Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Throwback Thursday: Dia De Los Muertos is Subversive Spirituality!

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Throwback Thursday: Dia De Los Muertos is Subversive Spirituality! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:00
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• 0:25
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• 0:33
  SPEAKER_04: And now on with the show.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: You must excuse me.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: But you remember lesson.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_04: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to yet another episode of Tales from Ostlantis.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_04: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_04: Andrew Benariano Tlacateka.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_04: So what's going on, man?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_03: You good?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_05: Just Yeah, actually, it's uh since last we spoke, it's the temperature's gotten a lot better over here.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_05: It's cooled down to a balmy 99 degrees.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_05: Damn.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_05: We did get two days of rain, at least in in my part of the hood, uh two straight days of a little bit of rain one day, and then the next day we we got a solid like at least 30-minute downpour, which is really nice.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_05: Couple days off.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_05: So ever since the temperature dropped, and I think it's gonna hit triple digits again in the coming days, but it's been it's been nice for at least maybe a week now.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_05: That's good to hear.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_04: It was like 95 today.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_04: It was really hot.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_04: I'm jealous.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, it was a nice crisp 95.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_04: And it's it's dope when it rains, but of course the problem with the rain, at least here, is all the damn mosquitoes, man.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_04: Like they just come out of the woodwork.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_05: You know, we haven't had a problem with mosquitoes all summer, I guess, because it's too hot.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_05: Wow.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_05: And with flies, too.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_05: Usually we get a lot of flies, and mosquitoes and flies have been absent, and uh that kind of worries me too.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_05: I'm like, eh, what's going on?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_05: Is it part of that whole climate change I've been hearing about?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_05: Probably.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_05: That that hoax that famous hoax of climate change.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_04: Well, yeah, man.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_04: Well, what evolutionary you know, benefit do mosquitoes serve?
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_04: Like most animals and insects serve a very specific purpose in the the chain of life, the circle of life, you know, like your evolved, your evolutionary adaptations serve a specific purpose.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_04: I have no idea what the hell purpose mosquitoes could possibly serve.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I'm I'm no scientist, so don't take my word as gospel.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_05: But but you know, mosquitoes, if you think about it, they bite you, they draw blood, and then they go bite another person, and then they are kind of mixing the blood up.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_05: So mosquitoes in the evolutionary scale, I would presume are responsible for making sure that humans by and large continue to remain the same species by mixing all our blood together.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_05: What do you think about that idea?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: That's uh that's an interesting hypothesis there, Dr.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_03: Oliano.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_03: I wonder if anyone's uh followed that.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, any listeners out there who know uh stuff about mosquitoes, please shoot us uh a message on Twitter, Facebook, email, what have you.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_04: So, on today's episode, I'm pretty excited because we're in August, and August, if you think about it, I was thinking about this, is really heavy on resistance.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_04: If you think about it, indigenous resistance, it's a heavy month in August because you've got the fall of Tenochtitlan, August 13th, you've got the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, that's uh August 10th.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we call it uh Pueblo Revolt Day here in New Mexico.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_04: You've got August 29th, Chicano Moratorium.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_04: Right, right.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_04: So it's like uh I don't know, there's a lot of cool stuff that happened in uh in August, you know, resistance resistance-wise, as far as indigenous resistance goes.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_04: So, and also August, we are in the month of Mikailwit leading into Wei Mika Ilwit.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_04: And if you don't know what these months are in the Mexican calendar, well, we're here to tell you a little bit about what those months are, and at the root of these I'm bringing it back now is indigenous resistance and how this resistance led to a tradition that we all know and love now in Chicano Landia, in Atlantes, and in Mexico, as Day of the Dead, the A de los Muertos here in the States or the A de Muertos in Mexico.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_04: Indigenous resistance is our existence.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_04: So strap yourselves in, dear listeners, as we get into subversive spirituality.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_04: The Mexican tradition known as the A de Muertos, Day of the Dead, has slowly spread from indigenous communities in southern Mexico into the mainstream US consciousness.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_04: In the days leading up to November 1st, popular media and businesses are flooded with images of calaveras, sugar skulls, marigolds, and beautifully decorated altars.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_04: And if the global success of the animated film Coco is any indication, Day of the Dead is going to firmly remain a part of the cultural landscape in the United States and across the world.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_04: But where did this indigenous celebration of ancestor veneration come from?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_04: And why does it coincide with the Christian celebrations of All Hollow Tide, known separately as All Saints Day and All Souls Day?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_04: Well, long before the arrival of Europeans, some of the indigenous Mesoamerican traditions of honoring the dead were celebrated with two specific feasts, Mikailwit, the feast of the dead, and We Mikailwit, the great feast of the dead.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_04: These feasts were celebrated in early August through mid-September.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, we are currently in the month of Mikailwit right now, as it began on August 8th, or the day Chikome Koska Kwautli in the ancestral Mexica calendar.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_04: These celebrations were dedicated to honoring the dead through dance, song, and offerings of food and drink.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_04: Altars and burials were adorned with marigolds, a sacred flower thought to attract the spirits so that they might enjoy the offerings left in their memory.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_04: Today, these celebrations have been blended with Catholic traditions and take place on All Saints' Day and All Souls Day.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_04: Many think that Mikailwit and We Mikailwit were absorbed into the All Hollow Tide under the direction of the Catholic Church, as these Christian holidays also involve honoring the dead.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_04: Unfortunately, this popular claim is often repeated without any evidence to really back it up.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_04: For example, a column about the A de Muertos published on the website, We Are Your Voice Mag states.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_05: In an attempt to convert the natives to Catholicism, the Spanish colonizers moved the celebration to November 1st and 2nd, all Saints' Day, which is when we celebrate it currently.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_04: But is this how it really happened?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_04: The process of combining older rituals into another newer foreign religion is known as syncretism.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_04: And it is intended to help ease religious conversion.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_04: While Catholic priests often employed syncretism as a strategy of conversion in the New World, this is not really what happened in regards to the festivals of Mika Ilwit and Wei Micah Ilwit in relation to the Edam Muertos.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, it was kind of the exact opposite.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_04: To better understand the origins of contemporary Day of the Dead celebrations, we need to examine their Mesoamerican roots.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_05: The Codex Teleriano Remensis describes the feast of Mikailwit on Folio IIR as During this feast they made offerings to the dead, placing food and drink on their tombs, which they did for four years, for they believed that during all this time the souls had not yet gone to their place of rest, according to their belief.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_05: And thus they buried them dressed with all their clothing and shod.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_05: For they believed that until they arrived at the place where the souls went at the end of the four years, they had much toil, cold, and weariness because they had to go through places full of snow and thorns.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_05: And that is why when an important person died, they also killed and buried a slave at the same time, so that he could serve him.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_05: The Mishtek, Sabotech, and Mish people honored their dead in a way almost like the Spaniards, for they built a tomb covered in black and placed much food around it.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_05: The way of burying the dead was just like ours.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_05: The feet of the dead pointed toward the east, and after the bodies had been eaten away, they unearthed the bones from the tomb and put them in ossuaries made of mortar in the patios of their temples.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_05: This was done by the Mishtex and Sapotex, for the Mexicans did not bury them but cremated the bones, and the Mexicans took this practice from the Otomi people or the Chichimecs, who were the most ancient inhabitants of the land.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_04: Have you picked up your Mexica calendar for the year 12 Flint?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_04: Or how about a paperback copy of the four disagreements?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_04: Just visit talesfromostlantis.com for all the latest merchandise and show some love for your favorite podcast.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_04: That's talesfromostlantis.com for all the latest merchandise.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_04: Now, back to the show.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_04: Continuing, the Codex Tilariano Romenses also describes the feast of Wei Mikailwit on Folio 2V.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_05: During this month, they once again celebrated the Feast of the Dead, and it was bigger than the preceding one, for the name Wei Micailwit means Great Feast of the Dead.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_05: The last three days of this month, all the living fasted in honor of the dead, and they went out to play in the country as a way of celebrating.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_05: During this month, the Marquis Don Hernando Cortes ended his war with Mexico after he had conquered it completely.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_05: Each year, when they celebrated the Feast of the Dead, while the priests made sacrifices, everyone, each in his own house, climbed onto the terraced roofs of their houses, and looking toward the north at night, recited great prayers to the dead, each one to his ancestors, and speaking aloud, they said, Come quickly, for we are awaiting you.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_05: The slaves that they killed when the Lords died were to serve them there in the labors they encountered.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_04: The writings of Diego Durán reveal that these Mesoamerican feasts were not moved under the direction of Catholic priests, but were hidden within the feasts of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day by the indigenous people themselves.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_04: This subversive act of resistance was intended to fool the Catholic priests into thinking that the Mesoamericans had indeed submitted to Christianity.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_04: Here we see Dudan's complaint.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_05: I have already mentioned that the first reason for the name Feast of the Little Dead was due to the offerings made for deceased children.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_05: I wish to refer to something I have seen take place on the day of all hollows and on the day of the faithful departed.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_05: In some towns, offerings are made on all hollows, and further offerings take place on the day of the faithful departed.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_05: When I asked why offerings were made on the day of all hollows, I was told that this was in honor of the children, it being an ancient custom which had survived.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_05: I inquired whether offerings were also made on the day of the faithful departed, and the answer was yes, in honor of adults.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_05: I was sorry to hear of these things because I saw clearly that the feast of the little dead and the feast of the adults were still being celebrated.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_05: On the first, I saw people offering chocolate, candles, fowl, fruit, great quantities of seed and food.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_05: On the next day I saw the same being done.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_05: Though this feast fell in August, I suspect that it is an evil simulation, which I do not dare affirm, the pagan festival has been passed to the Feast of All Hollows in order to cover up the ancient ceremony.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_04: And that's from Diego Duran's Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar from page 442.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_04: In time, this celebration took on the name the E de Muerpos.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_04: Personally, I find it inspiring to know that my ancestors used every means of resistance at their disposal in order to navigate and negotiate and ultimately survive their way through the Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_04: Unfortunately, American representations of Day of the Dead have become a little problematic, as the kids like to say.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_04: Current celebrations of Day of the Dead in the United States tend to take on a pop culture aspect, and many of the ritual aspects are being lost.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, some people have even taken to calling it the Mexican Halloween.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_04: Pro tip, if you're doing this, just fucking stop, because that ain't what it is.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_04: And while their hearts might be in the right place, I implore non-Mexicans to take the time to learn the history of this celebration.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_04: We can all celebrate Day of the Dead in a way that both honors our ancestors and is respectful of the cultures that created it.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_04: Our ancestors deserve this much.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_05: I can see it now for uh Mexican Halloween kids dressing up as Namor.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_05: Or is that how you say Namor?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_05: Namor Namor.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, I bet you Namor's gonna be like the uh Namortzin.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna start calling him.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_04: Namortzin.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_04: I started seeing hashtags Namor Presente.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_04: So Presented I mean I hope that I hope that movie does well, and I hope that I I'm cautiously optimistic, let's just put it that way.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_04: But in uh in this episode, I I referred to the Book of the Gods and the Rites of the and the Ancient Calendar by Fray Diego Durán, and I think this is one of the more important books that are out there that help to understand the levels to which our ancestors resisted and how they navigated these processes.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_04: Because the whole point of this book, the Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar, you know, Duran, who, you know, the guy's a huge asshole, but he's really useful for historians, for ethnohistorians, because the reason he wrote all of this stuff was he wanted to record everything as accurately as possible as a tool to other priests to basically say, look, if they're doing this, this is what they're actually doing, you know, or this is how they hide their beliefs and how they pretend to have converted.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_05: He wasn't doing it because he was trying to preserve the customs and culture of our ancestors.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_05: He was doing this so that he could know when in his mind indigenous people were circumventing um the Catholic dogma that was being forced down their throats.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_04: So I want to read it.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_04: This is like the opening paragraph, just to let our listeners know this is what this guy's intention was in writing this book.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_04: He begins I am moved, O Christian reader, to begin the task of writing this work with the realization that we who have been chosen to instruct the Indians will never reveal the true God to them until the heathen ceremonies and false cults of their counterfeit deities are extinguished, erased.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_04: Here I shall set down a written account of the ancient idolatries and false religion with which the devil was worshipped until the holy gospel was brought to this land.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_04: And this is the most fucked up part.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_04: Fields of grain and fruit trees do not prosper on uncultivated rocky soil covered with brambles and brush, unless all roots and stumps are eradicated.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, that's why it's kind of like saying get them get them while they're young.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 21:13
  unknown: Yeah.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_05: Indoctrinate them early so that you know you can uh sort of mold them as you go along, and by the time that they're adults, it's uh it's difficult to do something else or to think differently because all that's all you know.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_05: That's the way that you've been brought up.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_05: And that for you know, it's sadly that's how most of our our you know fellow Chicano Mehicano people are.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_05: You know, they've been brought up to think that we will whether it's Catholicism or some other uh denomination of Christianity or or in today's day and age, other religions um that have nothing to do with with our indigenous ancestral ways, they've been brought up to think that that's that's the correct way, that's the true way, that's the only way, because that's all they know.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_05: And it's very difficult to do away with it, to to remove yourself from those beliefs and those traditions because there's a lot of family pressure, there's a lot of you know societal pressure to conform and to just go along to get along.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, exactly.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_04: And and even more um nefarious, right?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_04: Uh to get at what you were just talking about.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_04: So during the conquest, one of the main if you if you research what was going on with the Tlashkalteca, that's exactly what they were doing.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_04: What you were just saying, they were getting a hold of the youth, they were indoctrinating the youth, and then they were using the kids as spies, basically.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_04: And they were had the kids turning in their elders and the people who would run ceremony or the people who were preserving certain songs, because the kids are, you know, they're like these new converts, right?
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_04: They're gung ho.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_04: This is the real way, this is the truth, and they're just so eager to to spread these ideas that they immediately just started turning on their own people and and handling.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_05: It's almost like being under communism or fascism, yeah, which is what a lot of people in this country are are trying to take us toward that kind of society.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_05: Uh, a lot of people who have become right wing extremists want to take us to that.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_05: And there's some on the left too that that have these same kinds of um dispositions, but right now the the biggest threat is coming from the right wing, and absolutely a lot of the laws that are taking shape throughout the country, especially here in Texas where I live, are very draconian and very fascinating.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_05: And it sounds a lot like what they were doing to our ancestors way back when.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I like to think of um an analogy.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_04: Uh are you familiar with the um uh what were those guys called?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_04: The the Potter's house?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_04: Or who were the other guys?
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_04: Uh Victory Love, Victory Outreach.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, right.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_05: The victory, yeah.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_04: Anything with the word victory in it was gonna be an issue.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_05: Or truth.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_05: Victory or truth.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_05: Whenever you see those words or freedom, victory, truth, and freedom, it's the exact opposite.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_04: But I just remember they mainly targeted, and I don't even know if they're still around, I imagine they are, uh, young cholos is what I remember.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_04: That was my experience with them.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_05: That was that was that was a point of it.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and to save the souls of of the lost young Cholos, Chicano Mexicanos who had gone astray from you know, living in the streets and doing that that life, doing that dirt.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_04: Um and and they were like, you know, these Tlachkalteca kids, because they were just so eager, you know, born again, so full of fire that they had the absolute truth, man.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, they were also former thugs, right, from the hood.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_04: So these guys, they would walk up to us on the street and start trying to preach to us, and you know I wasn't having it, plus I was like a smart ass kid, and you could see like their thug start to come out almost immediately.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_04: They're like, Well, what do you mean you don't believe in Jesu Cristo?
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_04: Hey, hugs, not thugs.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah, man, it's uh it's scary what's going on right now because yeah, you if you read Diego Durán, you could be like, damn, did the did the Republican Party write this book?
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_04: Because it sounds really really similar.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_04: One of my favorite uh examples, I'll just return to this book one more time because this is probably one of my favorite examples from the book at how our ancestors resisted.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_04: Keeping with that overall theme of August being the month of resistance.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_04: I want to give a shout out to all the resistors.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_04: So here's uh Diego Duran.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_04: This is from page 409, and he's talking about how indigenous how the Mexica took their names from the calendar.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_04: He says, Since we have decided to give advice to our ministers, let nothing be omitted.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_04: Let the Reverend Fathers know that together with the Christian name, the Indians use the name of the ancient sign under which the person was born, and it is a second name.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_04: An example, if a man were born under the sign the sign of a snake, and at baptism he was Christian Peter, his name is Peter Koat, which is the name of the sign under which he came into this world.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_04: And if he was born under the sign of lizard, his name is John Quetzpal, one name joined to the other, and so it goes with the rest.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_04: May God our Lord give light to his ministers against the evil enemy and adversary, the devil.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_04: May he give us understanding regarding all superstitions so that we may destroy the demon.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_04: God help us to understand this salad, this mixture with which they have made of their ancient superstitions and of our divine law and ritual.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_04: So he's very much against synchronism, right?
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's what I'm getting from that.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_04: He's like, no, no, no, no.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_04: There's not gonna be any blending, there's not gonna be any mixing it together.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_05: Now that you bring that up, I did want to mention that uh currently there's there's a a trend in in scholarly works to move away from using the word syncretism and using the word hybridity instead.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_05: Because syncretism sort of implies that there's a mutual consent that two things are coming together and forming a new thing.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and hybridity just means something that is happening organically, whether it's um through a process of mutual understanding or one that's being forced, but it's a hybridization that's taking place, and so instead of using syncretism, uh scholars are now beginning to use hybridization instead.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_05: So I think what you're saying is that he was opposed to syncretism, and I'm sure a lot of the Meshika elders were also opposed to it, but to survive, they had to hybridize the culture.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_04: That's an excellent way of putting it, my friend.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_04: And what choice do you have, right, at that point?
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_04: You already fought the war, so now you're just trying to negotiate the results of the survival war.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, survival.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_04: You gotta show you.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_05: And to continue to resist in the face and the and in the onslaught of this force that is imposing itself on you and your culture and colonizing not only your land, but it's colonizing your your your physical space, it's colonizing your your body, your physical body, but it's also colonizing your mind as well.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, you had that that hierarchy of of the racial casta, but it was more important to identify either as a cristiano or as a or as a heathen, right?
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_05: As a non-Cristiano.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I can't.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_04: I could tell you that going through uh my family tree, I did find an ancestor and had her name, and then next to it in parentheses it said India Cristiana.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_04: So they were definitely making note of uh who was who was converted.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_05: And you can still find vestiges of of that idea in in contemporary Mexican, maybe not so much, but you could hear it like at least 20 years ago, where people would say when something happened, oh lástima or something, referring to person, and Christian or Cristiano just is synonymous with just saying a person, a human being.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_05: It doesn't mean necessarily that they were looking at it from a religious standpoint, it just came to mean someone who was a civilized individual in a sense.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_05: Um but I didn't want to go back to to what you were saying uh well when you were reading out of Duran's book about people taking a a uh Spanish name or a Christian name and then continuing to have their indigenous name.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_05: You know, and I know that there's people out there that still have their indigenous name that's been that survived 500 years of colonization.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_05: I'm thinking here of like Emma Tenayuka, the famous uh you know civil rights icon here in Texas.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_05: Uh South Texas, right?
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_05: Um, she was one of the earliest uh radical, I mean, she probably didn't call herself a Chicana, right?
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_05: But she was one of the radical Mexican Americans for the time.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_05: And her last name, Tenayuca, I mean, that's a place name within the Valley of Mexico, Tenayuca.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_05: Wasn't it like a town or something that was like around the lake of uh uh uh what's it called?
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_05: Texcoco.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_05: Texcoco.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah um and then I'm thinking also people who still retain the name you know Montesuma, Moctezuma, or what have you, right?
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_05: So there's still there's still it still exists, but not to the degree that that it it could have been, or or you know, to my to my liking should have been, you know, like why isn't there more of that that still exists?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_05: Why why what was I mean I get that colonization was this force that superimposed itself, but it could have also if it had been a different way where it would have been more syncretized instead of hybridized, we could have all be, you know, walking around with yeah, maybe a Spanish first name, but maybe an indigenous last name instead of having these Spanish names.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_04: Well, one of the points that um, and I don't remember if it's Durán or one of the other priests, uh, but one of the points they make, it's probably Duran, um, is that publicly around Espanoles, they would use their Juan or you know, whatever, Miguel, but in their communities, they would only go by their Nahuatl name, like the the day sign name.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_04: And it's one of the things that really pissed the priests off because they would be like, man, they we gave them we baptized them with this name, and they play this game, this outward appearance of having accepted it and playing along, but when they're with their own community, that name goes out the window and they go, they revert back to using the name that they would normally have used, and it really upsets the priests.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_04: They uh they even talk about how some communities, you know, we assigned them a uh a feast day, a saints feast for this community to celebrate.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_04: And the leaders of the community get together and they're like, Well, actually, we really like this other saint.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_04: Can we have him instead?
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_04: And the the priest would get all excited, like, oh hell yeah, these guys are digging it.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_04: Like they're they're down, and so then they would assign them, and Dudan is like, God damn it, they tricked you because they just picked a saint's feast day that was close to one of their indigenous ceremonies that was really important to them, and so that they get to continue celebrating that in the open, right?
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_04: Right under your nose, but under the veneer of having converted to Catholicism.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_05: Well, you know, that's that that's how Dansa Conchera emerges.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_05: That's how it survived because they created these hermandades and confraternidades where they adopted uh certain saints uh based on their hometown, but these saints were really, you know, other you know indigenous entities or deities or however you want to phrase it, right?
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_05: And so that's that's one of the ways that dansa was also a form of resistance and a form of revitalization, as I talk about in the article that I wrote that was published earlier this year, late last year, early this year.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_05: So oh right.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_05: So going back to the last names, I know we're kind of veering off a little bit off topic, but we'll get back to it.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_05: But uh, I remember um we had this discussion many years ago where a lot of our last names that we have today, I mean, that's not true for all Chicano Mexicanos, but for a good chunk uh uh of us, uh we received our last names because at some point our ancestors were also enslaved.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_05: This is something this is part of the conversation that uh often gets sort of lost and subdued and dismissed because it's been what 500 years?
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_05: And after 500 years, you know, so much has happened, you know, especially after the independence of Mexico, and especially after the Mexican Revolution, the history books.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_05: Not that they get rewritten in a sense that they're um making stuff up, but some things get more attention than others because there's only so much material that you can cover.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_05: As a history professor, I get that all the time, you know.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_05: It's it's really difficult to really um teach everything that that you think a student should know or that there is to know because you have a limited bandwidth for teaching and for all that.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but but that's one one of the ways that that I think a lot of our people don't realize, especially like when they're tracing their last name and stuff, and they're like, oh, I got this coat of arms that from you know, that's the I trace my name back to some Spanish blah blah blah blah blah.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_05: And while I'm not denying the fact that they they possibly have you know European ancestry, Spanish ancestry, but they've they failed to also realize that a lot of our people were branded by the colonizers' name when they were enslaved, whether uh under the uh uh repartimiento system, whether it was under the hacienda system, uh and other very the mission system, like for example, in in northern Mexico and South Texas and New Mexico and and California, a lot of indigenous people were were branded with Spanish names through through those systems.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, just through um mass baptismal too, right?
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_04: Whoever the captains the captain in charge, they would just baptize you in the name of Don whoever, and now all of a sudden all of your descendants have this last name that you're gonna trace to Spain, but it's because of this other dude.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, but not because maybe you have any ancestors that had that name.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_05: But so bringing it back to to the topic, why why do you think it's important?
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_05: Um like what is what is the main argument that that we're trying to say here?
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_05: Because there is something that we want to say, and we're not gonna get to everything that there is to say about this topic, we're gonna save some of that for a future episode.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_05: But what is what is the the the if the main takeaway that that our listeners uh if you were to condense it down to a couple of sentences that that can that they can sort of latch on to and say, okay, yeah, I get what you're saying now.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_04: So I think for me personally, what I would like, what I would hope people come away with is that we have this tendency to give the Spaniards, the priests especially, more credit than they deserve.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_04: Like we have this idea that it was the priests who were so clever that they tricked us into adopting these things by mixing them with ours.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that removes a lot of the agency from our ancestors who were figuring out their own ways, these subversive tactics on how are we gonna negotiate this, how are we gonna survive, how are we gonna make sure that what we have continues on into the future.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_04: And so just this shift in perspective of understanding like, well, hold on.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_04: No, it was our ancestors who who were hiding this stuff.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_04: Because they knew they they knew what was going on, you know.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_04: And if you look at Mesoamerica, what was going on here, I mean, this was like Game of Thrones level, like political machinations and maneuverings.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_04: Our people were intelligent people.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_04: They knew how to navigate their lives, you know, because when you have two competing empires and you're competing with each other for resources and land, you have to be intelligent.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_04: You have to know how to negotiate and work with other people.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_04: And I think we lose that when we just credit everything to the Spaniards, right?
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_04: We do this because this is what the Spaniards tricked us into doing.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_04: It's like, no, that's that's not exactly what happened.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, sure, I'm sure there are instances of that where the Spaniards were the ones who were like, we're going to fuse these two things together to our benefit, but just as often, if not more often, it was indigenous peoples who had figured out, like, we need to survive, we need to make sure that this survives.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_05: Well, I mean, all you have to do is go to uh contemporary indigenous communities in Mexico that still, you know, by and large have retained their culture, even though it's been um changed over the centuries, it's it's evolved, it's it's uh transitioned, it's transformed, um, but it's still their indigenous culture.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_05: And what what they if you go to those communities, you'll notice that yeah, a lot of them are by and large predominantly you know Catholic-oriented communities because of colonization, but the ceremonies that they conduct, I'm I'm I'm thinking of like the Yaqui, for example, you know, when they're when they have their their uh Easter celebration, the big Easter celebration celebration.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's a Catholic celebration by name, right?
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_05: But if you're looking at what what's going on, I mean it's basically an indigenous ceremony dressed up with Catholic uh uh dress.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_05: The trappings of Catholicism, trappings of of something that that the colonizer, that the the missionaries that the priests can identify and say, we've done our job here.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_05: Let's pat ourselves on the back.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_05: We we have successfully colonized these people.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_05: We can now and and something that that a lot of people also don't understand is that especially you know the anglophone uh um portion of of America doesn't understand about the Hispano uh phone uh America is that Spain wasn't necessarily trying to completely destroy and commit genocide against all indigenous people, only those that they deemed as a threat or those that dared to resist and fight back in a military fashion.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_05: They really wanted to convert people so that they could not only convert them, because once you could once you could convert someone to to Catholicism, you could now say that they had been quote unquote saved and now they were part, they could be happy Spanish um um members of society, not with all the full rights and privileges that uh Castilian would have had, but they could at least say that these are now subjects of the crown and we have authority over them, and not only that, because we have authority over them, this is the a place that we can now say we control on the map.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, getting back to what these freaking lunatics were wanting from the very beginning was this whole idea of creating a new Jerusalem in Mexico and bringing about the second coming of Christ and all of this crazy stuff.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_04: It was like this doomsday cult that landed in Mexico.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, for the listeners that don't get the references, go back and listen to the episodes that we did on La Virgen de Guadalupe.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, we go into that in those episodes.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_04: Please do.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_04: One of the things about um the celebrations that are are uh discussed in the the codex uh Teleriano Remensis, I'm probably butchering that.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, who cares?
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_04: But who cares?
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_04: What I think is really cool, and you read this excerpt, is how they say that you know, every year everyone climbed onto the roof of their house, yeah, exactly.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_04: And shouted to the north at night for their ancestors to come back that's so badass, man.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_04: I I think I think it would restart that.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_05: That was that was a a tradition that they did for various celebrations because I remember reading I forget what source it was, where they also discuss um the Mexica going uh on top of the roof of their homes for the new fire ceremony as well.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_05: That was something that was also done.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_05: So this idea of climbing the roof and and celebrating, you know, uh on the rooftop, that that's our people.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_05: We started that shit.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_05: Word up.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_05: So next time you want to celebrate, uh do it on the roof.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_05: Yep.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_05: Well, we don't have we don't well, at least not in Texas.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_05: In New Mexico, it's a little bit easier with your flat roof roofs.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_05: Not here in Texas.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_04: But one of the things that that people always bring up to me is about, you know, well, Dia de Muertos, Dia de los Muertos, it's so, you know, it's colonized now because you know, all these white people are doing it, and it's turned into like this kichi pop culture thing, and we need to decolonize the and I'm my answer is always, well, maybe we can celebrate it during Mika Ilwit and Wei Mika Ilwit, and just have it as a separate thing.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_04: Like Dia de Muertos ain't going anywhere, it's its own thing right now, and it's a legitimate celebration, and I enjoy it, I participate.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_04: But if we want to talk about, you know, reclaiming something, taking something back, well, you know, we have we have the the codices right here that tell us how to do it and when to do it.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_04: So maybe we we just do that and we keep it on the DL and we don't let anybody else come in and take it over.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_05: This is kind of like what I said also in in the Guadalupe, which I think it was the second one where I say that where I push back against this notion that Abril Guadalupe equals Tonantin Batlique, and I'm like, no, absolutely not.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_05: Just because you've made it that way doesn't mean that that's what it was.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_05: And I and I think one of the things that I said in that episode was that if those people that keep trying to conflate La Virgen with Quatlique were serious about celebrating Quatlique, they would actually try to find the the day that Quatlique was actually honored and celebrated and have the celebration on that day and not on the 12th of December when La Virgen is celebrated.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_05: And that's it, that's kind of what you're arguing here, right?
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_05: Same thing.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, exactly.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_04: Like, don't don't fake the funk.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_04: You just get back to that root.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_04: That's the same route that Duran was bragging about destroying and ripping things out by, you know, because it made the land bad.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_04: Just get back to that root.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_04: It's all there for us.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_04: Our ancestors are waiting.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_05: They tried, they tried to yank us from the roots, but they didn't know that we were seeds, or how does that go?
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_05: I like the way you say it.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_04: Which one?
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_04: The uh oh, the the tales from Aslantis version?
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they tried to bury us, they just didn't know we were assholes.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_04: Well, good talk, man.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_04: Uh glad to hear you're doing well.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_04: I'm glad the temperature's getting down a couple of degrees.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, hopefully we still have the whole month of August to deal with.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_05: Temperature isn't gonna start going down until the first week of September.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_05: Second week of September, around that that time.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_05: So we still have some heat.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_05: The heat is on, my brother.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_05: It is.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you know what I like to say, man.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_04: What's that, homie?
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_04: The the truth.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_04: It's like medicine.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_04: Doesn't always taste good, but it's always good for you.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_04: Butcha! Dimoitas.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_02: This is ground zero of the European invasion, a Catholic church built on the ruins of an Aztec temple in Mexico City.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_02: David Carrasco, a Mexican-American historian of religion at Harvard Divinity School, is on the very spot where in 1521 Spanish conquistadors slaughter 40,000 native warriors, and the last Aztec emperor surrenders.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_02: It is the end of nearly a century of Aztec rule.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_02: The Spanish force Aztec workers to destroy their own temple and with its stones construct the church in its place.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_02: Spaniards knew that the site itself was sacred, and therefore they wanted to build their church on the same site.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_02: This church marks the military defeat of the Aztecs.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_02: But it is also the place where the battle for people's souls begins.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you for listening to Tales from Oslantis, a project of the Chimalli Institute of Mesoamerican Arts.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_04: If you enjoy the show, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_04: You can do this by visiting TalesFromAstlantis.com and clicking support the podcast.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_04: Your continued support will help keep the podcast ad free and independent.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_04: Until next time, Dimo Itase.