In the Spanish new colony, ‘blood’ is everything: the gachupines control wealth and power over criollos (colonial Spaniards), and the criollos look down on peons (mestizos – half blooded Spaniards/Aztecs as well as the Aztecs themselves). Escaping with the help of a fellow prisoner, he winds up at a parish run by Father Miguel Hidalgo, who is secretly going against the church and Spanish government by teaching the local Aztecs how to cultivate wine and make pottery. Accused of murdering his uncle, Zavala is thrown into prison, where he learns to eat humble pie from the very people he has trod upon all his life. His life is thrown upside down when his dying uncle announces that Zavala is not pure-blooded but an Aztec changeling, taken in as a replacement after the Zavala family perished on the voyage from Spain to Mexico. Once a gachupine (pure-blooded Spanish nobleman), Don Juan Zavala’s passions in life consisted of women, horses, fighting, the spending of money and the mistreatment of those in the lower class. This particular book, Aztec Rage, is by Robert Gleason (Jennings’ former editor) and Junius Podrug. The rest were written by other authors with the ‘Gary Jennings’ title slapped on. The Aztec series was popularized by American author Gary Jennings, who died in 1999 after completing two books.
So before I lose the plot, so to speak, let’s do a review on Gary Jennings’ Aztec Rage. The ironic thing is, I don’t have time to write about them, since I’ve been busy with housework and freelancing projects. Therefore, in order to establish a seemingly coherent plot of the past that would overcome fragmentation and chaos, the indigenous witnesses appearing in our sources relied heavily on unique visual schemata that assisted them in assembling the mental shreds and remnants of past experiences to restore them within the traditional framework and formulae of information transmission only modestly affected by the Spanish conquest.Now that I’m freelancing, I finally have time to read books – and I’ve read a couple of them over the last few weeks. It emphasizes that early colonial Cohuixca testimonies were deeply influenced by what are called, in Western terms, cadastral maps or cartographic histories or, in Nahuatl, amoxtli tlalamatl altepeamatl (" land papers, " titles of each town and district) in the former Cohuixca province of Tepecoacuilco (Cohuixcatlacapan), these geographical elements being heavily reinforced by oral retelling.
To do so, it introduces a qualitative methodological approach into ethnohistory, which discerns pervasive patterns of special understanding that guided indigenous testimony in the Colonial Spanish courtroom. This article aims to fill in some of the lacunae that still exist regarding the Cohuixca ethnicity of the northeastern part of the State of Guerrero.
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