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Throwback Thursday: Rescuing the Tonalamatl Aubin · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: You must excuse me.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, honesty.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, honesty the spending good step.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: I've always heard that honesty is the best honesty.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: The show where we explore Mesoamerican pseudo history, new age nonsense, and other stories of adventure.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_03: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa and Ruben Ariano Tlacateka.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_03: A couple of years back, I visited the British National Museum in London, England with my wife.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_03: As we stood in front of the many Mesoamerican artifacts on display, objects that the hands of our ancestors had meticulously crafted, I was reminded of a scene from the Marvel film Black Panther.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_03: Now, if you've seen the movie, I'm sure you remember which scene I am referring to.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: In it, the character Eric Kilmonger Stevens, played by Michael B.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_03: Jordan, stands in front of African artifacts at the fictional Museum of Great Britain.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: The museum director soon approaches and offers to tell him where the artifacts had originated.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_03: After listening for a bit, Kilmonger interjects and notes that the Fula tribe did not make a 7th century war hammer in Benin, but rather it was taken by British soldiers in Benin, but it's from Wakanda, and it's made out of vibranium.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: He then adds, Don't trip, I'm gonna take it off your hands for you.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: When the director retorts that the artifacts are not for sale, Kilmonger responds, How do you think your ancestors got these?
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think they paid a fair price?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: Or did they take it like they took everything else?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_03: Soon, the curator has collapsed to the floor.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: Kilmonger tells her that she should have paid more attention to what she was drinking rather than to the gallery's suspicious black man.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_03: He and his team, posing as EMTs, charge in, take out museum security, and escape with the artifact.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_03: This scene caused an interesting discussion in the archaeological community and among museum professionals when the movie first came out.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: In an essay titled Why Museum Professionals Need to Talk About Black Panther, Casey Hogan of John Hopkins wrote that Black Panther presented the museum as an illegal mechanism of colonialism, and along with that, a space which does not even welcome those whose culture it displays.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: Now, I'm not gonna lie, part of me wished that I had my own team of highly skilled Nawa operatives with me at the museum in London, and that we were there to pull off a carefully orchestrated heist, liberating the objects of our Mesoamerican cultural inheritance and returning them to the land of their birth.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_03: Unfortunately, such acts of daring cultural restitution are the stuff of pure fantasy, more at home in the Marvel Cinematic Universe than in the real world.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: Or are they?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: Well, buckle those seat belts, dear listener, because on today's episode, we delve into a little-known story I like to call Rescuing the Tonalamat Albin.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_03: For this episode, I will rely on multiple newspaper accounts, particularly the New York Times article, A Stolen Relic, is a Problem for Mexicans, published August 29th, 1982, and written by Alan Writing, along with information provided by the website Mexico Lore.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: The Tonalamat Albin is a Nahua codex consisting of 18 screen-folded pages.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_03: It is constructed from 13 bark pieces that were pasted together and is meant to be read from right to left.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: Its contents include the 260 symbols representing the Tonal Puali, or count of days in the Mesoamerican timekeeping system.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_03: These symbols are broken down on each page into sets of 13 days, known as tresenas.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: Originally 20 pages long, the first two pages have been long lost to time.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_03: It is best described as a calendrical document of divination and appears to have originated in the Puebla Tlaxcala region of Mexico.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: Experts believe that it was copied from an older pre-Cuatemoc era document.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_03: The album first appears as calendario idolatrico, or idolatrous calendar, in the inventory of ancient Mexican manuscripts owned by the Italian aristocrat Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_03: Bottorini was sent to Mexico in 1736 to collect the 1,000 pesetas owed to one Dona Manuela de Oca Silva Moctesuma, a descendant of Moctezuma Chocoyotzin, who sought to claim her overdue pension.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: While in Mexico, Boturini amassed an impressive collection of rare and precious codices and manuscripts, including items from the collection of noted Nahua historian Alva Ishtil Shochic.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_03: In his own words, Boturini described the value of his rapidly growing collection as exceeding all the mines of gold and silver in the country.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_03: However, due to his propensity for shady dealings, Boturini was arrested on January 31, 1743, his precious collection confiscated, and an inventory made of its contents.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: Broke and penniless, Bottorini was expelled back to Spain, only to have his ship attacked by pirates, who managed to steal his last few possessions.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: This is one unlucky dude.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_03: The items in Bottorini's collection were soon dispersed across Europe, bought, sold, and traded among various collectors.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: According to the website Trafficking Culture.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: At that point, the codex passed into the hands of the local colonial government that sold the document.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: A portion of the codex, pages 9 through 20, seems to have been sold in or after 1802 from the estate of Mexican astronomer Antonio de León y Gama to two traveling artists, Car Nebel and John Frederic Waldeck.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: It is possible that Nebel purchased the Codex, then sold it to Waldeck, and then Waldeck sold the Codex to Joseph Marius Alexis Albin in Paris in 1841.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: Albin eventually obtained pages 3 through 8 of the Codex, but it is unclear when and under what circumstances.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: The complete document was purchased by Charles Eugene Espidon Goupil in 1889 along with 383 other Mesoamerican manuscripts from the Albin collection.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: The Albin Tonalamat was then donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris by Goupil's widow in 1898.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_03: It was there, in Paris, that the Tonalamat Albin appeared destined to sit in relative obscurity among countless other Mesoamerican artifacts.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_03: However, all of that would change a mere 84 years later.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_03: Enter the Mexican.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_03: When he had finished, he returned the wooden boxes containing the illustrated parchments and left the building.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_03: Days later, library officials discovered that one of the documents, the Tonalamat Albin, was missing.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_03: Jose Luis Castañeda del Valle of Cancún, Mexico, had presented credentials to the National Library and asked for permission to examine the codices as part of his research.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_03: Once alone, he hid the Tonalamat Albin on his person, returned the box it came in, and headed straight to the airport.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_03: Like all great heist stories, there are different versions of how he managed to get the albin out of the National Library.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: According to the website Mexico lore.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: He had been aided by the fact that the codex was stored as many such precious manuscripts are around the world in its own bespoke box, which he calmly handed in empty along with the other materials at the end of his visit, having concealed the original under his jacket.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: Or was it a sarape, as some claimed at the time?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: Frank suggests that he cunningly swapped the original for a fine facsimile, the edition by Carmen Aguilera, which conveniently had just been published the previous year.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: We'll probably never know.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: For the record, the BNF lists Aguilera's facsimile edition in its manuscript holdings.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_03: Library officials immediately called in the local police, but Castañeda had already slipped out of Paris.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_03: Interpol in France and Mexico soon became involved, and Castañeda was eventually arrested at his home in Cancun on August 16th, 1982.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_03: He surrendered the Tonalamat to the Procuraduría Federal de Justicia.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_03: Did I get that right?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_03: That sounds good too.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_03: And claimed that he had intended all along to hand the Codex over to Mexican authorities.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: The French embassy demanded the return of the Codex, but Castañeda stirred up a wave of Mexican nationalism by asserting that he had rescued a piece of Mexico's cultural heritage that had been stolen from the country more than a century before.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_03: Newspapers argued that extradition of such a Mexican patriot was surely out of the question.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: He told one reporter, it was stolen from Mexico, and now we have recovered stolen property.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_03: However, the fact that he kept the Codex at home for two months and only handed it in when arrested made many suspect that he planned to sell it on the lucrative antiquities market.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_03: Ultimately, only Castañeda knew his true intentions regarding the Codex.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_03: Inevitably, a diplomatic fight broke out between Mexico and France, the former portraying Castañeda as a hero and the latter labeling him a common criminal.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_03: One person's hero is another person's smuggler.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_03: The event tested the strongly nationalistic views of both countries regarding questions of cultural heritage and national identity.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_03: After French officials had publicly denounced the financial and intellectual imperialism of the United States only a few weeks prior to Castañeda's rescue of the Alban, France struck a decidedly different tone when it came to themselves.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_03: Argued Pierre Henri Guinard, spokesman at the French embassy.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: That can be discussed and negotiated at the UNESCO.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: But here we're dealing with a common crime.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: Our reaction is the same as Britain with the Falklands.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_03: There was a theft, and we cannot accept the theft.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_03: Another foreign diplomat said that any decision by France to drop the case would set a dangerous precedent.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: Can you imagine the Greeks trying to steal the Elgin marbles from the British Museum?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: The Italians trying to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, and so on?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: He asked.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: It could be chaos.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_03: Sounds like my kind of chaos.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_03: The French historian Emmanuel Leroy Laderie, director of the BNF in the mid-1980s, refused to allow any Mexican to cross the threshold of the library ever again.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_03: I wonder if he um ordered one of those signs from the United States, one of the No Mexicans or Dogs Allowed.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: No Mexicans, no pets, uh no dogs.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: No cussin', no fussin'.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_03: He could have uh bought one of those signs from Texas.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_03: And he demanded the return of the manuscript on a legal basis.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: It had been in the BNF since 1898, donated by Eugene Goupil's widow in accordance with her husband's will.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_03: Eventually, the two countries would come to an agreement that allowed France to save some face.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_03: The Tonalamot Alban was symbolically handed over to Roberto Garcia Mole, the director of ENA, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, by Pierre Chures, a high-ranking French diplomat.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: French officials agreed that while the document legally belongs, quote unquote, to France, it would remain on permanent loan to Mexico.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_03: And to this day, the Tonalamot Alban rests in Mexican hands.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_03: Returned home by a daring young reporter named Jose Luis Castañeda del Valle.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_03: Here, here.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_03: So it's interesting because when I first saw Black Panther in the theater and the scene happens where he's like in the in the museum, which is obviously a stand-in for the British National Museum, and takes the artifact, I wondered to myself, like, I wonder if if one of the uh the writers was aware of the story of the Tonalamat Albin and was inspired by that to uh to write to write this scene, to create this scene.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_03: So if I ever meet one of the writers of Black Panther, I'll have to ask them that question because it's it's a little similar.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there's some parallels there.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: And it also makes me wonder where's the movie for this one?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is an actual thing that occurred.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this is real.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: And it's someone's someone's asleep at the wheel over there in Hollywood or what do you comics in Hollywood?
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: What's that called down there?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: Chicano Hollywood should be called Chilewood.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: Or Chicano Hollywood.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: Someone, someone needs to yeah, exactly right.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: Someone needs to shine some more light on these kinds of stories.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, people like going to see uh 007 and uh what's the other character that's similar to that international spine and Jason Bourne.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: Why not Chicano Bourne, right?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_03: There you go.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I think this story is prime to be made into a film because it's pretty amazing.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, if you look at it, it's unclear whether he faked his credentials to make himself appear as a student.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um, because that's one of the rumors that I had heard while doing research for this episode.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: But then he went into the museum over the course of a few days and started trying to ingratiate himself to the staff there and start to gain their confidence.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, some people think that his original plan was to take the uh Paris Codex, the Maya Codex held at that library.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: And um he made a lot of visits to the library to gain the you know confidence of the staff, but for whatever reason, he wasn't allowed access to the Paris Codex.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, he he went in and he just asked, Well, what can I see?
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_02: And well, are his credentials in in question?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like, do we know what he was he a student somewhere at the time?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: Was he a journalist?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: So he was a um what's his background?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_03: So José Luis Castañeda del Valle of Cancún, Mexico was I'm quoting from the website Mexico Lore, which everybody should check out because it's a really good website.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_03: Uh it sure is.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: He was one of 19.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, uh you wrote for them, didn't you?
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: I did, didn't I?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: I forgot about that.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: So it's uh it's a little piece on the concha guitar that the concheros use.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: You might want to check it out.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_02: Look for my name.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_03: Just uh get on Mexico lore and there's a search function.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_03: Just search for Ruben Ariano Tlacatecat and you'll have a really cool story that he wrote.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_03: But according to Mexico lore, José Luis Castañeda del Valle was one of 19 lawyers who founded the Barra de Abogados de Quintana Ru.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I guess the Mexican I think it's called Quintana Ro.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: Ro?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's how it's pronounced.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's at least that's the way I've always heard it pronounced.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_03: You're probably right, man.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: And he presented let's see what he says.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, here we go.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: Initially he had been refused permission by the head of the historical manuscript section to see and photograph any of the original codices in the BNF.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_03: But as he claimed professional status, including as a journalist, and provided photo ID and proof of his home address in Cancun, Mexico, permission was subsequently granted.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_03: On an impulse, he recounted later to the Mexican news outlet noticiero twenty-four horas.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know how to say twenty-four.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_03: I actually remember that show.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: If if you thought that was bad, wait till you hear this.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: To the MCRCA?
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well, um maybe not necessarily the MCRCA, but a similar type organization.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that's a good question, man.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_03: There's actually not a lot of information available on Jose Luis Castañeda.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um I've searched, believe me.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_03: It's when I first heard this story, I tried to do like a deep dive to find out everything I could about this guy.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_03: I've only been able to find one photograph of him, and it's from a still of a TV interview on Mexican TV in 1982.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: That's the only image I've been able to find of him.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_03: So that's a good question.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: I wonder, I wonder if he was a Mexican operative of some sort.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, for there to be so much secrecy around this guy, and for him to just be able to travel to Paris, France, and steal a valuable codex that way.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it just seems like I mean stranger things have happened.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe he was on a mission.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: He was on a mission.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: You never know.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: You heard it here, folks.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: Conspiracy.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: We have just begun the conspiracy theory of the Codex Tonalamat Aubin.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_03: But um what's interesting is the fact that you know he held on to it for a while, for like two months, and he only handed it over when he was arrested.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what led some people, especially the French.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_03: The French were like, he's no hero, he's just a common thief because he was gonna sell it on the black market.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: But they could have been playing that up to make their case as to why they wanted to get it back.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: But it makes you wonder, two months, that's a long time.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if you have the Interpol immediately chasing after you, and you've already boarded a plane, and as soon as you land, he was interrogated, apparently, right?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: Am I correct on that?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that I did read that.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: How is it that he's able to keep the tonal mat after he's been interrogated, after he landed?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it is two more months.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_03: Because it sounds like he was trying to wait for the heat to die down before he started looking for a buyer, perhaps.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, in Mexico, when he lands, who's interrogating him?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: Who's in charge of that?
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I don't know.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, was it like the old school customs where you give him a mordida and then let you go?
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: That's a good question.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I would imagine what it's the 1980s.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: So because they would have confiscated this if this was something, especially of international proportions, uh, the words you're dealing with foreign governments at this point.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like you're just smuggling to sell something across the border or what have you.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: I mean and this is a major at this time artifact.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_03: Well, at this time in Mexico, the uh the market, the black market for stolen artifacts was huge.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it still is, but particularly in the 1980s, I mean this was 1982.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_03: In 1985, you had the heist at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, where those two guys just planned it all out, went in there and stole like a bunch of artifacts, and immediately started trying to get them sold on the black market.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_03: There's a really good movie about that, by the way.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's called Museo.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_03: It was made in uh 2018, and uh it stars what's his name?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: Gael Garcia Bernal.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, he's in it.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a really good movie.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: Is he like the Samuel L.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_02: Jackson of Mexican actors?
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: That guy's in everything.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_03: And uh so you know, in the 80s, there was this market, so much so that if You look into this book called Faking Ancient Mesoamerica, they go into this whole market for fakes.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: So communities, small indigenous communities, started churning out fake artifacts and selling them to European or or whoever collectors, foreigners basically telling Well, this happens also in in in South America.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: I believe um the people who believe in in the whole UFO ancient aliens, like they go down to South America and there's like certain people down there that make these artifacts.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: They know that that these gullible Americans or foreigners are that are looking for quote unquote evidence of ancient aliens will buy this stuff up and bring it back and see here's evidence because such and such farmer out in Colombia or Peru or wherever, you know, found this when they were digging up dirt.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the some of the most famous ones are the Ica stones, right?
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_03: From from Peru.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_03: And they have like dinosaurs on them with like people riding them on sand saddled dinosaurs with like people riding them.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's like the flint stones come to life.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but in stone.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: And in ancient stones and that aren't ancient.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: So you had these farmers that were that were making these, you know, as evidenced by the Ecostones, it ran the gambit, right?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_03: So you had people who were trying to fake legitimate pre-quatemuk artifacts, saying that, well, we found this while digging in our in our land and it's a symbol of Tlaloc.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_03: Meanwhile, you have other people like the case of the Ecostones, where they're carving images of Fred Flintstone writing a Brontosaurus and selling it to people who are taking it back, and now you'll see this stuff on like ancient aliens and all these shitty uh YouTube faux documentaries about UFOs and forbidden history and stuff.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_03: So you know, if you come across any of these, they're fake, dear listeners.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_03: So please don't buy into.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying it was flintstones, but it was flintstones.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, when I was at the uh the British National Museum, in there I mean, this museum is insane, you know, it's massive.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_03: They've got a moai.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_03: They have a literal moai.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_03: If our listeners don't know what a moai is, if you've ever seen the s the giant stone heads from Easter Island, those are referred to as moai.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_03: They have an actual moai near the uh Captain Cook exhibit, which How did it get there, Curly?
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_03: Was it aliens?
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Captain Cook was see that goddamn.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's evidence how they got that's evidence that the aliens were were we're in Easter Island as well as England with you know the connection with Stonehenge and all that.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: So so this Moai that's it's an actual Moai, not a replica.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's a real Moai that that's there.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's a small one, it's not like one of the larger ones, uh, it's a smaller one, but it's pretty impressive.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_03: And the I guess the point I'm trying to make is when I was in the Mesoamerican room, they had Maya Stila on display, but the Maya Stila were replicas, right?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_03: And they were no less impressive than you know the actual stuff that was on display there.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: And it got me thinking, like, well, what's wrong with if a museum is able to repatriate these cultural artifacts back to where they came and just display replicas and then contextualize them and get, you know, still give the history of them.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_03: But personally, as an archaeologist, as an indigenous person, as a chicano, mexicano, I think that if you're going to see examples of a people's cultural inheritance, you should have to go to their place of origin to see them.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: Unless they're on loan, right?
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's obviously exceptions where we could loan out a collection to be toured around the world so that people can appreciate this culture.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_03: But I think holding on to artifacts, especially if we know specifically where they came from and how they were acquired, I think museums need to take a serious look at themselves and think like, how much of this stuff should we, are we morally obligated to return?
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, that brings up a good question in terms of something that's closer to the Mexica community.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: Something that we've kind of looked at over the years, the uh the so-called Panatula Montezuma.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's held in Vienna, Austria, right?
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we have a replica that is uh where in Mexico is it in the INA or it's in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of people they go down there and one of the pictures that they take is you know with this huge headdress that's like what five, six feet wide or something.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a gorgeous replica.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it's it's beautiful.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's really well made.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: And the interesting thing about this pinacho at the Ina is that it's a replica of a supposed, and I say supposed, we'll get into that in here in a minute, but it's a replica of a supposed actual pinacho that it's questioned whether Mote Kusama ever even wore it.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: Because apparently the history of the spinacho that's in Vienna, the original one, was a gift.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_02: What's one one of those supposed gifts that were gifted to Cortes?
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's I don't know if any of this is true.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's sort of the mythos behind it, that it was gifted to Cortes on one of those original missions that Montecusoma sent to appease the Spanish as they're making their way from the coast into Mexico City.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_02: And as the story goes, Cortes, as he was receiving these things, he was sending them back to Spain as a way to justify what he was about to do in Mexico, right?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and so this was evidence of look at all the luxurious goods that they have to offer here.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_02: Besides the gold, they have all these ornamental, you know, artifacts, and well, they wouldn't have called them artifacts, what do you call them?
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_03: Well, they had pieces of jewelry, they had featherwork, yeah, you know, just just all this regalia that regalia, there you go, were allegedly bestowing upon the Spaniards as gifts.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, one of the thoughts behind this is that you know, this was a show of strength.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_03: Like, here is the grandeur of our culture.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_03: These these this is what you've just encountered.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_03: And instead of looking at the these objects and being like, wow, we could learn so much from these people, he was shipping them back to Spain, like there's more where this came from, boys.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: We can just take it.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: And what I'm trying to drive at with this is that a long time ago, back in the late 1880s, there was uh a scholar by the name of Celia Nutal, and she wrote a piece entitled Standard or Headdress in 1888, and it was published in, I believe it's uh uh it looks like it's the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, and then it's just called Papers, Volume 1.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_03: Representation matters, but as indigenous Chigano people, we can't just sit back and wait for mainstream media outlets to make it happen for us.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_03: And nor should we.
• 32:23
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• 32:38
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• 32:49
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• 33:01
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• 33:09
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• 33:17
  SPEAKER_03: Now, on with the show.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: Papers Volume 1, right, 1888 to 1904.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: And this one specifically was published in 1888.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: And in that piece, she gets into the history of the headdress and she explains how uh different people have described it over the years, and she traces back uh the provenance of the headdress, uh, and that's where the story comes from that it was a gift that had been in Europe for a long time, since the very beginning of the invasion of Mexico.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: It was one of those artifacts that just made it through the centuries and is still with us today.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: But the question of whether it's the same headdress or if it's something different altogether is something for you, the listener, to decide because, according to as uh late as 1888, Zelia is saying that when they were looking at this headdress, when they were cataloging it and when they were preparing it for you know making it uh possibly a uh a piece that could be displayed in the museum, they encountered the fact that the entire headdress had deteriorated so badly that the feathers were basically almost non-existent, and all the original gold work had been removed over the years, all the gold, all the ornaments, all the gold threading that was used to piece all the feathers together and hold them in place had all been removed over the years and replaced with uh non-precious metals, and even those were so badly worn that it wasn't worth even displaying the way it was.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so what happened was they ended up restoring it.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: They basically went back and looked at different codices to get an idea of what a headdress would have looked like, and based on these different codices and the images, they and descriptions from the early chroniclers in Mexico, they were able to approximate what this headdress might have looked like back when it was originally uh made.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so, what we have now, even in Vienna, the only thing that actually remained that was original to the headdress was only the frame itself.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_02: Everything else was new at the time.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: It was it had to be refurbished with new materials, new feathers.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: I don't even think they used actual gold in the remaking of this.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was still maybe brass or something or a combination of of different metals to create what we have today in Vienna and the reproduction in Mexico is actually based on a recreation of something that even by the late 19th century people didn't really exactly know what it looked like originally.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the version that sits in the National Museum of Anthropology is a recreation of an approximation of something that they think could have looked like this.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_03: And what's interesting is in I think between 2010 and 2012, representatives of Ina went to Austria and did another restoration because the version that was on display, they determined that it couldn't even be put on display anymore because it was so flimsy and fragile that representatives of Ina working together with Vienna's Museum of Ethnology got together and did another restoration.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_03: So it's like several steps removed at this point from the original from the original.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, a lot has been made about returning this uh alleged headdress, uh the penacho of Mote Cusoma, people call it, back to Mexico.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_03: But in reality, you know, it's really no different than the version that's currently on display.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_03: And the the version that's currently on display is fine.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_03: I guess it would be a symbolic victory, you know, to get it returned.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_03: But even then, there are other, like as we've seen in the case of the uh Tonalamat Albin, there are legitimate codices and artifacts with verifiable provenance that we know are authentic being held in museums and libraries across Europe.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_03: Why aren't we trying to get all of those returned?
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_03: Like, why specifically the pinacho?
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_03: Like, especially knowing that it's it's not even the real pinacho at this point, it's not the original question.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I don't know if our listeners are familiar with a gentleman by the name of Choconochle.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: What's his Spanish name?
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_02: Something Gomara Choconochle Antonio, I think.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm gonna I've I don't I've got his book right here, I could check.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_02: But going back to the 1980s, speaking of the 80s, uh he was by the mid to the late 1980s, Shokonochle was either traveling to Europe or had already moved to uh to Austria, or what is it is does he live in Vienna itself or is it somewhere else?
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um I know he lives in Austria.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if it's specifically Vienna, but he did you know what it's probably is Vienna because he does Danza and holds protests in front of the Museum of Ethnology all the time.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: And he's been doing this since at least nine 1986, 87, probably even before then.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: So we're going back, you know, several decades now that this gentleman has been either traveling to Austria, living there, taking Dan Santes.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: The story that I heard from Sante once uh was that he routinely goes to Mexico to recruit in the Sócalo from different young people that are you know willing to travel, and you know, he he pays their their their travel expenses and and you know puts them up in a place to stay when they get to Vienna and they stay out there for months at a time.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_02: And and so the the dancers that you see out there uh protesting and doing the danzas are are routinely um sort of cycled through.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's never exactly the same group of dancers from any one given time.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think this idea has slowly picked up over the years, and then mexicanistas who have nothing to do with Mexicayo and they just have their own brand of national pride started hearing this notion of a Penacho being abroad and there being some kind of effort that goes back several decades now, and it it's gotten to the point where now the you know museums are involved back and forth in in either restoring it or I think even like 10 years ago there was talk of uh perhaps doing an exchange.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_02: Vienna said, We will give you back the pinacho if you give us back the golden carriage of uh Maximilian.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: Maximilian.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: Mexico's like, nah, we're gonna hold on to that.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, yeah, but even Mexico knows, yeah, I think this is probably worth more than that pinacho you got over there.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_02: So it's yeah, it would just be a symbolic thing, but but you're right.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, instead of trying to recover these symbolic things, why not actually try to recover things that are more meaningful like codices and all other people?
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_03: Why aren't we trying to get the Dresden Codex back?
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_03: Why aren't we trying to get the Paris Codex or the Borges or the other Boturini?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_03: Who has that one?
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you know.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, these are things that, you know, when I was there at the uh the British National Museum, I was seeing things that I had only ever seen photographs of in books.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, the turquoise dual-headed serpent, that's there.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like I was looking at it, like, why is this in London?
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know?
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, this is one of the most iconic pieces from Mesoamerica, and it's in London.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_03: Why aren't we trying to get that back?
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't know, man.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_03: People don't want to hear the truth about the pinacho because you know, like you said, it's it's very symbolic, right?
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's one of those things that I think the symbolism matters more to people than the actual truth behind it.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_03: But the truth matters to me.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_03: And what do you say about the truth, Carly?
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_03: I say that the truth is like medicine, Dr.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_03: Ariano.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_03: It might not always taste good, but it's always good for you.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_03: That was fun.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_03: It was.