An absorbing account of the descendants of the ancient Aztecs and
of the survival of their culture into the twentieth century in the
Valley of Mexico is presented in this fascinating volume. Focusing
on San Francisco Tecospa-a village of some eight hundred Indians
who still spoke Nahuatl, whose lives were dominated by
supernaturalism, and who observed with only slight modification
much of their Aztec heritage-this story bears out the
anthropological principle that innovations are most likely to be
accepted when they are useful, communicable, and compatible with
established tradition. Nowhere is the Indian genius for combining
the old and the new better exemplified than in the story of how the
Virgin of Guadalupe came to fulfill the role formerly played by the
pagan goddess Tonantzin and of how Christian saints replaced the
Aztec gods. At the time of this study, the Tecospans still called
the Catholic Virgin Tonantzin, but their concept of the mother
goddess had changed profoundly since Aztec times. Tonantzin the
Pagan, a hideous goddess with claws on her hands and feet and with
snakes entwining her face, wore a necklace of hearts, hands, and
skulls to represent her insatiable appetite for corpses. Tonantzin
the Catholic-also called Guadalupe-is a beautiful and benevolent
mother deity who repeatedly stays God's anger against her Mexican
children and answers the prayers of the poorest Indian, with no
thought of return. In Tecospa the road to social recognition lay in
the performance of religious works, and the neglect of ritual
obligation subjected both the individual and the community to the
anger of supernaturals who punished with illness or other
misfortune. Religion was inextricably a part of every phase of
life, and it is the whole life of the Aztecan that is recorded
here: fiesta, clothing, food, agricultural practices, courtship,
marriage, pregnancy and childbirth, death, witchcraft and its
cures, medical practices and attitudes, houses and home life,
ethics, and the hot-cold complex that classifies everything in the
Tecospan universe from God to Bromo-Seltzer. With a marked
simplicity of style and language William Madsen has produced a
profoundly significant anthropological study that is delightful
reading from the first sentence to the last. The drawings, the work
of a ten-year-old Tecospan lad, are remarkable for their
penetrating insight into the culture.
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