
SPEAKER_04: Kind of like the they teach a class.
24:45
SPEAKER_04: I for there's a name for it from forgetting, and so he didn't have an answer for me when I asked him, hey, why is it that John Locke's ideas about natural man are so reminiscent of those dis early descriptions of Native people in the Americas, and he wasn't able to put one in one together, and it's later on, you know, after further studies over the years, but I was already making the the argument back then that essentially what John Locke was doing, he was taking those early references to native people that were coming back from those early writings and and from Spain and and others, and he was constructing his idea of what it meant to be uh um a natural man, and he was getting these ideas from those descriptions of native people, right?
25:35
SPEAKER_04: And so he was saying, and and so if you if you want, you know, tie it back to this, what he was saying is essentially those people are our ancestors, that's how we used to be.
25:48
SPEAKER_04: Those people over there in the Americas, those naturales, as they call them, those natural men, natural people, meaning people of the earth, but also meaning people who are simple, who don't have the complexity of culture and society and all the stuff that we Europeans now have evolved into over the generations.
26:07
SPEAKER_04: That's who we used to be back then, all those you know, millennia ago.
26:12
SPEAKER_04: And so what he was saying is that they're essentially a mirror of who we are.
26:17
SPEAKER_04: But because you know, we as humans we we hate what we see sometimes when we look in the mirror.
26:25
SPEAKER_04: Europeans saw native people and they saw themselves as they used to be, and they hated it.
26:30
SPEAKER_04: They hated us or they hated our our ancestors for the fact that we were reflecting back to them what they used to be, where they came from originally.
26:39
SPEAKER_04: That's deep philosophical.
26:41
SPEAKER_04: I'm getting deep here, man.
26:47
SPEAKER_05: Suffice it to say, um, the Europeans had pro issues.
26:51
SPEAKER_05: That's uh putting it mildly, but I digress.
26:57
SPEAKER_05: In uh in 1884, P.
27:00
SPEAKER_05: T.
27:00
SPEAKER_05: Barnum launched the Ethnological Congress of the Barnum and London Circus.
27:05
SPEAKER_05: This exhibit showcased people from various ethnicities, often with microcephaly or some other physical disorder, from around the world as objects for a primarily white audience to observe, like a human zoos, basically.
27:22
SPEAKER_05: Examples of the attractions on display included Zulu warriors, princess, and child, a band of Nubians from Sudan, and look at the way they spelled Sudan, genuine Hindu notch dancers.
27:40
SPEAKER_05: What is that?
27:41
SPEAKER_05: I don't know.
27:42
SPEAKER_05: And then look at the way they spell Hindu as well.
27:46
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
27:46
SPEAKER_05: And the Aztecs of ancient Mexico.
27:50
SPEAKER_05: So basically taking people with some sort of physical disability, some some level of cognitive disability, uh, who looked exotic, dressing them up in costumes, yeah, and saying, you know, like pay a nickel or whatever it was at the time to come look, to come gawk at, you know, the ancient Hindus and the ancient Aztecs and stuff.
28:11
SPEAKER_04: It's but isn't that kind of what Mat Matthew Restal is saying in his book when Amontasuma met Cortez?
28:19
SPEAKER_04: And uh if I remember correctly, he's he's saying that that because you know um the Aztecs had pretty much the the first zoo uh uh that we know of on record.
28:32
SPEAKER_04: And I don't know if you remember this uh from the book, but uh, I think at one point he was saying that the only way that you can really explain well, not the only way, but like a one way that you can explain some of the actions that that you know Motecusoma took in regards to the Spanish, allowing them to come into the city and showing them around and treating them, you know, with the the dignity that a uh foreign uh ambassador deserves and yeah, that sort of stuff, right?
29:00
SPEAKER_04: That that part of what he was saying was that he was also at the same time like trying to see how he could sort of fit them into his menagerie, menagerie of exotic peoples, because you know, Mote Kusama he he had a people with with microcephaly as part of his retinue, uh you know, different dwarfism dwarfism, different people who performed different kind of acrobatic acts and all this stuff.
29:29
SPEAKER_04: And and so I think what what Restal was saying was that he was trying that Mote Kusama was trying to see how he could sort of capture these Spanish people as being these exotic folk and sort of somehow put them in display and be part of his palace, right?
29:45
SPEAKER_04: Like that that's kind of what's going on here in a different way, yeah.
29:47
SPEAKER_04: But it's very kind of similar to what's going on.
29:51
SPEAKER_05: It just cracks me up because I could picture them like um you know, Cortez hanging with uh Motexoma and they're going through and well, here we have this, here we have this, and the Spaniards are like, oh wow, wow, and then they come to like a giant empty.
30:07
SPEAKER_05: And what's this?
30:08
SPEAKER_05: That's for you, fool.
30:10
SPEAKER_04: Throw them in there.
30:13
SPEAKER_05: Yep.
30:14
SPEAKER_05: That would have been awesome.
30:18
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, if only during and after the Aztec children's rise to fame, other individuals born with microcephaly were being exhibited as Aztecs in circuses, copying the look and myths of Maximo and Bartola.
30:35
SPEAKER_05: People with microcephala microcephala, microcephala people with microcephaly began to be referred to.
30:42
SPEAKER_04: You know, is that like the difference between um what's that old running joke my my nieces used to say in regards to um Harry Potter?
30:51
SPEAKER_04: It's not uh Liviosa, it's Livio.
30:58
SPEAKER_05: Microcephala.
31:00
SPEAKER_05: It sounds like a Harry Potter.
31:01
SPEAKER_05: It sounds like a Harry Potter spell.
31:06
SPEAKER_04: No, wait, the the the the the Harry Potter spell is Atlantis propagantis, don't forget that.
31:11
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's that's the spell.
31:14
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's the spell we cast when we're spreading our propaganda through the early.
31:25
SPEAKER_05: People with microcephaly begin to be referred to as pinheads, and other famous acts include Tic Tac the Aztec Pinhead.
31:35
SPEAKER_05: Uh Zip, also referred to as what is it?
31:38
SPEAKER_05: What is it?
31:39
SPEAKER_05: And Schlitzy the Pinhead, who became famous.
31:43
SPEAKER_05: Schlitzy's probably the most famous uh um performer with microcephaly.
31:49
SPEAKER_05: Uh Schlitzy became famous for his appearance in the classic horror film Freaks, which we were talking about at the top of the show.
31:57
SPEAKER_05: Robert the Aguirre describes racial exhibitions in the mid to late nineteenth century.
32:06
SPEAKER_04: Freak shows depended on a supply of curiosities from abroad, which in turn provided racial theorists with new specimens to analyze.
32:16
SPEAKER_04: Racial characterizations were then funneled back into the materials purveyed by freak show promoters, lending them an air of respectability and further securing scientific to mask culture.
32:31
SPEAKER_04: Ethnology gained access to rare specimen, and racial ideology was disseminated to a broad public.
32:43
SPEAKER_05: The Aztec children were not only sold into a life of sideshow performance, but they were also subjected to medical tests and ethnological examinations and cranial measurements in order to study their racial traits.
32:59
SPEAKER_05: The scientific community eventually discredited the pamphlets and Barnum's assertion of their origins, right, as the last of the Aztecs of this pure.
33:09
SPEAKER_04: Wait, so so so the scientific community says, you know, Barnum, we've had enough of this story that you're pushing about these pure people.
33:17
SPEAKER_04: Let's go ahead and prod them again.
33:20
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
33:21
SPEAKER_04: Right?
33:21
SPEAKER_04: It's like they're not questioning their own.
33:24
SPEAKER_04: They're like, we're gonna question the story behind it, but guess what?
33:27
SPEAKER_04: You know, we're still gonna continue with our scientific prodding and probing.
33:33
SPEAKER_04: Like, what?
33:35
SPEAKER_05: Of these poor exploites.
33:39
SPEAKER_05: So despite their racial status lowered to that of mestizos, they continued to draw crowds at Barnum's circus until fading into obscurity near the turn of the century.
33:52
SPEAKER_05: Maximo vanishes from the historical record after 1885, and Bartola was last documented in the early 20th century performing as the last living Aztec in Germany.
34:07
SPEAKER_05: From the 1820s to the 1850s, a considerable number of pre-Columbian objects were taken from Mesoamerica, a practice which also involved the trafficking of humans, as illustrated by the narrative of Maximo and Bartola.
34:23
SPEAKER_05: The Aztec children were not the only anomalies showcased to American and European spectators, but rather part of a broader pattern of assembling and exhibiting human and material artifacts in museums, circuses, and freak shows.
34:40
SPEAKER_05: This pattern involved the theft and exploitation of cultural heritage, not only for entertainment purposes, but also for scientific and economic gain.
34:51
SPEAKER_05: So, at its core, getting back to the aboriginals, the aboriginalist movement is a hateful ideology rooted in pseudo-historical racial fantasy.
35:02
SPEAKER_05: Its goal is to erase the indigenous cultural inheritance of the Americas and eliminate the sovereignty of indigenous nations.
35:11
SPEAKER_05: By further exploiting images of Maximo and Bartola and presenting their invented origins as fact, Aboriginalists also erase Maximo and Bartola's painful, authentic history.
35:26
SPEAKER_05: What was done to them was despicable, inhuman, and in my opinion, unforgivable.
35:32
SPEAKER_05: They were callously exploited by greedy con artists who paraded them across the globe and fraudulently presented them as the last living examples of a long-lost civilization.
35:43
SPEAKER_05: So no, Maximo and Bartolo were most certainly not the last of the Aztecs.
35:49
SPEAKER_05: Rather, they were unfortunate victims, whose images are once again being exploited by opportunistic con artists in order to advance a racist, pseudo-historical fantasy.
36:03
SPEAKER_05: I say it's time we let them rest in peace.
36:07
SPEAKER_05: That's quite a story.
36:08
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, you know what, and reading this book, um I I actually I didn't expect to get as angry as I got doing the research for this episode.
36:19
SPEAKER_05: Like because there's photos of Maximo and Bartola, and you just look at them and it's like, God damn, man, they were you know just prodded and and put on display for people to to come and gawk at and with this invented history.
36:35
SPEAKER_05: And then the whole story, you know, the way that dude told their mom, like, oh yeah, I could take them to America and they could be cured, right?
36:45
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
36:45
SPEAKER_05: And just to be sold into this this life of uh exploitation.
36:51
SPEAKER_05: It's right, it really pissed me off.
36:53
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's it's very, very troubling.
36:55
SPEAKER_04: And um I mean, you don't really hear about this happening today, but I mean, to what I mean just thinking back growing up, like going to like a carnival or going to like a you know, a fair and and seeing like the the freak show um amusement um sort of not it's not a ride, but it's like uh what what do you call it?
37:20
SPEAKER_04: What's the difference between the ride and and the thing that you go in and and like the fun house?
37:24
SPEAKER_04: Like a fun house kind of type of situation, and you know, just thinking back to to to that whole history of the freaks and you know the the the bearded woman and you know the the half half fish, half this and that, half monkey, you know the mermaid, there's the mermaid and all this stuff, and and and and there's like a long tradition, and and these lost Aztec or the last of the Aztec children, Maximo and Bartola, were just part of that that sort of freak show, you know, that that that that that freak show community that was being exploited by people like P.T.
38:03
SPEAKER_04: Barnum and and other people who are just looking to make a buck, right?
38:08
SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, wasn't it P.T.
38:10
SPEAKER_04: Barnum who's cr uh credited as as um coming up with the with the phrase that there's a sucker born every minute.
38:16
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, there's a sucker.
38:17
SPEAKER_04: And so this is one way that they would they would make their money, they would convince people that they would come up with a nice little story about uh a supposed freak or the last this or the anomalous anomalous that, and they would charge people, you know, to go in and to gawk at these human beings, right, that are being you know uh taken advantage of.
38:38
SPEAKER_04: But the flip side of that is that some of these people, because of their deformities, because of their um disabilities, they didn't really have any other options, and some of them like they survived and they depended on being taken advantage of at these kinds of freak shows for their own, you know, uh well-being and and and just even earn a living.
39:02
SPEAKER_04: So it was it's one of those double-edged sword things.
39:06
SPEAKER_04: And so the question is um, were the these children better off having stayed with their mother and having suffered uh a life of misery, not that they didn't suffer when they were being prodded and exhibited and and tested and all that, but it seems to me, and I'm not making an argument in favor of this, but it seems to me that that you know, not that it was better morally, but maybe in in some way they they they had a different lifestyle that they would not have enjoyed had they stayed with their mother.
39:42
SPEAKER_04: I mean, that's I've because I've heard these kinds of arguments before.
39:46
SPEAKER_04: Now, how do we relate this back to to what these people are doing today?
39:50
SPEAKER_04: It's like you were saying, it's another form of exploitation.
39:54
SPEAKER_04: Now, these people are saying, Well, you know, because it goes back to the the conversation that we've been having on this podcast off and on about these people that are trying to deny the indigeneity of actual Native American people whose ancestors, you know, have been here on these continents for millennia, and and for whatever reason, I mean, I I'm not gonna question their their motives in terms of them wanting to sort of correct past ills, which you know that that's something that is that is uh commendable, but when you're doing it at the expense of a different group, and then you're taking it to the the lengths and the degrees that you're taking it to deny the indigeneity of those people and sort of claim it for yourself, um, then uh that's you know you're going way past you know the too far line.
40:52
SPEAKER_04: I mean, you've exceeded the you've gone too far to the extreme far uh end of that of that argument.
40:59
SPEAKER_04: If you want to argue for self-determination, if you want to argue for equality, if you want to argue for being respected as a human being, you know, you don't have to make up stories, you don't have to rob someone else's culture and claim it as your own.
41:16
SPEAKER_04: You know, be proud of your own culture, assert that culture for yourself, and then try to right the wrongs that that happened to your people uh using the available mechanisms that don't impinge on someone else's history and lives and and and their own cultures.
41:35
SPEAKER_04: And so I don't understand this necessity by these people to try to assert a culture and claim it for themselves that historically speaking, I mean, on the face of it, even if you know nothing about history, it just is preposterous.
41:54
SPEAKER_04: Like, who believes these people, right?
41:56
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, well, one of their hashtags is like hashtag where are the slave ships?
42:01
SPEAKER_05: And their whole argument is like, well, if if this transatlantic slave trade was real, then there would be, you know, tons of slave ships all over, and and where are they?
42:12
SPEAKER_05: It's really bizarre.
42:13
SPEAKER_05: Like if you go on, I you know, go into down the rabbit hole of exploring these groups and their dis their beliefs, and I was exposed initially to Maximo and Bartola.
42:25
SPEAKER_05: Like I always knew about the freak shows and people with Microcephala being microcephala, I'm doing it again.
42:32
SPEAKER_05: Being put on um on display, but I didn't know about Maximo and Bartola specifically, right?
42:39
SPEAKER_05: And then a few years back, I get this message on on Facebook, and it's a screen grab from one of those shitty YouTube documentaries that you know it's all conspiracy uh documentary style, and it had pretty high production values, so I think it made more people take it seriously than I call those documentaries, yeah.
43:04
SPEAKER_05: Um, but it was a screen grab and it was a photograph of Maximo and Bartola, and it had the caption that said, you know, the last of the Aztecs.
43:15
SPEAKER_02: Uh-huh.
43:16
SPEAKER_05: And you could tell by looking at Maximo and Bartola that they're mixed blood, right?
43:20
SPEAKER_05: They have like Afro-style hair and exactly, and and you know, they were using this as like the smoking gun.
43:28
SPEAKER_05: They're like, haha, here's a photo that actually says the last of the Aztecs.
43:33
SPEAKER_05: So, you know, where's your God now?
43:35
SPEAKER_04: Right.
43:36
SPEAKER_04: And the fact that this was uh completely concocted by white people has no bearing on their argumentation at all, right?
43:43
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it was a circus sideshow, and they were using this as proof.
43:48
SPEAKER_05: And so I looked at this picture and I'm like, well, this is weird.
43:52
SPEAKER_05: And so I don't know, it took me literally 15 minutes of poking around the internet to come up to.
44:00
SPEAKER_05: Find their names, to find their backstory, to find where they came from.
44:04
SPEAKER_05: And so I compiled all that information and I sent it to the person who uh who had sent me the uh the screen grab.
44:12
SPEAKER_05: Uh-huh.
44:13
SPEAKER_05: And they're like, Alright, well, yeah, I was just trying to make sure, bro.
44:16
SPEAKER_04: Oh, okay.
44:17
SPEAKER_04: I thought you were gonna say that they were trying to push back on on your research and say, Well, that's what you say, but you know, come up with some weird rationalization why they st they continue to justify believing in that thing.
44:30
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
44:31
SPEAKER_04: That would have been unfortunate.
44:34
SPEAKER_05: And um I wanted to read this other quote from this book, uh Freak Show by Robert Bogden.
44:41
SPEAKER_05: Um It says During their lifetime and after their deaths, a host of other people with microcephaly and below normal intellectual functions were exhibited by showmen as quote unquote Aztecs.
44:59
SPEAKER_05: All borrowed their presentations, their costumes, as well as their stories from the fabrication that had created the celebrated Maximo and Bartola.
45:11
SPEAKER_05: In typical showman fashion, a number of such copies even claimed to be the originals.
45:19
SPEAKER_05: Even while Maximo and Bartola were still appearing, a man and a woman with microcephaly were displayed together in the eighteen eighties as the Aztecs.
45:30
SPEAKER_05: Whether and it's a Aztecs E S T I C S the Aztecs.
45:37
SPEAKER_05: Whether the spelling was a mistake or merely an attempt to be original is not clear, but they traveled with the Cooper and Jackson Circus as Huddy and Tane, wearing serapes and indigenous South American style clothing.
45:52
SPEAKER_05: A woman with microcephaly was exhibited in the 1880s as Rosie, the wild girl of the Yucatan.
45:59
SPEAKER_05: Another 19th century Aztec derived exhibit was a young man with microcephaly who traveled with the Wallace Circus and was presented as the Mexican wild boy.
46:12
SPEAKER_04: So you have people who suffer from microcephaly, and they're being taken advantage of through the freak show circuit, through these various circuses and uh carnivals, right?
46:27
SPEAKER_04: Are they just all following the Maximo Bartola template because it's something that worked, and so they're just going to continue to say these people are Aztec.
46:37
SPEAKER_04: But think about that.
46:38
SPEAKER_04: Why would the original, you know, Aguirre, why would he call them Aztecs?
46:43
SPEAKER_04: What does that say about what his association with Astics and people who he himself described as being not only diminutive, but as also being uh basically dumb, right?
46:55
SPEAKER_04: Is what he's saying.
46:56
SPEAKER_04: These people are dumb, they're they're dumb, they have their low IQ, um, they they can't really think for themselves.
47:04
SPEAKER_04: Why would he call these people Aztecs?
47:07
SPEAKER_04: Out of all the names that he could come up with, he goes to Aztecs.
47:11
SPEAKER_04: Like, I don't know, was there some kind of opinion at the time that we know of?
47:14
SPEAKER_04: I mean, I haven't done this kind of deep research on this, but it got me thinking, like, what was going on at the time?
47:21
SPEAKER_05: Well, if we look at it, right, Mexican-American War, 1848.
47:26
SPEAKER_05: All these American soldiers saw like all these, you know, temples and ruins, you know, quote unquote ruins.
47:35
SPEAKER_05: I hate using that word, but archaeological sites and all these indigenous people.
47:41
SPEAKER_05: And so they came back, I think, to the United States with these stories of like, holy shit, it's amazing over there, right?
47:48
SPEAKER_05: And I think you can't tell white people that that uh these brown people have all this amazing shit.
47:56
SPEAKER_05: So it it piqued the American interest in like, oh, there's like all these lost civilizations.
48:01
SPEAKER_05: I mean, these modern people are not them, obviously, descendants of them, but we need to go explore, you know, because at the time it was huge to have um woodcut prints and illustrations of uh the Teocalis uh printed in magazines and newspapers and stuff, and there was like this this thirst for adventure and these exotic locations.
48:26
SPEAKER_05: And I think it it it helped do a couple of things, in my opinion.
48:32
SPEAKER_05: It it satiated this thirst for uh, you know, wanting to learn more about the world, uh, but it also allowed them to be like here's this exotic uh lost civilization, but they're obviously inferior, right?
48:51
SPEAKER_05: They're they're they're inferior to us, so we can, you know, we can gawk at them and and pay money to see them and and have this romanticized vision of the past, but when you see them in person, it's obvious that we're superior, right?
49:07
SPEAKER_05: Because people with microcephaly are, you know, they're tiny and they're not very strong, and they're just they have all of these physical uh limitations, and so it allows them to like it it it basically it upholds white supremacy, right?
49:22
SPEAKER_05: To be like, this is what the Aztecs were, you know, and this is why we beat them so easily in in Mexico.
49:29
SPEAKER_04: But I guess what I'm I'm trying to get at is it's not like there were weren't any actual indigenous communities around at the time.
49:37
SPEAKER_04: I mean, we know there were because they still exist today.
49:40
SPEAKER_04: News flash, and so like people that had actually traveled to Mexico and there was a lot of traveling going on, uh, it's you know it's nothing new.
49:52
SPEAKER_04: It didn't start in, you know, in this century or the last century, it's been going on since the 19th century.
49:58
SPEAKER_04: And people that travel there, they understand who these indigenous people are.
50:04
SPEAKER_04: Now, maybe the majority of the people who were going to these shows to the circus and whatnot to see the freak shows and to gawk at Maximo Bartola had never been to Mexico.
50:19
SPEAKER_04: But you have to also like consider like, did these people actually think that these were Aztec people?
50:26
SPEAKER_04: Was is there no mic no evidence of microcephaly in in the non-brown community, non-black community?
50:32
SPEAKER_04: Like, is are there no white microcephaly uh people out there?
50:37
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so like did they actually believe it, or was it just a goof, right?
50:40
SPEAKER_05: They were just having fun.
50:41
SPEAKER_05: They're like, or did were they just having fun, you know?
50:44
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
50:45
SPEAKER_04: So that's I mean, I I think that's what I'm trying to get at.
50:47
SPEAKER_04: Like, what what what is it?
50:49
SPEAKER_04: I mean, because you know, white supremacy is always baked into every single one of these, you know, conversations about the 19th century and colonialism and the that have to do with Europeans and Americans.
51:03
SPEAKER_04: So that's kind of like a given.
51:05
SPEAKER_04: Like, like that's part of the found like if you're baking a cake, that's basically the foundation of it, right?
51:11
SPEAKER_04: It's the power.
51:13
SPEAKER_04: It's already it's already baked into it.
51:15
SPEAKER_04: So beyond that, what else explains this idea that these people who suffer from microcephaly are a stics?
51:24
SPEAKER_04: Right?
51:25
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, like of all the the different names to come, is it is it be uh I mean going back to your question about why Ishimaya, like where's where does that word come from?
51:36
SPEAKER_04: Is that an actual place?
51:37
SPEAKER_04: Do we know?
51:38
SPEAKER_04: No, right?
51:38
SPEAKER_04: I mean, I've never come across that term before.
51:41
SPEAKER_04: But then again, I'm not well versed in all my uh um geoplacenes to say no it didn't didn't exist, right?
51:48
SPEAKER_04: It could have, but to me it seems like it's a it's a made-up word.
51:53
SPEAKER_04: Now, the question would be um going back to the 19th century, around when did the first archaeologists begin to uh discover the the the archaeological sites that show uh or was it only in the codices that show how the Maya used to uh basically um reshape their heads using boards, right?
52:19
SPEAKER_04: I mean, is that the connection here between microcephaly and associating them with Maya, but instead of calling them Mayas, you go with the word Aztec because Aztec is what everyone knew because that was kind of like the catch-all term for Mexican Indian, yeah, essentially.
52:38
SPEAKER_04: Whatever you were, whether you were Maya, Yaqui, whatever the case may be, to an American, you were all Aztecs, kind of like eventually, you know, all brown people were Mexican, yeah, eventually, yeah, right.
52:49
SPEAKER_04: That's kind of like the same idea.
52:51
SPEAKER_04: So, is that what's going on here?
52:53
SPEAKER_04: Do we know when the first uh uh uh does it go back to the codices?
52:58
SPEAKER_04: Like how how far back do we know that that Europeans were were had had noticed this this um this aesthetic within the Maya certain Maya they had already been, they had already seen um uh murals and engravings that depict you know So by the time that the Ma Maximo Bartola uh are alive and are being exhibited that was already part of the conversation.
53:25
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, in fact, they even so in that pamphlet that we talk about that has a long ass name, right?
53:31
SPEAKER_05: I I found um I found it online, like somebody had scanned it and and put it online.
53:38
SPEAKER_05: Okay, and there's uh images of the Stella, you know, the Maya Stella, uh, in there to to show, like, see, they look like this, so they must be these people.
53:50
SPEAKER_05: And it's all part of this elaborate, it's really poorly written, by the way.
53:54
SPEAKER_05: Like it's a slog.
53:56
SPEAKER_05: It's only 48 pages, and my god, it feels like the longest 48 pages you'll ever read in your life.
54:01
SPEAKER_05: It's a slog to get through this thing.
54:06
SPEAKER_05: And I'll send it to you if you want.
54:07
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, so please do.
54:09
SPEAKER_05: It's it's it's it's interesting.
54:11
SPEAKER_05: I'll just I'll just put it that way.
54:13
SPEAKER_04: So that I mean that might explain a little bit like why Aguirre chose to call them Aztec instead of Maya.
54:20
SPEAKER_04: Or instead of just saying, you know, these people because I mean, where were they from again?
54:25
SPEAKER_04: Uh it's they were purported to have been from Chiapas, but but where were they actually from?
54:31
SPEAKER_04: They were actually from um uh San Salvador.
54:35
SPEAKER_04: San Salvador, right?
54:36
SPEAKER_04: So it's not even they're not even like in within the bounds of what is traditionally Mexico.
54:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
54:42
SPEAKER_04: Like they're further south, right?
54:44
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
54:45
SPEAKER_04: Um, and so because most Americans at the time probably wouldn't, I mean, you might have known of San Salvador, but not really.
54:52
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and and you know, you're probably not making that distinction anyway.
54:56
SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
54:58
SPEAKER_04: Hmm.
54:59
SPEAKER_04: I don't know, that's always been something that's that's um that's really stuck with me.
55:05
SPEAKER_04: Like when I first learned of Maximo Barton, I was like, why Astec?
55:09
SPEAKER_04: Of all the different names to come up with, like what and the reasoning, you know, what what is that reason reasoning to to equate microcephaly with with Aztecs?
55:18
SPEAKER_04: And I think it has to do with that association, the proximity of of the Maya, because you know, even to this day, people people who should know better, right, are conflate the Aztec and the Maya all the time.
55:32
SPEAKER_04: All the time with the temples and the iconography, the calendar the calendar, all you know, it's always so it's been going on for since the beginning, since since Europeans started, you know, doing research and investigating and and being interested in things related to the Maya and the Aztec.
55:51
SPEAKER_04: That conflation has always existed, and and this is a clear example of it, right?
55:56
SPEAKER_04: But then again, so so we have that conflation, we have the the the equation of that the microcephaly with the Aztec.
56:09
SPEAKER_04: Why would these people today knowing what they know want to claim that they descend from people who are microcephalic?
56:20
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
56:22
SPEAKER_04: What is the reasoning behind that?
56:24
SPEAKER_04: I don't think they thought that far ahead, man.
56:27
SPEAKER_04: I mean, even if it were true, right?
56:30
SPEAKER_04: Let's let's for the sake of argument, let's say that it's true that Maxim and Bartola were the last uh Aztecs and they were microcephalic because for whatever reason, in this strange, bizarro universe that these people have constructed, the Aztecs were all microcephalic.
56:46
SPEAKER_04: Right?
56:48
SPEAKER_05: Why now the and then now the aboriginalists are claiming to be descended from them?
56:52
SPEAKER_04: These are the people that the abor Aboriginalists claim to descend from.
56:58
SPEAKER_04: I mean, not that I'm trying to put down microsophalic people, but you get what I'm saying?
57:03
SPEAKER_05: Like that's that's an odd saying that's a very odd choice to Yeah, it's interesting that for them to make that choice.
57:13
SPEAKER_05: But you know Um I I do know, however, for for uh you know certitude with absolute certitude, they really don't like being told the the actual story of Maximo and Boris.
57:29
SPEAKER_05: Well, of course not.
57:30
SPEAKER_04: The Aboriginalists did.
57:32
SPEAKER_04: It's like people who are uh Bible thumpers don't actually like to be told what's in the Bible.
57:38
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, while they're afraid of the truth, man.
57:40
SPEAKER_05: And what is it about that truth?
57:42
SPEAKER_05: Well, the truth, my friend, it's like medicine.
57:47
SPEAKER_05: It doesn't always taste good, but it's always good for you.
58:08
SPEAKER_01: We didn't lie to you, folks.
58:10
SPEAKER_01: We told you we had living, reading, you laughed, and yet we had to do it.
58:24
SPEAKER_01: You might be with a layer.
58:52
SPEAKER_01: You're not about to witness a most amazing, a most coming living on company of all time.
59:03
SPEAKER_05: Thank you for listening to Tales from Ostlantis, a project of the Chimalli Institute of Mesoamerican Arts.
59:10
SPEAKER_05: If you enjoy the show, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.
59:15
SPEAKER_05: You can do this by visiting TalesFromostlantis.com and clicking support the podcast.
59:22
SPEAKER_05: Your continued support will help keep the podcast ad free and independent.
59:28
SPEAKER_05: Until next time, Timo Itase.