Moctezuma’s Zoo: Housing Disability in Transatlantic Travel Literature and European Courts

In the famous description of Tenochtitlán in his Segunda relación (1520), Hernán Cortés gives an account of Moctezuma II’s court—its customs, inhabitants, and architecture. Among the leader’s retinue are a number of albinos, hunchbacks, and dwarfs who inhabit a house later referred to as Moctezuma’s zoo. They live among the feral animals that Cortés suggests Moctezuma kept simply for his amusement. Nevertheless, other accounts aver that these people were given pride of place within what Cortés portrays as a strict social hierarchy, and Cortés himself valued them highly enough to bring physically impaired Mexica people back to Spain with him in 1528, where they performed for the court of Carlos V.¹

In this essay, I consider descriptions of these people and their roles in Mexica society. I explore how their paradoxical position resembles the place of Tenochtitlán itself under Cortés’s epistolary and colonial sway. Varying accounts of these people—both close to their ruler and yet his captives, both monstrous and yet favored by the Mexica gods—resemble Cortés’s colonial impulse to place Tenochtitlán itself as a superlative and yet subjected space on the new Imperial map of Spain. Beyond this context of burgeoning colonial discourse, however, we should ask how these people’s history, how their story and their travel back and forth between Mexico and Spain, both in print and in person, contributes to the representation of disability and how it illuminates aspects of transatlantic cross-cultural exchange in the Renaissance. How might we read the presence of these physically impaired figures in this famous travel text and in the subsequent European response to their existence? I contend that the universality of disability, what we might think of in modern parlance as its transnational and transhistorical pervasiveness, makes the physically impaired figures of Moctezuma’s court a paradoxical point of likeness between European and Mexica cultures. Their physical difference and ambivalent social status ironically produces mimetic similitude across Mexica and European cultures that Cortés leverages in his transport of these peoples back to Spain with him in 1528.²

To understand the position of the physically impaired Mexica peoples in both Tenochtitlán and in Europe, I put contemporary disability theory into dialogue with the history of disability—what was often referred to as monstrosity. I first argue that s narratological and spatial representation of the physically impaired figures in his Cartas and the ambivalent representation of disability that it produces can best be discerned through the lens of Disability Theory. In particular, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell’s concept of narrative prosthesis, which theorizes the narrative function of people with physical impairments as a plot device that tends to instrumentalize the appearance and disappearance of disabled figures in a narrative, along with Brendan Gleeson’s elaboration of the ways in which spatial environments can be both disabling and can provide sites of resistance for physically impaired people in what he calls geographies of disability, will inform my analysis of the story and location of the Mexica figures. Reading Cortés’s Cartas with these theories in mind demonstrates how his account of these people can both produce disability and, alternatively, can provide a platform for unruly bodily resistance, a position of ambivalence that is still prevalent in the construction of disability. Of equal importance is the need to consider the European social matrices and historical particulars that would have shaped Cortés and other Europeans’ impressions of these people. In the second half of the essay, I accordingly explore the travel and reception of the Mexica in Europe where the possible social roles that were open to people with physical impairments were limited. Nevertheless, the potential for bodily difference to elevate and subjugate individuals in Europe mirrors the cultural construction of disability that we can glean from pre-Columbian Mexica cultures, a similarity that forges transatlantic connections. These theoretical and historical perspectives thus work symbiotically in this essay to improve our understanding of both the carta itself as a...