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1 The Quinatzin Map, the Tlohtzin Map, and the Codex Xolotl, all today in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, first arrived in Europe in 1840 in the baggage of Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin (1802–1891), a French scientist, at one time (1826–1830) director of the science division of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, who had resided in Mexico from 1830 to 1840.1 During his decade there, Aubin became profoundly interested in Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past and collected whatever indigenous documents he could find. It was a propitious moment for collecting, as the remnants of Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci’s magnificent but ill-fated collection of Mexican antiquities, the museo indiano (Indian museum), were still to be had as well as the equally noteworthy holdings, many drawn from the Boturini collection, of the Mexican antiquarians Antonio de León y Gama (1736–1802) and Father José Antonio Pichardo (1748–1812).2 Boturini (1702–1755), a Milanese nobleman, had first gone to Mexico in 1736 to collect monies due to the Condesa de Santibáñez, a descendant of Motecuhzoma II Xocoyotzin.3 In Mexico he became passionate about the pre-Hispanic past partly by way of his devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe , the truth of whose apparitions in 1531 to the Indian Juan Diego he hoped to demonstrate.4 Through the good graces of the Jesuits of the Colegio de San Pedro y de San Pablo in Mexico City, Boturini had access to and eventually both copied and in part acquired the rich trove of indigenous documents left to the college by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700), the criollo patriot, antiquarian, scholar, poet, priest, and former Jesuit, at his death.5 Sigüenza y Góngora served as the executor of the estate of his friend and protégé, don Juan de Alva y Cortés Ixtlilxochitl (died 1684), cacique of San Juan Teotihuacan, former nahuatlato (interpreter) to the Juzgado General de Indios (the General Indian Court) and the Real Audiencia (the Royal High Court) of New Spain, and son of historian don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, who, like his son, had served the Crown as a nahuatlato .6 Sigüenza y Góngora received from don Juan the manuscript collection that he had inherited from his father, don Fernando. Through his MIXED FORMS, MIXED MESSAGES: THE CODEX XOLOTL, THE QUINATZIN MAP, AND THE TLOHTZIN MAP Book 1.indb 17 Book 1.indb 17 1/19/10 10:10:21 AM 1/19/10 10:10:21 AM In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl 18 mother, doña Ana Cortés, don Fernando was a great-great-great grandson of Nezahualpilli.7 Because of his blood ties to the royal houses of Teotihuacan , which, although a mestizo, he at one time ruled as cacique (as did his son after him), and Tetzcoco, two cities and families intimately connected from the pre-Hispanic through to the colonial period, don Fernando dedicated much of his life to documenting their past. Don Fernando had access to and eventually possession of the pictorial histories of Tetzcoco—the greater and more important of the two cities before and after 1519—and in great part he based his Spanish-language accounts of Tetzcoco’s past on this archive.8 From his text, it is clear that he had before him, among other documents, the Codex Xolotl, the Quinatzin Map, and the Tlohtzin Map.9 Don Fernando must have obtained the manuscripts either from his royal relatives in Tetzcoco or his maternal grandmother in Teotihuacan, doña Francisca Verdugo (the granddaughter of Nezahualpilli’s son, don Fernando Cortés Ixtlilxochitl). Don Fernando knew Tetzcoco well; indeed in 1613 he served as its juez-gobernador (judge-governor), appointed by Viceroy Diego Fernández de Córdova, Marqués de Guadalcázar, at the request of the city’s nobles and people, who commended don Fernando as “a relative [propincuo] and legitimate descendant [sucesor] of the kings that were of this said city, and a person fit and competent for this office.”10 Even before 1613, don Fernando had written on pre-Conquest Tetzcoco with the help of his kin. In 1608 he submitted a copy of his Compendio histórico de los reyes de Texcoco and the pictorial sources that he had used to the indigenous authorities of Otompan and San Salvador Cuauhtlatzinco so that they might witness its veracity and accuracy:11 All that the ten books of...

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