Tucson, Tula & Tlaxcala
4,000 Years of Cultural Interaction

Transcript of Video by 2008 Trip Particpant Tom Onak

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	[music]
Paul Fish	What we're going to divide into groups of four, and we're going to assign each group of four to one of us, so that we know that we're all here. It doesn't mean that you can't ask somebody else a question.
	(laughter)
Sharon Onak	Are you sure?
Paul	I'm sure.
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Suzy Fish	Now this pulque process, where you take out the sap that gathers and ferment that, and it's a very low alcohol drink, I mean even children drink it. It's less than two percent beer. You know the pulquerías in Mexico City didn't develop until the days of the railroad, because pulque doesn't keep. It has a shelf life of a day or so or maybe a little more. And so the pulquerías in Mexico City reflect the fact that there was a railroad to bring it quickly before it spoiled.
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Suzy Fish	Because, see the stripe on the head? And here's another badger over here, it looks quite different, but you see the stripe. Big on badgers in the icnongraphy. And it's totally different from the Hohokam, you never see a badger, but you do in the other Mogollon.
Tom Onak	So you say that they're just contemplating?
Suzy	I don't know what she's doing. But it is the women who seem to be dismayed or whatever.
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Tom	Do you know enough Spanish to know whether these are all from the same room?
Suzy	(reading and translating) In this manner we know that the Paquimé people... how they cut their hair in different forms... or wore their hair in different forms. The men with the hair kind of pulled back and the women with... bangs over in the front. Both sexes dressed in a similar manner. The torso... they covered the torso using mantas, sort of blankets, of cotton cloth with bands of blue and red. The Paquimé people averaged in height about 1.5 meters. They would have looked like Tarahumara people.
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Patricia Fournier	We don't really know that the Teotihuacanos called the Street of the Dead with that name. First of all, Teotihuacan is a Nahuatl name, "the City of the Gods". And it was given by the Aztecs to the settlement because of course, they found the pyramids. The pyramids have been here all the time. They were huge, massive mounds when the Aztecs were around. Actually the Aztecs for some of their offerings, sort of looted Teotihuacán looking for beautiful items. And the Aztecs were also living here, the Mexica. After the collapse of Teotihuacán around 600 A.D., probably 75 percent of the population left, and they settled all over central Mexico and even north they headed toward Hidalgo, Querétaro, those areas, because all the state system collapsed. We don't know why. But this was a state-level society. So all the names were either given by the Aztecs, or by the Spaniards or by us, the archaeologists. What did they speak? We have no clue, but we suspect they were Nahuas, Uto-Aztec like the Hopi. We suspect but we have no evidence yet. We don't know if they were priests, who at the same time were kings, emperors or whatever. No fancy burials have been found like in the Maya, so we don't know exactly how it worked.
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Paul Fish	Apprently here they were used for parrots...
Tom Onak	Oh, those little tiny ones?
Paul	...likeat Casas.
Tom	You mean the ones here on the right?
Paul	Yeah, the little boxes.
Tom	So both holes and the boxes are similar to the ...
Paul	to the ones at Casas Grandes.
Tom	Paquimé?
Paul	Yes.
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Denise Collins	What's coming up out of the stalks? You said something about them. I missed it.
Karime Castillo	They're heads.
Denise	They are heads?
Karime	Yes, human heads.
Denise	Oh... those are human heads, those aren't corns!
Karime	Yeah
Denise	Oh, who knew!?
Karime	Yeah, it's very crazy.
Denise	Now, wait a minute, why would they have the faces in the ears of corn like that?
Karime	I think it's a symbol of sacrifice, and also in cosmology they believe that first humans came out of corn, also. So it's a symbol.
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Michael Brescia	Think of it as four moving frontiers. The first was the mining frontier. That makes sense, right? Spaniards wanted precious metals. In fact, when Hernán Cortés met the first emissaries of Montezuma, he told them that Spaniards had a disease of the heart that could only be cured by precious metals. So whether that's apocryphal or not, but I believe it shows up in Bernal Díaz's account, or maybe even in Cortés's letters. But that makes sense, they're searching for precious metals, that's the whole Spanish colonial enterprise is defined—in this time mercantilism and bullionism is the way to generate wealth. So they're looking for silver veins, veins of silver. So that's the first frontier: mining. But as I mentioned previously, those miners need to be fed. So the second frontier, the moving frontier, is the agrarian frontier. That brings farms and ranches, and they're usually around sources of water like Patricia said, and, of course, to raise crops and livestock to feed miners. The third frontier is the religious frontier, where you have the Franciscans moving in, the Society of Jesus moving in north, places northward, to evangelize the native population. And then the fourth moving frontier is the military frontier. Again, these are not distinct, hard and fast, of course they overlapped. But the fourth frontier is the military frontier or garrisons of presidios, right? Moving garrisons of men would pop up to defend the mines, to defend the missions against so-called nomadic Indians. In the far north frontier it's the Apaches and the Comanches. So that's a general way to think about the moving frontier from the near north here, Querétaro, Hidalgo, all the way up to places like Chihuahua, Sonora, Arizona, and New Mexico. Mining frontier, agrarian frontier, religious frontier, military frontier. OK? There'll be an essay test at the end of the day, so if you can remember those four, please. OK?
	(laughter)
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Michael Brescia	Sopa poblana is more of a vegetable soup, not the crema poblana that you had in the restaurant in Mexico City. So, mole poblano with chicken, or pipián verde with pork, or carne asada. And then afterwards everyone will get to try dulces típicos, typical sweets from Puebla, and then coffee.
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Michael Brescia	How many churches in the center of Puebla? Very good question. Lots, lots. I know the city of Cholula where we're headed to, it'sapocryphal, it's lore, but people like to say there were 365 churches built by the Spaniards to commemorate each day. But apparently when scholars actually took the count, there's 39. There's probably more now, but the 39 they built on top of places of pre-Columbian worship, teocallis.
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Paul Fish	I have to say about Cholula, it was a major center at the time a of Teotihuacan. It's not laid out quite like Teotihuacan, artifact styles and other stylistic characteristics are similar. And although it was abandoned at the time that the Spanish arrived, it was like Teo was as well, an important pilgrimage center. And in fact the Spanish chroniclers described it as Mecca. I'll also mention that this is the location, Cholula, of a very important (well, from an American perspective) university in Mexico. It's called the University of the Americas. It was originally a university in Mexico City oriented towards people from the U.S. and many famous archaeologists were trained there. It's Karime's institution now, and it continues to be a very important school for the training of archaeologists. A lot of our friends went there.
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Paul Fish	...or a cream soup with corn. The main courses are ribs with chilaquiles (and I know a number of people picked that), chicken breast cordon bleu, baked chicken with enchiladas suizas (a lot of people ordered that). I know some people ordered mole, it will be a different style.
Susan Finkenberg	Do you have a list?
Paul	I think we have a margin of error.
	(laughter)
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