I

n 1579, a son was born to a well-to-do indigenous

family living in the town of Amaquemecan, New

Spain (encompassing today’s Mexico). His parents

gave him the Christian name Domingo, but he was

also sometimes called Chimalpahin, meaning

‘He Ran with a Shield’ in their language, Nahuatl.

It had been his great-great-grandfather’s name.

The boy had a happy childhood, growing up in

a four-sided complex of adobe rooms surrounding a bright,

flower-filled patio where much of the women’s daily work of

spinning, weaving and tortilla-making was done. Outside the

home lay fields of corn and beans in which the men laboured.

Chimalpahin’s family was a proud one: they were related to the

nobility of the kingdom of Chalco, of which Amaquemecan

had been a part. Chalco, though at one time conquered by the

Aztecs of nearby Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City), had grown

to be that people’s close ally. Together they dominated the cen-

tral valley of Mexico, and the Aztecs governed much of the sur-

rounding land as well. In the 1580s, Amaquemecan might have

seemed like a backwater, but Chimalpahin was well aware that it

had been a player in the days of the Aztec empire.

Chimalpahin loved his grandmother, who had been a child

in the 1530s, the period right after the Spaniards first came.

She had stories to tell, and she found a listener in her grand-

son. She described the old days: the feasts of trussed wild birds

and honeyed hot chocolate, the evening concerts with drums

and the haunting music of conch shells. But she also recalled

the frightening periods of deadly drought, and the wars in

her parents’ time when the Aztecs expanded their power and

resource base so that the people of their valley need never

know hunger again.

There were other subjects that she did not dwell

on, because the boy was a devout Christian and

loved his friar-teachers. She knew, and perhaps

whispered to him, that the town church had been

built on the site where the old temple pyramid used

to stand. There, on important holy days, prisoners

of war had occasionally been sacrificed in a des-

perate effort to gain the favour of the old gods.

It hadn’t worked, she said; the priests had been

mistaken in their teachings, and she was still

bitter about that.

The grandmother showed the boy the old

painted histories used by talented speakers and

singers as mnemonic devices helping them recount

and dramatise the people’s story during firelit eve-

nings. Another relative showed him some

old parchments written in Nahuatl, the

words spelled out using the Roman alpha-

bet. The friars’ earliest students, those of

Chimalpahin’s grandmother’s generation,

had enjoyed taking their new knowledge

The boy’s grandmother

described feasts of trussed

wild birds and honeyed hot

chocolate, concerts with

drums and the haunting

music of conch shells

of phonetic writing and using it to transcribe the old oral history

performances. The boy was fascinated by these ageing papers,

and never forgot them – nor the attics in which he had seen them.

Church and city

When Chimalpahin, now more and more often called

Domingo, was around 11 years old, he went to Mexico City to

be educated and to work for the church. He loved to visit the pair

of captive jaguars kept in a pretty cage outside a government

building not far from where the Aztec emperor Moctezuma had

once had a zoo. In his journal, he recorded his sadness when the

jaguars were shipped off to Spain as a present for the king.

That event notwithstanding, young Domingo loved his

life in Mexico City. He enjoyed reading and studying the

great European texts (Saint Augustine was a favourite)

and was delighted to contribute to spreading the word of

God – for his teachers had assured him that, in the eyes

of God, all human souls were equally valuable. When

he was only 16, he was considered so mature that he

was made the manager of the small church of San An-

tonio Abad, which stood at the gate of the city where

Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés had first come face

to face in 1519. Domingo continued to be fascinated

by his people’s past, and made it his business to collect

whatever indigenous histories he could find, whether

they recounted the past of Chalco or of the Aztecs

of Mexico City. When he went home to Chalco for

visits, he began to collect papers there, too – often

the ones he had seen during his childhood.

Domingo’s father and grandmother

both died in a horrifying epidemic of the

early 1600s, when multiple diseases hit

at once. They were not the only ones. The

native population had fallen so dramati-

cally over the course of the previous three BR

ID

GE

MA

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Idol speculation

A pre-Columbian statue representing

Chalchiuhtlicue, a female Aztec deity

associated with water and fertility – an

important god in a land prone to drought