Diseño y puesta en marcha de un plan de producción

At the beginning of this section, I briefly explored the possibility of recol- lections of TQ in the traditional histories of various Central and West Mexican linguistic groups other than the Nahua-speakers. Agreeing with a suggestion made by Pedro Carrasco in his 1950 monograph on the pre-Hispanic Cen- tral Mexican Otomi-speakers, I concluded that one possibility might be an Otomi term meaning “feathered serpent” for a “ministro del ídolo de las ciencias” that was listed in a colonial Spanish-Otomi dictionary. The men- tion in the 1582 Relación de Querétaro of Ramos de Cárdenas—published in a more satisfactory new edition in 1981 by Acuña—of an idol worshipped by the Otomi of Xilotepec, called eday (edahi = “wind”), indicated the presence here of at least a version of Ehecatl Quetzalcoatl. These slight notices con- stituted the only tidbits possibly relevant to our inquiry that I had discov- ered—and I am not aware of any further significant evidence that has since come to light that would change the picture.

LI

III. OAXACA

A. THE MIXTECA

In my summary of the ethnohistorical sources from the culturally and politically important Mixteca subregion of western Mesoamerica, I discussed the evidence for the presence here of a deity who clearly was cognate with the Central Mexican Ehecatl Quetzalcoatl (EQ) and who possibly also re- flected some aspects of the Toltec priest/ruler with whom we are concerned. This last possibility was based, above all, on the fragment of the cosmogony of the Mixtec-speaking outpost of Yuta(ti)caha/Coyolapan (Cuilapan) in the Valley of Oaxaca, recorded by Fray Gregorio García in his early-seventeenth- century chronicle—plus the reconstructions of Alfonso Caso of the genealo- gies in different pre-Hispanic and early colonial pictorial histories of a num- ber of the leading dynasties of the Postclassic Mixteca. Caso had based his suggestion of a likely connection between TQ and the EQ cognate 9 Wind on his identification of the former as a fundamental ancestral figure and dynastic founder of various Mixteca polities. Because Caso’s researches were still in progress, I did not investigate the primary Mixteca source material, especially the pictorial histories, as thoroughly as I otherwise would have done.

After 1957, Caso did publish additional papers and monographs inter- preting the Mixteca pictorial histories, including material relevant to our topic (e.g., Caso 1960, 1961, 1965, 1977–1979). Various new reproductions of those that I cited, usually accompanied by commentaries—including those by Caso—have also been issued (e.g., codices Vindobonensis 1963, 1967, 1974, 1992; Zouche-Nuttall 1974, 1975, 1987, 1992; Bodley 1960a and b, 1964; and

Colombino-Becker I 1961, 1964, 1997; Selden Roll 1964; Lienzo Antonio de León

[Caso 1961]). A possibly relevant Mixteca pictorial that was not available in 1957 has since been published: the Lienzo de Ihuitlan (Caso 1961, 1965), a member of the “Tocuijñuhu” or “Coixtlahuaca Group.” As Caso (1961: 242; cf. Smith 1973: 65) suggested, the depiction of a sacred bundle labeled 9 Wind, in a stone enclosure or cave above the place sign of the Chocho/ Mixtec center of Inguinche/Yodzocoo/Coaixtlahuacan, probably designated this deity—although the head atop the bundle appears to be that of the Rain God. Also, in 1981, a facsimile of the 1729 Madrid edition of Fray Gregorio García’s Origen de los Indios de el Nuevo Mundo, with its important fragment of the Cuilapan cosmogony, was published in Mexico by the Fondo de Cultura Económica.

A plethora of new studies and interpretations of the Mixteca pictorial and documentary corpus have appeared during this period (see, especially, Caso 1965, 1977–1979; Smith 1973; Troike 1978; Jansen 1992; Pohl 1994; Pohl and Byland 1994), much too numerous to itemize here. Nearly all have been listed in the annual/biannual “Mesoamerica: Ethnohistory” sections of 2001 INTRODUCTION

LII

the Handbook of Latin American Studies, which I initiated in 1960. A reprint of Barbro Dahlgren’s classic 1954 synthesis of pre-Hispanic Mixteca culture history was published by the state government of Oaxaca in 1979. Signifi- cant new interpretive studies of the Codex Vindobonensis—apart from the commentaries to the new reproductions—have also appeared (e.g., Furst 1978; Melgarejo Vivanco 1980; Jansen 1982; Hochleitner, Paula, and Krumbach 1987). All of these studies and commentaries recognize the im- portance of the deity/personage 9 Wind but differ somewhat in their specific interpretations.

In 1974, as noted above, I presented a paper—“The Deity 9 Wind ‘Ehecatl Quetzalcoatl’ in the Mixteca Pictorials,” in the session “Mixtec Codices: Problems and Progress,” organized by Nancy Troike, at the XLI Interna- tional Congress of Americanists, Mexico City, September 2–7, 1974—which was published in 1978. It was the first study to focus specifically on 9 Wind. I tried to specify and comment on all of his significant appearances in the Mixteca pictorial corpus (cf. Caso 1977–1979, II: 60–67). I also discussed the Caso hypothesis—which he had further developed in some of his post- 1957 publications—of 9 Wind’s role as divine ancestor of Mixteca royalty, and I constructed a detailed genealogical chart to illustrate it. I concluded that, in spite of its somewhat hypothetical nature due principally to alterna- tive interpretations of some of the marital and genealogical relationships depicted in the relevant pictorials, the chart might well indicate that 9 Wind “Stone Skull,” the founder of the First Dynasty of Ñuutnoo/Tlillantonco (Tilantongo), the most important Mixteca Alta political center, was consid- ered to have been the direct lineal descendant, in the fourth generation, of the first 9 Wind. As for the latter’s possible relationship with TQ of Tollan, I left that somewhat open, suggesting that it deserved further investigation. Recently, Maarten Jansen (1996, 1997a, 1997b, 1998) has advanced quite a different hypothesis, one that places TQ squarely in the Mixteca. He identi- fies him with a personage with the calendric name 4 Jaguar, who plays a prominent role in the codices Bodley, Zouche-Nuttall, and Colombino-Becker

I. I have criticized Jansen’s hypothesis in a forthcoming paper (Nicholson

n.d.a).

B. ZAPOTECAPAN

Although considerable time has elapsed, I am not aware of the emer- gence of new evidence that would necessitate any significant modification of my discussion of the Oaxacan Zapotecapan section of the dissertation. Con- cerning the wall paintings of Mitla that feature various depictions of a deity that is iconographically close to the Central Mexican EQ ((Nicholson 1957a: 208), I would stand by my view that the priesthood of this great shrine “simply had adopted this variant of the widespread Mixteca-Puebla style, along with certain Central Mexican/Mixteca religious conceptions” (cf. Pohl 2001 INTRODUCTION

LIII

1999). Since 1957, I have published various papers focusing on the Mixteca- Puebla stylistic/iconographic tradition and the various problems connected with it (e.g., Nicholson 1960 [reprinted 1966, 1977, 1981], 1961, 1982, 1996; Nicholson and Quiñones Keber 1994a and b). Also, it is worth noting that two new editions of Burgoa’s Geográfica descripción were published in Mexico, the first, in 1989, by the Editorial Porrúa (Biblioteca Porrúa, 97– 98), with a brief introduction by Barbro Dahlgren, and the second, in 1997, a facsimile of the 1674 edition, by the Grupo Editorial Miguel Angel Porrúa.

IV. CHIAPAS

My discussion in this section focused on the Tzeltal/Tzotzil Votan legend of Highland Chiapas, as recorded, quite imperfectly, in two versions. One was a brief paraphrase in Spanish, supposedly based in a manuscript in Tzeltal (?), by the seventeenth-century Dominican Fray Francisco Nuñez de la Vega in his 1702 ecclesiastical chronicle. The other, also putatively derived from a version in Tzeltal, was somewhat diversely paraphrased, based on different copies, by two late-eighteenth-century writers, Pablo Félix Cabrera and Ramón de Ordoñez y Aguiar—and, later, by Brasseur de Bourbourg. As I emphasized in my discussion, the romantic, mystical approach of those who recorded the Votanic legend has created serious difficulties for modern scholars in their attempt to evaluate its authenticity and possible relevance to the Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl of Tollan Tale. A reappraisal of the “Votan problem” by a scholar thoroughly conversant with Tzeltal/Tzotzil ethnohistory/ethnography would be very much in order. In the meantime, it should be noted that a new edition of Nuñez de la Vega’s 1702 Constituciones Diocesanas del Obispado de

Chiapa, the prime source on Votan, prepared by María del Carmen León

Cazares and Mario Humberto Ruz, was published in 1988 by the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Centro de Estudios Mayas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.