Landschaft, pueblo and altepetl: a consideration of landscape in sixteenth-century Central Mexico

Abstract

In 1521, the Spanish conquistadors defeated the Nahuas of Central Mexico. Spain was ruled at the time by the House of Habsburg, and its administrators became familiar with the German concept of Landschaft. By 1570, they used this concept to prepare and launch a survey of the indigenous communities which called themselves—and their lands—altepetl. The purpose of this paper is to show to what extent the terms Landschaft and altepetl are equivalent since modern scholars have described both as organized “communities” subject to a customary “law” and possessing a specific piece of “land”. The main obstacle for this comparison is that in the sixteenth century the Spaniards did not have a word equivalent to landscape, and they used words like pueblo, pago and pintura instead, depending on the context. This paper describes the general characteristics of the altepetl in Central Mexico and focuses on its representation by analysing some maps made after the conquest in the area of Cholula, current State of Puebla. The comparison of Landschaft, pueblo and altepetl in historical context is pertinent for cultural geographers since it was during the sixteenth century that the concept of landscape, as we know it today, was taking shape.

Keywords:

• landscape
• Landschaft
• Mexico
• paisaje
• altepetl
• Cholula

Acknowledgments

This article is part of a broader research sponsored by the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s (UNAM) D.G.A.P.A., in four different stages: research at the University of Texas at Austin (2006), sabbatical at the University of Sussex (2008–2009), research project Saberes locales y manejo de la diversidad ecogeográfica en áreas rurales de tradición indígena funded through UNAM’s Center of Research on Environmental Geography (2008–2011), and research project Paisaje y conflicto en comunidades de tradición indígena funded by PAPIIT (IN302115). Luis Fernando Gopar Merino produced the map of the Cholula area for this article and drew the Figures 3, 4, 6 and 7. Javier Pérez Siller kept a photographic record of the sun’s transit. Thanks to Alejandro Velázquez for his remarks and to Dora Napolitano for her comments and supervision of my English version. Very important amendments have been suggested by the reviewers and editors of JCG. Many thanks to Raquel Urroz for her discussions, the readings and images provided. I am particularly grateful to Marcelo Ramírez who invited me to do research on this subject many years ago and who shared with me his latest investigations for this paper. Thanks also to UNAM’s Institute of Geography, UNAM’s School in Canada and UNAM’s Centre of Mexican Studies in Paris.

Notes

1. Some linguistic clarifications are in order. I use “Castilian” and “Spanish” as synonyms in terms of language although in the sixteenth century they were not yet the same. I use the German term Landschaft (plural: Landschaften) as a gloss for the various equivalents in Germanic languages, such as Landschap, which is the equivalent term in Flemish. Finally, “Nahuatl” is the language of the Aztecs or Mexicas; “Nahua” is the adjective and the name of its ethnic group (plural: “Nahuas”).

2. For this case study, I visited Cholula, Cuauhtinchan, Tepeaca and other neighbouring towns several times between 2012 and 2014. I met with local people to learn about their views and the place names of the surrounding landscape. I am particularly grateful to Señora Verónica and Señora Clotilde in Tepeaca and to Erasmo Velázquez in Cuauhtinchan.

3. There are geographers who have analysed the modern Spanish concept of paisaje (Bolós 1992; García-Romero and Muñoz-Jiménez 2002) but none of them go as far as the sixteenth century to examine the roots of the term and the background from which it was conceived. A good analysis has been written by Javier Maderuelo (2006) from a pictorial point of view.

4. Historians have explained that Flemish and Dutch influences over the Spanish administration started long before the Habsburgs gained power (Jago 1981; Lovet 1986; Espinosa 2009). Nevertheless, when Charles arrived for his first visit to Spain in 1517, he was impressed by the “Spanish rusticity” (Nader 1988, p. 301). After he became Holy Roman Emperor, he and later his son Philip II had to negotiate permanently with the courts, the Church and the Spanish elites.

5. All translations were made by the author.

6. The word pueblo had and still has these two meanings in Spanish: “town” and “people”. One example from our case study is this: in the text of the RG of Cholula of 1581, Gabriel de Rojas, the Spanish Authority in Cholula writes that “Hernando Cortés … al tiempo que venía a descubrir la ciudad de México, llegó a este pueblo ” [Hernando Cortes … when he came to discover the city of Mexico, arrived at this town (emphasis added)] (Rojas 1985, p. 125) and a few paragraphs later “a este ídolo … le hacían una fiesta general cada año, donde concurría todo el pueblo” [… they prepared a festivity to this idol each year, which all the people attended (emphasis added)] (p. 132).

7. Cities like Tenochtitlan, Cholula or Huexotzingo were famous for their size and demography in pre-Columbian times, but they were rather exceptional. Most of the indigenous population used to live scattered on rural lands (Ramírez-Ruiz 2006).

8. There were Flemish painters in Mexico, some of them painting in indigenous towns: Simon Pereyns arrived in 1566 and Adrian Suster arrived in 1573, but none of them represented landscapes (Toussaint 1948; Kubler 1984). In 1571, Philip II sent to New Spain a Portuguese cosmographer called Francisco Domínguez to represent cities and towns, but there is no evidence of his work (Mundy 1996).