Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Episode 91: The Invention of America

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Episode 91: The Invention of America · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: You must excuse me.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't easy.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: But you've learned a lesson.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: A lesson in honesty.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Honesty to yourself, honesty to others.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: That lesson must stand you in good step on your mind.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm catching on to why that's so and why that's so and why that's so and why that's so and why that's so why that's so.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Ostlantis, where we explore the fascinating worlds of Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, while also challenging the myths and misinformation that surround them.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: And Ruben Ariano Tlakatekat.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: So what's going on, Dr.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: Tlacatekat?
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: How are you today?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_04: Not too shabby, you know, just the end of the year, the end of the Gregorian calendar, the European New Year.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: Enjoying your uh your your time off from the university.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my goodness.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_04: It's uh you know, it's like you said before, you know, nothing's gonna stop me from having a good time with my family, even if it's a Western holiday or a colonizer holiday, it's time off with the family, and so that's what counts.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, right.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, it's it's interesting because uh we we tend to do a um um symposium every year here at in Dallas at the with the Kalbuli.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_04: And um this year, um one of the things that we discussed was uh for the new uh you know uh members of of the danza group and the kalbuli in general who haven't been around for a very long time, you know, we we kind of like to go over some of the the history of the group besides you know other things that relate to danza and the tradicion.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_04: And so this year, one of the things uh that we discussed was how back when we started in doing danza and uh doing the tradicion and and going to medicine meetings and we met the Huicholes, uh, one of the things that we started doing because it was Amanda, it was like this thing that the Huicholes had us doing.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_04: They were like for five years you have to go do uh ceremony with us in in Wirikuta.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_04: And uh but the catch was that it was on New Year's Eve.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_04: And so for five years straight, you know, some of us like spent our New Year's down in in Wirikuta.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_04: And if you've ever been to Winicuta, it it gets cold in the winter, especially at night, because you're out in the desert, and and uh we're just kind of thinking back then at how crazy that was back in the day.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_04: Like, yeah, oh you want us to go do ceremony for New Year's and be away from our family?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, for five years, that's great.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_04: Let's do it.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's commitment.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: Commitment.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: Heesh.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, speaking of time and time systems and new years in particular, I wanted to uh give a little plug here because I just got from the printer the latest calendars, a Mexican count of days, the Mexica Aztec calendar for the year.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uhly 2026 to 2027.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: This is the annual calendar that I co-publish um every year with Ruben Ochoa, who did uh the uh the work as far as the correlation goes, and I put it all together in a cool full color.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and a lot of people confuse you guys for each other when they talk to me.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: Oh wow, they're like, hey uh so Ruben you know, when when is he gonna talk about the calendar on the show?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, well, that's the different that's a different Ruben.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, spoiler alert, two different individuals.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: One lives in Compton, the other lives in Dallas.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: But you know what?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: There can only be one.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: Fight, fight, fight.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: But uh, if anybody out there wants to order one of the calendars, um yeah, you could get it from Amazon if you so choose, or you could go to shopastlantis.com and order it straight from the source.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: I'll even sign it for you and I'll throw in like a free sticker or something while while supplies last.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: So um yeah, I'm excited.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: It came out really well.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: Nice always uh stress out as the the new year draws because the new year is in March.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: Right as the new year draws closer, I always start feeling a little stressed, like, oh shit, I gotta get this calendar done.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: Gotta get it out.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: Gotta get it made.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: So with that uh small plug out of the way, I would like to get into today's episode that we are calling the invention of America.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: So today we're peeling back the layers of a name that we use every single day, often without a second thought.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: America.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_02: America! America.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: But we aren't just looking at a map, we're looking at a philosophical crisis.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's a crisis that came to a head in 1958.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: That was the year Edmundo O'Gorman, one of Mexico's most brilliant modern historians, published a book that sent shock waves through the academic world.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_04: And I should say his name is O'Gorman, not O'Gorman.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_04: He he used he was Mexican.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_04: So that's uh he was born.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_04: I think he was born in Mexico too.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_04: Uh his father happened to be um uh what is the oh is that is that Scottish?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_04: What is that?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_04: Scottish or Irish, Irish, yeah.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, so um the book that he published in 1958 was called La Invention de America Investigacion Acerva de la Structura Historica del Nuevo Mundo y del sentido de su devenir.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_04: Man, that's a long time.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_04: That's a mouthful.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_04: I think we're gonna try to translate it.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_04: But it was a very inf influential book, and it was translated into English uh a few years after it was published, and then eventually uh it went through several editions and countless translations.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_04: You can find it in French and all kinds of different languages.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so you know, needless to say, it is a kind of staple, uh, one of those uh books that anyone who's interested in how the so-called new world was constructed in the European mind should probably read.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember um you telling me that you did not find this in a classroom, though.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_04: No, I mean I found it by accident while you know scanning the history shelves of a used bookstore when I was in Houston.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_04: This was maybe 20-something years ago, back when I was a part-time community college student, and you know, back then I was just starting what turned out to be a very long academic career.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, at that stage I was like five years deep into the tradicion, doing danzateca, and then deep into mechikayot.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_04: And Ogorman's book really struck a chord.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_04: Um, because as a natural contrarian that I happened to be, uh as I've been told, I don't know, you know, his work played right into a major tenet of Mexicayot, you know, which was the rejection of Eurocentric history and thinking.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so you used him as ammunition.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_04: You know, whenever we discussed the falsehood or the falsity of the name America, you know, I'd pull him out, O'Gorman, you know, to argue for indigenous names like Turtle Island, Abia Yala, I think that's how you say that, the South American or is the Peruvian, I forget exactly.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I think it's in the Quechua or Quechua language.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_04: And then, of course, Ishachila, which is the supposed Mexicayot or Mexica name for uh the Western Hemisphere.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_04: And so O'Gorman's argument was something that was elegant and simple.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_04: You know, he argued that Columbus didn't discover America, that it was invented by Europeans, you know, and so that again this is kind of a philosophical framework.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_04: He challenged the very word discover itself, you know.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, O'Gorman would state things like discovery implies that the nature of the thing found was previously known to the finder, i.e., that he knows that objects such as the one he has found can and do exist, although the existence of that particular one was wholly unknown.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_04: So think about that for a second.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_04: O'Gorman wondered how you could discover something without having prior knowledge of what that thing even was.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_04: So, you know, he used astronomy as an example explaining that.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_02: Thus, an astronomer who is already aware that some heavenly bodies are classed as planets may be said to have discovered it.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: But the astronomer who first has the conception of such bodies as planets may properly be said to have invented them.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_04: So, you know, invention.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, he's he's targeting the idea of discovery and invention.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_04: And so he's saying that Europe didn't find a continent, that they invented a concept of one.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_04: They populated this invention with their own fanciful ideas, such as strange creatures.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_04: And now you've probably seen these maps where you see like faces on on the bodies of humans in the chest where instead of having a head, so that kind of stuff, right?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_04: Amazonian women, which is kind of where the the name for California comes from, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, it's kind of associated to that.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_04: And then the Garden of Eden, right?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_04: So the framework is a cornerstone for scholars of colonialism today.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_04: You know, his work has been used by many preeminent scholars of coloniality and such, but it has also opened a door for a much wilder theory: the idea that the name America itself isn't even European.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: The Americo Vespucci myth.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_04: Good one.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_04: So most of us grew up being told that the continents were named after Americo Vespucci.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_04: It's one of those facts so entrenched that almost no one really questions it except for a select few.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_04: You have people who are nationalists, like from the Hispanosphere, uh, some anti-German Europeans, for instance, because of Waltz Müller, the mapmaker, um, and more radical thinker uh people among indigenous-centric circles also tend to uh believe in this idea.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_04: And so I wanted to also be one of those believers, you know, back then that I that they were right, that what they were telling me was right because I wanted to believe that the knowledge that I was being taught in the tradicion was ancient and factual.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you can relate to this, right, Curly?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, but you know, you start to feel like you were being indoctrinated, maybe.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_04: No offense.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_04: But honestly, yes, you know, my teachers were just parroting information that they um had heard before, they called it ancient knowledge, but as I became a more serious student of history, I realized I couldn't just take it on faith.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I decided to stop being an apologist for the charlatans and the Mexica communities, and I realized that age and sincerity, as we've mentioned before in this podcast, don't equate to infallibility.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_04: You know, simply being an old person doesn't mean that you are an elder who holds factual knowledge.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_04: I can't stress that enough.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I started looking into what what I call the American toponym hypothesis.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_04: I know that's a mouthful, so we're gonna shorten it to ATH, but toponym refers to the name itself, and the hypothesis is this is kind of my like my own like pit theory that I have that I've given to this idea, right?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_04: So this is a critical framework that questions the notion that America comes from an indigenous name in South America, because that's the proposition here.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and so the problem here is that no one can agree on which name and which sources, sources that I might add are often non-existent to use for this, right?
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, we've talked about this before.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_04: So let's, for instance, let's look at Jack D.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_04: Forbes, uh, who was a huge figure in Chicano Indigenous Studies, and one of at least my intellectual heroes from the Indigenous community, I'm sure that you as well, Curly.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_04: I want to speak for you.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_04: Same here.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_04: But I know that we've cited him before a lot, and and when I found this out about him, I was really kind of um disappointed to say the least.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_04: You know, this is something that he wrote, for instance, in 1995 in regards to the ATH.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: Some people believe that America, as a name, stems from the mountain range known as America, located in Nicaragua.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: Others believe that it stems from a word common to several American languages of the Caribbean and South America, namely Maraca pronounced Maraca, Maraca, and Maraca.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: This word, meaning rattle or gourd, is found as a place name in Venezuela, Maracapana, Maracai, Maracaibo, Trinidad, Maracas, Puerto Rico, Maracayu, etc., Brazil, Maraca, Itamaraca, and elsewhere.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: Many very early maps of the Caribbean region show an island located to the northwest of Venezuela, where Nicaragua is actually located, called Tamarake, which has been interpreted as T Amarake, standing for tierra or terra, which is land terra, of Amarake.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: All of this is before America first appeared as a name on the mainland, roughly in the area of Venezuela.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: Most of us have probably been taught that America as a name is derived from that of Americo Vespucci, a notorious liar and enslaver of native people.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: Strangely enough, Vespucci's first name is more often recorded as Alberico rather than Americo.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: It may well be that the name America is not derived from his name, but we know for sure that it was first applied to South America or Central America and not to the area of the United States.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: Oh Forbes.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_04: So, Jack T.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_04: Forbes, you know, he was very influential in the community.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_04: His idea spread through the Mexica, you know, circles and kalpulis like a wildfire.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I remember talking about this stuff back in the day.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_04: But long before him, there was Juan Luna Cardenas, whom we've also talked about here on this podcast before.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_04: He was one of those post-revolutionary Mexicanists or indigenists as well, who claimed, right, that Vespucci's real name was Alberico, with a B Alberico, and that Americo was a later invention.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_04: So we have two claims here.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_04: First name being Alberico, a second name being invented Americo.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_04: He gave this fascinating interview to Lulak in 1979, which I found while I was doing my doctoral dissertation, uh, where he had been invited to UT Austin for that conference and spoke at the event.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_04: And during his talk, as he was wont to do, Luna brought up the American toponym hypothesis or the ATH and caught the attention of the Lulak film documentarian who then requested an interview.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, and so the name of America was the first item of interest in this interview, and this was Luna's very interesting response.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_04: And this is translated by you?
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_04: Because it was all in Spanish, right?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_04: Uh let me let me remember if it was originally in Spanish, because it's been a while.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_04: It's been about 15 years since I'm like that.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_04: This it might have been originally in Spanish.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_04: I think it was, because I I think I found um clips of it somewhere.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: I think I might have shared those with you.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, yeah, that that's where that's where I got it from.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, yes, the name America rarely appears in the books, and its origin is certainly not explained in the geographical maps, but it uh is attributed to a certain man named Americo Vespucci.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, uh there never was an Americo Vespucci, because his real name was Albericus Vespucci, making several trips with Christopher Columbus, specifically on his second voyage, when the region of Venezuela was seen.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: He asked the natives where they were from, and they replied that they were from the mountains of America, which are to the west of the country.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: Subsequently, he sent his relaciones or written accounts to Germany to a gentleman named Waldschmueller.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: Did I get that right?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: Waldsmueller.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: Who read the wonders of the trip.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: As a result, Waldschmuel Mueller chose to immortalize the surname of the cartographer and navigator, who was a very learned man by using America Vespucci with a Latin ending for America, a ha e, which means uh of and meant America of Vespucci.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: Later, people who ignored Latin took away the AE, which is the genitive ending of the first Latin translation, and changed it to an o, making it America.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: But certainly it is so that the Western Venezuelan mountain region, America, was used to give the name to the entire continent, which by the way, in the Aztec language, it uh it being the continent already had another name called Ishachilan, where this ethnic group traveled from the regions of Canada to the pre-Inca Andes and vice versa.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: From the pre-Inca Andes and Mesoamerica, they traveled north to visit the Aztec groups of North America.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I just gotta say, he starts off kind of making sense.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: And then he just goes right into the crazy shit at the very end.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_04: Just down that cliff, huh?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, there's definitely so much to unpack there for sure.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_04: Um yeah, absolutely.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_04: So the search for America.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_04: So Cárdenas and Forbes.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_04: So so far we've talked about mainly Cardanas, one Cardanas, one Jack D.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_04: Forbes, and they agree on three things.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_04: The names or the name of America comes from an indigenous mountain range.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_04: The range was or is near Venezuela, and that Vespucci's name was actually Alberico, and then later switched to uh Americo, Alberico, I don't know.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: You kind of lose track after a while.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and and then when you looked for these mountains, you didn't find them in Venezuela.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I looked for them the mountains on maps, uh, searched archives, and nothing.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, there was nothing with that name or variations.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_04: But then I turned my gaze towards Nicaragua because Nicaragua had been one of those places that had also been mentioned, and there it was, sure enough, Las Serranias de Amerisque, uh, which is close enough, so I assume that that's what they were talking about.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_04: And so this is where I began to search, and and we meet another individual that predates both Luna and uh Forbes by the name of Thomas Bell, and he was a British geologist who wrote The Naturalist in Nicaragua.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_04: That was a publication that was published in 1874.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_04: I believe it's a book.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, I found an online copy of it.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and so in that book he mentioned these mountains, the Amarisca Mountains, or the Sierra de Amerisque, uh, and uh he proposes uh that these are mountains, and he doesn't outright say it, but you know, because of his mention of this, a lot of proponents of the ATH hypothesis they often point to him as someone that they can use to support their their their argumentation.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_04: They use them as a source.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_04: But let's look at what he actually has to say about the Serranias de Ameriske, if you don't mind.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: At a short distance to the west rise the precipitous rocks of the Amerike range, with great perpendicular cliffs and huge isolated rocks and pinnacles.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: The name of this range gives us a clue to the race of the ancient inhabitants.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: In the highlands of Honduras, the termination of Atique or Rike is of frequent occurrence in the names of places as Chaparistique Le Paraterike Yotique and others.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: The race that inhabited this region were the Lenca Indians, often mentioned in the accounts given by the missionaries of their early expeditions into Honduras.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think that the Lenca Indians were the ancient inhabitants of Chontales, that they were the Chontals of the Nawas, or Aztecs of the Pacific side of the country.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_04: Do you know anything about that?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_04: This is all new to me.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_04: I think we need to dig into that.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_04: I wonder what he's referring to here.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_04: But you know, to be clear, Belt wasn't saying that America came from these mountains.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_04: He was just doing linguistics on the Lenka people.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_04: It was another gentleman, Jules Marcou, a Swiss geologist, and Marquis is spelled M-A-I-M-A-R-C-O-U, who took Belt's work a year later and made that leap.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_04: He made that jump.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_04: So he argued that when Columbus asked where the gold came from, the local said Ameriske.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_04: He even wrote a whole book in 1888.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_04: The following points are what really stand out from his work.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: Point one, America is the Indian name of some existing mountains.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: In the Mayan language, this means land of wind, or country where the wind always blows.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: Point two Vespucci's name is Alberico in Italian and Spanish and Albericus in Latin.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_02: Never has a name suffered so many variations and combinations, some intentional and others unconsciously, like that of Vespucci's Americas, Amerigo, Amerigo, etc.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: And point four.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: Before fifteen oh seven, the date of publication of the name Americus by Jean Basin.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_02: Jean Basin?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's Jean Basin.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I don't speak French.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: Is it French?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it is.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: By Jean Basin.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: Saint Die.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: This name does not appear in any printed document or manuscript of recognizable and undisputed.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's it's very weird.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_04: Um Marco was convinced that Alexander von Humboldt made a mistake by giving Walsmuller too much credit.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_04: He thought Europeans associated Amerike with gold and that the name had just stuck.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_04: It's a compelling story, but is it true?
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_04: The ghost of Humboldt.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_04: Humboldt always has to make an appearance in these talks, right?
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_04: Humboldt's always gotta fucking pop up somewhere.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_04: Pinche Humboldt.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_04: So while Marcus was looking at Nicaragua, Thomas H.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_04: de Lambert, here's another French guy.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_04: Let me see if I get it right.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_04: Thomas H.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_04: de Lambert de Saint Brie was looking at Venezuela.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_04: In 1888, he published the book the same year as Marcou, claiming that the name came from Amaracapana.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_04: Saint Brie and Brie is uh spelled B-R-I-S.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_04: Saint Bri tried to use the Popolvu to prove his point.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_04: He told the story about the hero twins and the place called Amarca.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_02: Ishkik returns home and goes to the mother of Hunun Ahpu, by whom she is received as a daughter-in-law, remaining there until the birth of the twins, Hunaphu and Shpalenga.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: Shbalenka?
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_02: God damn, I I cannot speak Maya.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: Hun Ahpu and Shpalenka, who go to Shibalba and perform many wonders, killing and restoring themselves to life.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: The kings of Shibalba command that they repeat this with them, whereon they kill their majesties, but do not restore them.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: Then they tell the people that they are the sons of one of the heroes executed by these kings, and that they have thus avenged their father.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: They then retire to Utlatlan, the seat of the common people, declare war, defeat Shibalba, and form an empire, making Utlatlan the capital, but changing its name to Amarca before doing so.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: The old Spaniards wrote this name Gumarca.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_04: Interesting story.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_04: As the kids say, cool story, bro.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_04: The problem is that the story isn't in the Popolvo at all.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_04: Amarca is likely just a shortened version of Cundina Marca in Colombia.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_04: But Saint Bree doubled down, trying to break the word into syllabic roots such as am dash ar dash gar.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_04: Am arca.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_04: God damn.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: That takes a lot of balls to make up an entire quote and then cite a book and you just made it all up.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: The g interesting.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: So to quote To find the origin of the name America, its construction must be examined.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: The history and language of Peru points out unmistakably that the root R eight, that is AR, in its primary or er in its secondary form, is the chief in the name of America.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, it appears to be formed of three roots Am R ca or Am Erika, which language explains in the following way.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: Am is a universal root meaning great, which is found in many American names, as in Amaganset, Amatitlan, Amaru Kancha, etc.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: R, A-R, meant the sun, which it was universally which was universally the chief emblem of God, the great spirit.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: In Qichwa, pak is for pakarin.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: It dawns.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: E R on high.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: Pakari or Hu Awi morning.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: Hwa who is Lord.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_02: God, this sounds like it's shit that you see on TikTok.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like straight off.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_02: TikTok's long.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: Hwa is Yeah, man.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_02: This guy was he was ahead of his time.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: Hwa is Lord or Old or Ancient.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_02: Ial Arien, Light of the Sun.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: The Incas were called children of the sun and claimed descent from the Aim R race.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: While the names of the first four brothers and governors of Amarca began with Ayer, A Y E R.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: Hu Yara was their alias, and Huirakocha was their chief god.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_02: Is that supposed to be Virakocha?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah was their chief god.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: Or wa Lord Ira Sun Kocha Water, the sun rising from the water, hence the dawn.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: Arika was their chief seaport, and it may be that Peru means Eru.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: God damn.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: This is exactly like those fucking TikTok videos where somebody's trying to break down a bullshit made-up Nawa word.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: But maybe for the dictionaries.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_02: So Peruvians were very fond of adding the letter P to words, you know.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_04: I swear.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_04: My head spins every time I go back and look at St.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_04: Breeze and that word salad that you just read.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it's very impressive how much of he reaches here, right, to try to make it work.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_04: It reminds me a lot of like the sort of jungle gym explanations that we get from our old pal Domingo Paredes in his old book Uncontinente y una cultura.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, he kind of does the same thing there with the Mayan language.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, Cundinamarca likely just means condorousness, right?
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_04: If I'm not mistaken.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_04: And Peru comes from a local ruler who was named Biru with a B.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_04: And so over time, B and P they kind of get um interchanged, right?
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_04: And so Saint Brie is just guessing and then tries to rope in Humboldt again.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_04: He I mean he can't help but rope in Humboldt.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_04: He's gotta bring him back in.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_02: The point of land, so like an isle, and now known as Maraka Ibo, was no doubt part of a Maraca Pana mentioned by Humboldt.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: And it is a curious illustration of these early errors to find it called by Oheta the Isle, province and lake of Kovikoa Kokivakoa, which the crown appointed him governor of, though existing only in his imagination.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: But they soon found out their mistake, for the name Koki meant Chibchi, the Chibchi royal race of the kingdom of Kundin Amaraka.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: Chibchi was the name of the people and not their country, and altered it to Maraca Ibo, which like Maracapana meant Amaraka or America.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_02: America Lord.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_04: Honestly, we need a linguist to come in here and parse this crap out.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_04: But but here's the big but here's the mic drop.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_04: This is my mic drop moment.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_04: The humble text Saint Bree cites the Relation Historix, volume two, page 462.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_04: That's an actual citation in Saint Brie.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_04: Does not exist, people, listeners does not exist.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I search for this everywhere, and I could be wrong.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I've been known to be wrong, but it's likely a phantom source, as we like to call them.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_04: This is something that is frequent, it's an ongoing problem that we encounter with work that is usually penned by pseudo-scholars who pretend like they know what the hell they're talking about.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_04: Ugh, curly.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_04: And phantom source is a very nice way of putting it.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, what would you describe it as besides phantom source?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_04: Bullshit.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_04: It's a bullshit source.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I like mine.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, both both are equally valid.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_04: Uh you can use one and one.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Phantom Source sounds way more um professional and prestigious.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay, that's what it is.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_02: The homonymic fallacy.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_02: So we have a bunch of scholars in the late 1800s, Belt, Marco, St.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_02: Bree, all echoing each other, but none of them offering anything concrete.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_02: And this happens a lot with pseudo-scholars, right?
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_02: They just repeat each other and cite each other, and it's just like this circle of fucking nonsense.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, this persists.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: You even found it in the 2001 handbook on the Aztec calendar.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_04: I I have it.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_04: I think we talked about this before.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_04: You know, honestly, if I'm not mistaken, when I this is originally from a blog post, uh, the script here.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_04: And when I first wrote that thing, it was prompted by me finding that in that book.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_04: I was like, what the hell is this, right?
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_04: And so I remember this is where we get to the core of this issue of the hominin homonymic fallacy.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_04: I know that sounds so mouthful.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it is a mouthful.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_04: So can you break that down?
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_02: Explain what that means, sir.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_04: So homonymic fallacy is when you assume that two words are related just because they sound similar and are spelled similarly, even if they come from completely different times and places.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_04: You know, my fellow Mexica, and you've encountered this before.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_04: You know, they do this all the time.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_04: They say things like Atlantis must be related to Astlan.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_04: And sure, you know, we have this podcast called Astlantis, but you know, it's a play on that idea.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's a it's a play on words.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_04: Our followers, I believe they know that we do this in jest, hopefully, right?
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_04: Most people that listen to us they understand that.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, but this is what I think.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think we get some people who think we're being serious though, and then they listen to the show and they're like, What?
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_02: Fuck these guys.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_04: That's crazy.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_04: That's crazy talk, man.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_04: So the issue, if I may, sir, is that many in Mexicayot and the Dansa tradition believe this stuff as fact.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_04: You know, they they hear it, they've heard it, someone said it.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_04: It must be true.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_04: I found it in, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_04: Such and such person said it.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_04: And so, for instance, we've discussed this before as well.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_04: There are people within the Tradicionan Mexicayot and the Dansa community who say that Seattle, right, the city which is named after the old uh chief Seattle, you know, that they claim that this is an actual Nahuatl word, se atl, you know, se meaning one and at meaning water.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_04: One water.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_04: What does that even mean?
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_04: One water up in Seattle.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_04: Is there like one a place that's got only one thing of water?
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_04: I don't get it.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_04: Like, why would they be able to do it?
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_04: The way they try to explain it though, right?
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's like seat one water, and it's called that because of the abundance of water.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: Go to Seattle.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's always raining.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_02: Coincidence.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_04: It's one, it's what just one stream of constant flow of water coming down from the sky.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_04: Or my other favorite one, I don't know if you've heard this one before, but they'll say that Nakadoches, which is here in Texas, little little big town called Nakadoches, that it comes from Nakatochtli, which is now what for rabbit meat.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_04: There's a bunch of rabbit meat over there.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_04: Just call it Nakatochi.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my gosh.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: Ridiculous.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it sounds plausible if you want it to be true.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_04: Right?
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, and that's the trap.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_04: It's the truthiness of it, right?
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_04: That there is some truth behind what's being said, but there really is no conclusive proof, for instance, that America comes from the Amerisque Mountains or Amaraca.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it's a beautiful idea that helps people feel like they've reclaimed the land from the colonizers, but it's not history, folks.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_04: It's a fallacy.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: So if the name is an invention, as O'Gorman, O'Gorman said.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_02: O'Gorman.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_02: We have to grapple with that invention rather than trying to find a secret indigenous out.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_04: We must be honest with ourselves, like we what we try to do in this episode in this podcast, you know, and not only to ourselves, but to others, to especially to the newcomers in the tradicion who are eager to learn about this.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_04: You know, we can't build a future on a foundation of homonymic mistakes.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_04: It that can't be the case, man.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's a heavy note to end on, but a necessary one.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's so there's two things I think that help people um believe these things.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like they make them sound more believable to certain people.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_02: And the first thing is that they're hearing it from like respected elders or or leaders, or and it, you know, depending on how you twist it, you could make it sound plausible, right?
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: Umchis, knacadochli.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_02: If it's coming from somebody you respect and you're totally new to this and you haven't questioned things before, and you've been taught, no, this is your elder, this is who you listen to, then you're more likely to believe that.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing I think that reinforces this tendency to believe claims like this is that you do have actual Nahuatl names in the United States to certain places.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_02: So you could point to um Anawak, Texas, right?
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_02: Which the people there call Anawak.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_04: Annawak.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_04: But weren't you telling it up a long time ago that that when you uh first encountered that that place that you uh wanted to like did you go there or something?
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_04: And or you researched it.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_04: I wanted to and people were saying, Nobody knows where the name comes from.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_04: And like, oh my god.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_04: I looked into it.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I researched it.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_04: Nobody knows.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that was like like the prominent thing online is they they were talking to people from the town, and they're like, Yeah, nobody knows.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: There's all these different uh ideas, but nobody knows for sure.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, really?
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's an actual word.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_02: Or then you get places like there's this um this mountain, and it's called like Mount Teocali or Mount Teocal, and I forget where it is.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's somewhere in the southwest, but people were pointing to this as like evidence of like, oh, why would this be called Mount Teocali if the Mexica weren't already up in the southwestern United States?
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: And the truth of it was soldiers who had fought in the Mexican-American War, you know, after the United States took the northern portion of Mexico, they had to send out all of these uh survey crews to check out the new land.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_02: And some of the people they sent out were former military who had fought in the Mexican-American War.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_02: And if you look at this mountain, it looks kind of like a teocali, like the shape of it.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so the guy just named it that.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_02: And he was like, Oh shit, that looks like uh a teocali, that which is what they call their temples, and so I'm gonna name it Mount Teocali.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: So that's like an interesting origin, and it's way more interesting than just making shit up, like, yes, it's called this because you know, of uh this ancient connection.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_02: Or like here in New Mexico, we have Mount Chalchiwitl.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_02: If you know Chalchiwitl is turquoise, and this is uh a mountain up by Santa Fe where there are turquoise mines.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know exactly when it got this name, but it stands to reason that probably some of the Meso Nahuatl speaking Mesoamericans who came up with the Spanish had something to to do with naming it.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not saying I do know, but that's my hypothesis.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: So what I'm saying is, you know, long story short, uh it's a very roundabout way to make my point, but there are reasons why people people can glom on to these ideas, right?
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like if I took Mount Chalchiwit and I just started telling people, oh yeah, it was named that because of an ancient turquoise trade route that existed between the ancestral Puebloans and the people from central Mexico, and when the Pochtecas came up here, they named this mountain Chalchiwit.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_02: I I guarantee you somebody would believe me.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's possible.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_04: Even though I just made that up.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_04: By the way, I just made that up.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_04: The name is right there, it's in Nahuatl.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_04: So it has this a kernel of truth to it.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_04: Like most misinformation or disinformation or fake news, whatever you want to call it, there's there's always or a conspiracy theory.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_04: The reason why why they resonate with people is because it taps into something that they already kind of believe in, um, and there's a kernel to truth to it.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_04: And it's also confirmation bias plays into this as well.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_04: If you want to believe, right, that the that there's an ancient connection between the Mexica or the Azteca in central Mexico to that specific area, and you find a mountain that you have no reason to to know or believe that it was named after the fact, after colonization, after the US-Mexican War, then you're gonna assume it's always been called Mount Chauchiwit and that it dates back to some time in place when the Mexica Aztec were there or or what have you, right?
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_04: So it's it's it's kind of hard.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, uh in in in a sense, I'm not trying to beat down on people who believe on this stuff uh because they've been misinformed.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_04: It's not their fault.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_04: But at the same time, like our goal here is to expose these things so that people do know where these things come from and so they can have a better understanding and hopefully start making better choices and and maybe not believe a lot of the nonsense that comes up online.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, one of the reasons why this episode we're doing here late in in this um year of 2025 and into 2026 is because there was a recent conversation in the Discord channel, and oftentimes some of the the shows that we do are are sort of prompted by those discussions that we had, and and there's been discussion of people who are like you were saying on TikTok and the social medias who are saying a bunch of nonsense, and uh and so it's like hey, wait a minute.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_04: I wrote about that some years ago.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_04: Hey, why don't we turn that into an episode so we can try to maybe inform more people about this?
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't realize that people were still debating the name of America, otherwise, I would have suggested this topic a long time ago.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_04: But here we are, you know.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and this thing is you know, stuff like this, I think um repeats itself.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_02: So even though we think something is like, okay, that's been addressed, we don't have to deal with this anymore.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right, you know, social media being the way it is, all it takes is for one person, oh wow, you know, like they hear it for the first time, and so they make a video about it, and now they've infected the minds of like all of their followers and people are sharing.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_04: Just stay away, man.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_04: That's why I'm like I'm done.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_04: I'm done with the socials.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_04: Probably a good policy.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_04: What's the other good policy that we have here?
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_04: It's about the truth, sir.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah?
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_04: What about that truth?
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_02: Well, my friend, the truth, it's like medicine.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't always taste good, but it is always good for you.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_04: Happy New Year's, everyone.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_02: Happy New Year's.