Q: Could you tell us about the heron petroglyphs?

A: Aztlán received its name after the fact that it was the home of the egrets, the home of the snowy egrets, these white herons that are the emblem of the Aztecs. The egrets were somehow connected to the story of Aztlán because it gave this homeland its name. We still haven’t totally figured out the connection, but there’s an important correlation there between the egrets and the homeland.
Well, actually, I believe what it is, is the Pacific Flyway, which is the migration of birds down the Pacific coast and down the coast of Mexico and back again between summer and winter. There’s a huge river of birds that goes down the coast and crosses southern California. It crosses from the Los Angeles basin over to the Gulf of California, [and goes] down the coast of Western Mexico. The Salton Sea--and it would’ve been even more so when it was huge Lake Cahuilla--was an important nesting place for birds going up and down the coast of North America. In fact, even today with the Salton Sea being a much smaller version of Lake Cahuilla, it’s the [largest] egret nesting ground in all of North America.
So, if you look at the rock art and the petroglyphs of the entire Southwest area, or for that matter, look at North American petrographs, and look for where there’s water birds in several different cultures, which you can see in art, and rock art, and basketry and weaving, the only place where there’s an egret is in this southwest area along in the Gila River area. You can find rock art where there’s depictions of egrets. And also in the Hohokam culture, which settled central Arizona a thousand years ago and had irrigation, agriculture, cities--well, everything that we would consider a civilization. The egrets are an important part of their art in pottery. [It’s a] motif repeated over and over. Nowhere else in other parts of the Southwest, nowhere else in California, nowhere else in Mexico or farther east in the United States do you see these egrets depicted. Right here in the lower Colorado region you see those egrets depicted. So that’s saying, I think, that these birds were an important part of the cultural reference of the people that inhabited the region.

Q: How does the Mapa de Sequenza help us understand that the Colorado river delta may have been the original site of Aztlán?

A: Well, the Mapa de Sequenza is a native map that was created either before the conquistadors came to this continent, or, perhaps, around the same time or shortly thereafter. But it’s a native map in native style. And the Mapa de Sequenza depicts the Aztec’s migration. It shows them in Aztlán--shows a lake shows a mountain, shows a curved mountain depicting Teotihuacan, and then it shows the journey of the Aztecs when they left Aztlán, their migration from place to place. It names these places. It tells how many years they stayed at each place. And then it shows, as they got to the central highlands of Mexico, their migration around the Valley of Mexico, until they finally located their ultimate stopping point at Tenochtitlán.
It’s called a Mapa because it’s geographic, and it shows, when you start to look at the relationship between these various localities, many of which are known, they have the geographical correspondence, too. The way that we would consider a map. It shows that Chapultepec is west of Mexico City. It shows all of the settlements around the Valley of Mexico in a fairly realistic, even from modern map conventions, depiction of geographical relationships. It’s sort of like two maps merged together. Well, Aztlán is located to the northwest of the Valley of Mexico. And that corresponds to many of the native accounts of the Aztec migration and [of] other people who came in the Nahuatl migration from the Northwest from El Norte of Mexico, and from the American Southwest, we believe. It shows that Aztlán was located in a northwest direction from the Valley of Mexico.
So it wasn’t only the Aztecs who migrated. In fact, the Aztecs were the last of the migrants. The Aztec migration started out with eight tribes or eight capulli migrating from their homeland in Aztlán to the central highland of Mexico. The people who are historically called the Aztecs, or the Mexicas is really what they called themselves, were one of those groups that migrated. They migrated along with eight other groups, and they were the last of those groups to migrate. Well, there had been even earlier waves of migration from the North to Central Mexico. It’s sort of like coming from a less urbanized settlement to a more urbanized settlement. Just like what happens in the world today. So there were waves of migration of which the Aztecs were notable by being the last migrants, and they established their city at Tenochtitlán, the culmination of the Aztec migration. But actually the early phase of these migrations were what we call the Toltecs.
The Toltecs were settled at a city which archeologists have demonstrated was Tula, which is at the northern part of the Valley of Mexico. And the Toltecs came several hundred years earlier than the Aztecs. They came to Central Mexico, and in a way, created a synthesis of their civilization from the Southwest and the Meso-American civilization of Central Mexico. The realm of the Toltecs preceded, historically, the realm of the Aztecs. And so there was a number of waves of migration from the north of Mexico to the central highlands of Mexico.
At the same time that you had a number of migrations happening within the Southwest, the Anasazi migrations, and other migrations in Arizona and New Mexico that have been recognized by archeologists and historians.
In figuring out the puzzle of Aztlán, we need to look at who the Aztec people were. The Aztecs were part of a wide-ranging language family which is now called the Uto-Aztecan language group. And the Uto-Aztecans inhabited a region from Utah, Idaho, sort of the border of Canada, all the way to Central America, to Nicaragua and Guatemala. It’s called the Uto-Aztecan language group because that sort of defines the extent. The Utes in Utah and Idaho were one end of the Uto-Aztecan language group, and the Aztecs at the other end. But actually, the Aztecs weren’t even the end of it, because there were people who migrated even further into Central America and Nicaragua and Guatemala. The Uto-Azteca language group arose, linguists now believe, in the Southwest. So linguists, by comparing these languages and comparing the similarity and dissimilarity of these languages, have been able to tell how close the Uto-Aztecan languages [are to] each other and how far apart. If they [are] related farther back, they may have evolved more since they differentiated from each other. But linguists have identified eight different languages as part of the Uto-Aztecan language group.
Well, if you trace back, according to the methodologies of the linguist, you find that these languages probably arose in the Southwest. The linguists have identified southeastern California or along the Colorado River region as the ultimate origin of the Uto-Aztecan languages. The Aztecs were in central Mexico, a fair ways away from this. So it raises the question of how long ago did they leave the Southwest. Their language may have pre-dated Aztlán. But actually, one hypothesis is that the Aztec migration moved from the Colorado, the lower Colorado River region, in the delta, and the Lake Cahuilla region, in relatively recent times, such as a millennium ago, went down the western coast of Mexico, and established themselves in the central Mexican highlands and the Valley of Mexico, and some of them proceeded even further and went to establish themselves in Central America. The region that they may have come from is this area [is] between the border of Arizona and California and Mexico, and I should say Nevada, too. It’s an area that hasn’t received as much study. There’s been a lot of archeology and history of California. By the same token, there’s been a lot of archeology done in Arizona and New Mexico and the four corners area.
So the linguists have established maps of where the locations of the Uto-Aztecan languages are located. And one of the curious things is these languages arose in the Southwest. Yet, if you look at the map, there’s kind of a hole. It’s like a hole in a donut, right there in the Southwest where the languages are thought to have originated. So the languages spread all up into the central basin, and they spread all down into Mexico and they spread eastward. But [in] the area where the languages presumably arose in the southeastern California area, there’s a hole in the map, because the Uto-Aztecan speakers of California have moved west of Lake Cahuilla, as it were, into the Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles area. So there’s this gap in the map. It’s fairly striking if you look at [it].
Why aren’t they there if that’s where the languages originated? The archeologists and historians also haven’t fully studied this area. There’s been a lot of study of California, the history of California, the deep history of California. There’s been a lot of study and archeology in Arizona and New Mexico, the deep history of this region. The area along the river, itself, below the Grand Canyon, as the river goes from the Grand Canyon to the Gulf of California, has not been very well studied. In part, it’s because there were no great cities along this river. There’s nothing like the cliff dwellings of New Mexico, there’s nothing [like] the cities in Arizona that archeologists have been discovered. Yet, the Colorado River was inhabited, from below the Grand Canyon to the Gulf was a navigable river. It would have been used, historically, for people to engage [in] trade along it, and there was settlement all along this river. But it has not yet been fully studied by archeology and by history, and, ironically, this may be where the Aztecs came from, from this very region, which is a hole in the map that the linguists will draw for you of Uto-Aztecan languages. And it’s kind of a fuzzy area for archeology and history to say exactly what happened in this area a thousand years ago, and two thousand years ago. It may, in fact, be where the Aztecs originally came from, because the Aztecs were apparently an agricultural people before their migration. On the trek from Aztlán to Mexico, the Aztecs, at some of the places where they would stop and spend several years, would built irrigation dams, and they would plant crops, and they would engage in irrigation agriculture. So they weren’t total nomads or hunter-gatherers. They were agriculturalists who were on a migration from place to place to place. And they engaged in this agricultural activity using irrigation agriculture along the way.
This may be a cultural knowledge and intelligence that they had from their existence here along the Colorado River and in the delta area. Practicing flood plain agriculture during that period of time. And it may account for some of the success of the Aztecs. Even the earlier success of the Toltecs. It may be that they brought with them a cultural knowledge and a cultural intelligence from the Southwest, from El Norte of Mexico, brought that to Central Mexico, and combined their culture, their civilization, with the Meso-American civilization of Central Mexico, and created a synthesis and a higher kind of civilization by doing that.