Interpreting | 2009.11.24
Myths and Moctezuma | José Juan López-Portillo
By rebranding the Aztec ruler, modern Mexico is now reclaiming its links to the indigenous past
As Gordon Brown and the Sun both found to their cost recently, spelling matters. Sometimes, however, people can insist on a misspelling. " Moctezuma " is a conscious act of Mexican misspelling that the British Museum has generously conceded in its current exhibition. Actually, the name of the last Aztec ruler to be elected before the Spaniards arrived would have sounded more like Motecuhzoma, and that is how most of the earliest indigenous writers to use the Latin alphabet first spelled it. To modern Mexicans, however, it sounds as alien as the traditional English version: Montezuma.
I sensed the patriotic machinations of the Mexican embassy as soon as I saw it – and I was right. If to name something is to give it meaning then Mexico\'s insistence on interpreting Motecuhzoma\'s name as Moctezuma means something. To me it symbolises the Mexican desire to reclaim as its own an idea of a cherished indigenous past that is crucial for its national self-conception.
It is often said that Mexican sovereignty is founded upon the dead Indian, not the live one. If the saying relates to any "Indian" in particular it is surely Moctezuma. Any Mexican will tell you that his glamorous young nephew Cuauhtemoc , who fought the Spaniards to the incredible limits of his strength, is much more popular in the collective imagination. He has been aggrandised since the triumph of the Mexican liberals in 1867 against the foreign imposition of Maximilian Habsburg . He was then re-imagined after the revolution that erupted in 1910 against the last of those same liberals, the dictator Porfirio Diaz : Cuauhtemoc became the hero of Marxist artists and intellectuals who recast him as rebelling physically and intellectually against Moctezuma\'s allegedly paralysing religious fatalism in the face of the Spanish newcomer. But a rebel becomes too simple a hero: if the British Museum had done an exhibition on Cuauhtemoc it would have been about doomed military heroics, not the glories of a lost empire.
All interpretations of Moctezuma link him inextricably with the empire he governed: he remains the most famous Aztec in Mexico and internationally by virtue of being the empire\'s last, most powerful ruler. Even his responsibility in hastening its collapse by trying to appease the Spanish newcomers binds him closer to it.
This link has made Moctezuma permanently relevant in Mexico. The conceptualisation of the Aztec empire, as a single political unit ruled from Mexico City and as the last independent and legitimate authority in Mesoamerica before the Spaniards arrived, has served in turn to legitimise every authority that has ruled from Mexico City subsequently. Paradoxically this includes the Spaniards who conquered it and settled there in the 16th century. In their legal fiction Moctezuma had willingly become a vassal of Charles V; the violence of the conquest was the suppression of Cuauhtemoc\'s seditious revolt. As if to make the connection explicit, what is now the National Palace was built by Hernando Cortés over the ruins of Moctezuma\'s palace. It remains the centre of political power in Mexico. Throughout the subsequent period of Spanish rule, Moctezuma became an allegory in art and rhetoric for a nascent Mexican patriotism.
With Mexico\'s independence, the importance of magnifying Mexico City and the Aztec legacy only grew as the capital struggled to fill the vacuum left in its diverse provinces by lost loyalties to the Spanish imperial system. Tellingly the city gave its name to the new nation and an adaptation of Mexico-Tenochtitlan\'s Aztec name glyph became the crest of the new national flag.
The figure of Moctezuma may not be popular in Mexico, but it is sympathetic. In a different tradition, dating back to the early days of Spanish dominion, his surviving Mexica countrymen tried to exorcise the shame of their defeat by blaming their emperor. They created the myth of Moctezuma\'s paralysing and fatalistic religious beliefs convincing him that the Spaniards were returning gods. Had it not been for his dogma, guns or no guns, that handful of Spanish adventurers would have had no chance against a powerful and populous empire. To a large extent it worked. This exculpatory myth has survived and been adapted throughout Mexican history to become an indispensable attribute of the glorification of the Aztec past. Moctezuma has carried the opprobrium but he has cleared his ancestors and his successors of the ignominy of defeat in a fair fight. Cuauhtemoc could never have done that.
The legitimising figure of Moctezuma has helped to bind the pre-Columbian world and modern Mexico into one conceptual continuum. Of course at no point has this meant that anyone has wished to recreate the historical Motecuhzoma\'s exploitative empire. Nor have his descendants been considered the rightful heirs to the throne, let alone proposed giving up the Spanish language for Nahuatl or taking up human sacrifice again. Most Mexicans have long felt happy in defining Mexico as a mestizo culture, a mixture of Hispanic and indigenous elements. Moctezuma\'s influence has been altogether more subtle in binding a paradoxical nation together.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]octezuma-mexico-british-museum
