Tortillas: A Cultural History

2 • THE LIFE-GIVING TORTILLA

Chapter 2 • • • THE LIFE-GIVING TORTILLA Within the walled Sacred Precinct of Templo Mayor in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, the children tore a dried-out tortilla in half and, with a piece of the sharp end, played the game of dying on the altar. So went the pretend human sacrifice. Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish missionary in sixteenth-century New Spain, described the tortilla ritual played by seven children, the chosen ones dedicated to the blue rain god Tlaloc: “Using tortillas of ground corn which had not been softened in lime as mock hearts, they thus cut their hearts out.” But it was no game. In the hands of the Aztec the children gave their own blood to sustain the gods. Five Aztec priests blackened with body paint led the adorned children up the narrow interior stairway and across a landing, up more stairs until they reached the top of the tall pyramidal temple, open to the heavens. Only the priests accessed the immediate area surrounding the sacrificial site, but the people lining the streets and crowding plazas for one of the imperial religious ceremonies of the year knew what happened inside the walls, a reality steeped in their world view of repayment to the gods and in return, renewal of life. On the flat top of the temple shrine was a ceremonial platform and on the platform a round sacrificial stone altar for the human offering. The priests held each arm and leg. The long, heavy snout of a sawfish known as a carpenter shark kept the head rigid. With a sharp flint knife the high priest swiftly cut the heart out of the still breathing child. He raised the beating heart and offered it to the gods. “These are precious blood-offerings. The rain gods receive them with rejoicing; they wish for them; they are thus satisfied with contentment.” 22 Chapter 2 Motivated by hope and fear, the Aztec thanked and placated the rain god for life to the earth. For how could they make the tortillas of feasts and fasts, rituals and daily interactions without rain to grow the corn? If the children cried, and surely most did, the people said the children cried tears of rain. In myth, the Aztec gods threw themselves into fire to give life to humans. In life, the Aztec paid tribute to the gods with beating hearts for nextlaulli, the sacred debt repayment to the gods. Thus, the gods kept the sun revolving and the entire universe in balance for survival in a transitory, often difficult world. Evidence indicated other Mesoamerican groups followed similar practices, although the Spanish exaggerated the massive scale to vindicate the violence unleashed on the “barbarians” of New Spain. These were people whose gods nurtured yet terrified them. Huitzilopochtli, the mythical war god associated with bloodletting to nourish the sun, named them the Mexica. The Spaniards called them the Aztec. In the beginning the Aztec were hunters and fishers, sometimes settling down to farm and cultivate corn, but seldom remaining long in one place. In 1325 this wandering tribe, known as fearless warriors and one of several Nahuatl-speaking groups called the Chichimeca, migrated from the remote northern deserts to a small swampy island in the middle of Lake Texcoco in the central highlands of Mexico. Less than two hundred years later, hundreds of thousands of people lived in the island city of Tenochtitlán and the towns surrounding the lake. Tenochtitlán (Among the Prickly Pears) was the largest city in the Americas. The Aztec started with a swamp no one else wanted and transformed it into the promised land of lush gardens, grand canals, and lake produce. Covering over 2,500 acres, the Aztec created a transportation system of canals and causeways, monumental temples, and sprawling open-air markets where merchants traded their wares from as far away as Panama and Nicaragua . They grew foods on raised beds called chinampas, small The Life-Giving Tortilla 23 rectangular areas of fertile arable swamp land layered with lake sediment and decaying vegetation, and fenced with poles intertwined with twigs, reeds, and branches. Here on the shallow margins of Lake Texcoco they produced bountiful crops of corn for their prized tortillas. When it rained hard and long all these miraculous accomplishments flooded. The problem was Tenochtitlán was a salt lake city, a disaster when the nitrous waters overflowed. As the...