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Creating Aztlán: Chicano art, indigenous sovereignty, and lowriding across Turtle Island
Abstract
In lowriding culture, the ride is many things—both physical and intellectual. Embraced by both Xicano and other Indigenous youth, lowriding takes something very ordinary—a car or bike—and transforms it and claims it. Using the idea that lowriding is an Indigenous way of being in the world, artist and historian Dylan A. T. Miner discusses the multiple roles that Aztlán has played at various moments in time, from the pre-Cuauhtemoc codices through both Spanish and American colonial regimes, past the Chicano Movement and into the present day. Across this “migration story,” Miner challenges notions of mestizaje and asserts Aztlán, as visualized by Xicano artists, as a form of Indigenous sovereignty. Throughout this book, Miner employs Indigenous and Native American methodologies to show that Chicano art needs to be understood in the context of Indigenous history, anticolonial struggle, and Native American studies. Miner pays particular attention to art outside the U.S. Southwest and includes discussions of work by Nora Chapa Mendoza, Gilbert “Magú” Luján, Santa Barraza, Malaquías Montoya, Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl, Favianna Rodríguez, and Dignidad Rebelde, which includes Melanie Cervantes and Jesús Barraza. With sixteen pages of color images, this book will be crucial to those interested in art history, anthropology, philosophy, and Chicano and Native American studies. Creating Aztlán interrogates the historic and important role that Aztlán plays in Chicano and Indigenous art and culture.
... Here, I outline how I serve students of Mesoamerican heritage through an Indigenous lens that takes into consideration ancestry, food, and profound experiences, in addition to race and ethnicity. Jack D. Forbes (1973) worked steadily to teach and engage Mestizas/os of mixed blood as Indigenous; yet, likeminded approaches still have little support from the academy (Miner, 2014). Current works (Alberto, 2017;Arce, 2016;Avila & Parker, 1999;Cuauhtin, 2016;Garcia, Arciga, Sanchez, & Arredondo, 2018;Gómez-Quiñones, 2012;Gonzales, 2012;Miner, 2014;Rodríguez, 2014), however, now allow us to interpret and live out the Xicana/o experience in the context of ceremony, maíz culture, and interregional interaction as Native Americans. ...
... Jack D. Forbes (1973) worked steadily to teach and engage Mestizas/os of mixed blood as Indigenous; yet, likeminded approaches still have little support from the academy (Miner, 2014). Current works (Alberto, 2017;Arce, 2016;Avila & Parker, 1999;Cuauhtin, 2016;Garcia, Arciga, Sanchez, & Arredondo, 2018;Gómez-Quiñones, 2012;Gonzales, 2012;Miner, 2014;Rodríguez, 2014), however, now allow us to interpret and live out the Xicana/o experience in the context of ceremony, maíz culture, and interregional interaction as Native Americans. A more self-determined way of teaching and learning must arise, I argue, as Indigenous people remain marginalizedand criminalizeddespite their openness toward assimilating into White-American culture. ...
... Throughout the paper, I follow Dylan A. T. Miner's (2014) definition of Indigeneity, as it "represents the inextinguishable right of Indigenous peoples to self-determine who they are, how they govern themselves, and how they define their own knowledge and aesthetic system" (p. 7). To build on Part I, I describe self-determination, and, in turn, Indigeneity, alongside a model for ancestral knowledge revitalization and sustainment in line with land and cosmology. ...
Over a period of nine years (2011-2019), I have had the opportunity to engage with-and to contextualize through a decolonial and mental health lens-the growing threats to and the policing of students at different Southern Californian community colleges. These interactions occurred with a non-White majority of students, mainly Xicanas/os, who were present in these community college classes in large numbers. In this paper, I write about a decolonizing teaching strategy that is both culturally sustaining and revitalizing, and conscious of race. Students of Mesoamerican ancestry, identified by the community colleges as Hispanic, benefit when teachers engage them through an Indigenous lens, affording to such students their rightful place as Native Americans to combat forms of trauma and violence. In addition, I outline the initial observations of the Mesoamerican Figurine Project of Rio Hondo College, where students materialized their own views of the human body and self through clay-work and reflective writing. Using the Borderlands lens and the Coatlicue State-I posit "a teaching archaeology of the human body" that nurtures self-determination and births an Indigeneity grounded in land and cosmology.
... Visual storytelling through the artwork of Gina Aparicio, and other sites of wisdom that consciously work with plant medicine and ancestors, reflect an active decolonial pathway to rooted Indigenous futures (Pérez 2003(Pérez , 2007Miner 2014). Xicana/x Indígena historical consciousness is bound up in the four directions, traditional medicine, interconnectivity, and intergenerational wisdom, or what Patrisia Gonzales calls "Mexican Traditional Medicine" (MTM). ...
A central thread of this article is to open a dialogue around traditional medicines such as sacred tabaco (tobacco) as it connects to Xicana Indígena ceremonial praxis, Mexican traditional medicine, and decolonial feminist futurities. I've argued elsewhere, as in the case of the 2019 Xicanx Futurity art exhibition, Xicana/x people have created a dignified path to self-determination that honors Indigenous roots and complex familial legacies and lineages across the hemisphere (Zepeda 2022, 141–153). In visual artist Gina Aparicio's installation titled, Ipan Nepantla Teotlailania Cachi Cualli Maztlacoyotl (Caught Between Worlds, Praying for a Better Future), she creates a sacred space for collective prayer in the context of an art exhibit through tobacco ties, intentionally creating a place for pause, reflection, and grounding, before taking the next steps into the larger part of the art installation that evokes a sacred circulo (Tello 2017). These tobacco-filled prayer ties in red cloth, because of their public visibility, became a site of contestation. This essay asks: what are the responsibilities and connections diasporic Mesoamerican peoples have to sacred plant medicine? Knowing that sanación (healing) arrives from working in collaboration with plants, what are the most respectful ways to work with tabaco : tobacco : picietl? What shapes the pathway of self-determination of Xicana/x peoples who are consciously re-rooting? How do we honor madre tierra, plant medicine, and ancestors?
... In these works, mestizaje is represented as the emergent product of such archaeology in favor of a new identity. It is produced by a colonial context that emerges as the "new" subjecta more advanced state of being that necessitates a fixed Indigenous past (Miner, 2014;Ríos, 2016)or what Alberto (2012) refers to as the "unchanging ruins of indigeneity" (p. 44). ...
Guided by critical ethnic studies and critical Indigenous studies, we engage analytical work to tease out how multiple colonial projects have implications for Latinx educational practice. Given the increase of ethnic studies curricula in K–12, we introduce in this article the theoretical framework of Critical Latinx Indigeneities (CLI) to educational debates around Latinx equity. We contemplate what it means to leave behind concepts such as mestizaje and indigenismo as analytical tools because of their “imperial durability” that we argue renders them incommensurable with Indigenous Latinx students. Finally, we explore the implications for Latinx equity agendas and conclude with how CLI might position us to engage ethnic studies approaches that can speak to the diversity of Latinx experiences. We see this as a necessary conversation in education and hope that our work will incite meaningful and robust conversations around the issues we center here.
... For example, mental and emotional health are harmed through structures of domination that invent national and state borders and distinctions (e.g., urban versus reservation) on Indigenous landscapes (Goeman 2009;Tamez 2016), create false forms of Tribal or First Nations governance or multi-culturalism (Simpson 2001;Simpson 2004;Lomawaima and McCarty 2006;Richardson 2011), dissociate people from having place-based identities (Lawrence 2003;TallBear 2013;Whyte 2016a, b, c, d), disrupt Indigenous systems of responsibilities (McGregor 2009;Bang et al. 2014) (Whyte 2013[(Coombes et al. 2012 or adaptive capacities coupled with ecological systems (Whyte 2015;Whyte 2016a, b, c, d) that underwrite the possibility for having a positive emotional attitude toward the possibility of their being a future (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández 2013;Whyte 2016a, b, c, d) or of having a sense of place (Hoover 2013;Johnson and Larsen 2013;Watts 2013). Hence theories of anticolonialism or decolonization-both in traditional lands but also reclaimed urban spaces-are not just about land reclamation but about generation of the moral and community relationships interwoven with nonhumans and ecosystems that advance individual and community mental health and wellness (Bang et al. 2010;Tuck and Yang 2012;Million 2013;Coulthard 2014;Miner 2014;Simpson and Coulthard 2014;Todd 2014;Whyte 2017). Again, while emotion is not invoked as a specific term, these theories are very much about emotions using other terminology. ...
This article extends analyses of environmental influences on social action by examining the emotions experienced by Karuk Tribal members in the face of environmental decline. Using interviews, public testimonies, and survey data we make two claims, one specific, the other general. We find that, for Karuk people, the natural environment is part of the stage of social interactions and a central influence on emotional experiences, including individuals’ internalization of identity, social roles, and power structures, and their resistance to racism and ongoing colonialism. We describe a unique approach to understanding the production of inequality through disruptions to relationships among nature, emotions, and society. Grief, anger, shame, and hopelessness associated with environmental decline serve as signal functions confirming structures of power. The moral battery of fear and hope underpins environmental activism and resistance. More generally, we expand this concern to argue that neglecting the natural world as a causal force for “generic” social processes has limited not only work on Native Americans, but also work sociology of emotions and theories of race and ethnicity, and has masked the theoretical significance of environmental justice. Taking seriously the experiences of Native people and the importance of the natural environment offers an opportunity to extend sociological analyses of power and to move sociology toward a more decolonized discipline.
... GómezQuiñones and Vásquez (2014), frame the development of the Aztlán ideology within the struggle for Chicano political rights. Miner (2014) focuses on pictorial and graphic practices, especially those associated with the lowrider subculture as one way that Chicanos resignify the US Southwest, turning it into Aztlán. Other studies have focused on religious and spiritual practices ( De La Torre & Zúñiga 2003 ). ...
This article explores the roles of the indigenous Nahuatl language in the production of the imagined nation of Aztlán, a central idea in the US Chicano movement. We adopt a theoretical approach from linguistic anthropology, in which we attend to the role of language as a source of historical knowledge about the past, and also as a medium for the production of metahistorical narratives. We describe the history of the Nahuatl language and its speakers, and how the concept idea of Aztlán has been used first as a source of identity among the Nahuatl speaking peoples of Mexico, then as a symbol of Mexican national origins, and finally as a source of identity and dignity among Chicano people in the US. We argue that just as the Nahuas saw the Nahuatl language as defining a panNahua identity including politically separate citystates, today Chicanos use the Nahuatl language and its related cultural practices to embody a transnational community.
Sociological research on international migration shares a fundamental question: What underlining forces drive migration? Sociologists use a number of theories such as neoclassical economics, new economics of migration, network theory, segmented labor market theory, and world systems theory among others to untangle the complexities of individual and group migration patterns. These theoretical propositions, and the methodological applications that are informed by them, are colonial in their epistemic origins and assumptions. Explored in this paper are the assumptions, limitations, and the epistemic privileging within westernized migration studies and sociology. Chicanx Studies systematically addresses this question by confronting colonization’s impact on how we contemporarily study, measure, and analyze human behavior including migration. Moreover, the discipline works to humanize Chicanx populations and their historic migratory life ways. For borderland theorist Gloria Anzaldúa the underling force that drives Chicanx and Mexican migration is their ontological and epistemological connection to their indigenous tradition of “long walks” across recent politicized borders. Her work contributes to migration studies’ lack of epistemic diversity and also gives insight to the historical relationship Chicanxs have with migratory practices to other parts of the U.S. beyond the Southwest.
Building upon emergent theorisations and praxes of decolonisation and decoloniality, in this essay Laster undertakes the critical work of suturing diverse understandings and practices of these notions from a range of fields and contexts. She begins by examining the crucial distinction between (de)colonisation and (de)coloniality, before arguing that the complementarity of the two ultimately means that both need to be mobilised in the liberation of Native lands, Nations, and peoples. Next, she turns her attention to several key discussions that focus on questions of imperialism and decolonisation in the field of performance studies, tracing their trajectories, as well as exploring some areas of potential growth for the field. In the second half of the essay, Laster discusses instances of Indigenous decolonisation—from perspectives of creative, critical, and activist praxis—that relate to the issue of forced migration, with a particular focus on Indigenous practices of hospitality and its limits.
Chicanxs Unidxs de Orange County (CU) is a community organisation in Southern California. Founded in 2006, CU is small, multigenerational and multi-ethnic. Its organising has focused predominantly on building community power by focusing on local politics, abusive policing and the gentrification of Chicanx neighbourhoods. This article presents an evidence-based narrative of several CU campaigns (primarily between 2008 and 2016). CU’s tactical aggressiveness and strategic pragmatism forced significant changes to ‘civil gang injunctions’ in California. For decades, California law enforcement has used such injunctions to suppress a generation of young people of colour as ‘gang members’. Minors and adults have been prohibited indefinitely from engaging in otherwise legal activities without due process. CU’s emphasis on the longevity of institutionalised and societal racism, rooted in the colonial conquest, resembles arguments associated with critical race theory (CRT) – though CU was not inspired by CRT. CU’s praxis resembles practices of critical pedagogy – though it was not directly modelled on it either. Rather, we argue that CU’s praxis is embedded in the members’ lived experience and study of the local history of racism, community and social movements. All five of this article’s authors were members of CU and were involved in the organising described in this article. The authors wrote this at the request of the CU membership, and it has been discussed and revised by the full membership.
Many studies have addressed the issue of migration and displacement, one of the
main geopolitical challenges of our time, but far fewer have analysed it using an
interdisciplinary framework and selecting literary and artistic practices from a
transnational context. !e purpose of this paper is to describe the way in which
the artists use the specificity of medium and mechanism in their projects to reflect
on the current migratory crisis and forced migration, to critique the securitization
or the politics of immigration in recent years and to explore a tactical use of technologies
in order to expand public consciousness and political debate. It is directly
focused on the migratory processes involving Mexicans who go to the United States
and its connection to the complex political imaginary of these regions, and on the
relationship between identity and marginalization, particularly the influence of
the conceptualization of migrants as the Other in contemporary European society.
Based on the analysis of a series of case studies both from a theoretical and from
an artistic point of view –, this research intends to understand how these projects
explore forms of critical intervention, dissent or disruption of a dominant semiotic
regime by stimulating critical thinking about consolidated narratives and sign systems
of identity and difference.
The term mestizaje has been used to reinforce a modern logic of biopower rooted in colonialism. This chapter argues that this term erases indigenous bodies.
This item is a listing of scholarly works submitted to the editorial office for possible review.
Immanuel Wallerstein draws on The Wretched of the Earth to set out three central dilemmas for today's anti-systemic movements. Questions of violence, identity and class seen through an anti-colonial lens.
This essay asks a question: what can't capitalism imagine in confronting the major social problem, poverty, facing the world today? The answer to that question is: the communal. To define the limits of capitalism's imagination, this essay begins by analyzing U.S. constitutional theory as represented in Federalist 10, where " the first object of government " is stated to be the "the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property"(my emphasis). Thus, economic democracy, which, this essay asserts, is the only answer to the question of poverty, is beyond the limits of capitalism's imagination. The essay then turns to Indigenous philosophies and practices of the communal to propose an answer to the question of poverty. Examples of the former are found in such thinkers as Taiaiake Alfred (Mohawk) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna). Examples of the latter are found in the ongoing revolutions in Bolivia and Chiapas. The essay is grounded in the observation of Frantz Fanon that "what matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the necessity for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must respond to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.
Documentary data reveal the Aztec marketing system in the Valley of Mexico to have been a highly developed and complex institution. Examination of this information shows that the Aztec regional economy fits the requirements of classical central place theory as developed by Christaller. A central place analysis of Aztec settlement locations is presented, and it is concluded that commercial factors were of primary importance in shaping the settlement pattern in the Valley of Mexico. This does not rule out political, ecological, and other factors, whose roles in the settlement system are discussed. The implications of these results in terms of the Aztec economy and its development over time are briefly considered, and comparative data are mentioned.
In several cities in the Southwest and Midwest with sizable enclaves of Chicanos, there are to be found considerable numbers of images that have become leitmotifs of Chicano art. In their ubiquity, these motifs demonstrate that the Chicano phase of Mexican-American art (from 1965 to the 1980s) was nationally dispersed, shared certain common philosophies, and established a network that promoted a hitherto nonexistent cohesion. In other words, it was a movement, not just an individual assembly of Mexican-descent artists. In what follows, Chicano art is examined as statements of a conquered and oppressed people countering oppression and determining their own destiny, though not all the producers of these images necessarily saw their production in the political way they are framed below. Examples have been chosen specifically to show how, in response to exploitation, artists have taken an affirmative stance celebrating race, ethnicity, and class.
The Chicano poster movement—and it must be viewed as a movement rather than simply as a collection of individuals making posters—arose towards the end of the 1960s. Although Chicano posters share stylistic characteristics with poster-making and fine art trends of the period, their iconography, content, and social functions are distinctive: they have drawn on bicultural and bilingual resources that reflect the history of Mexican peoples in the United States and on the separatism, cultural nationalism, search for identity, and sociopolitical struggles that marked the Chicano movement of the late sixties and the seventies.
Marxist art history in capitalist society has by now a long if narrow tradition. It was launched in the thirties by such scholars as Antal, Blunt, Brown, Raphael, and Schapiro and was continued soon after World War II by a few others, most notably Klin-gender and Hauser, but all these scholars worked in small groups or in isolation. Marxist art history did not enter into the mainstream of academic debate until the second general economic and political crisis of late capitalist society, from about 1968 to 1973. At that time, younger Marxist art historians in West Germany, France, Holland, and the United States began to gather in regular associations, proposing Marxist answers to a growing range of art historical questions. The journals of the West German and French groups, the Kritische Berichte and the Histoire et Critique des Arts, are by now firmly established.
Queer studies highlights the importance of developing analyses that go beyond identity and representational politics. For Native studies in particular, queer theory points to the possibility of going beyond representing the voices of Native peoples, a project that can quickly become co-opted into providing Native commodities for consumption in the multicultural academic-industrial complex. The subjectless critique of queer theory can assist Native studies in critically interrogating how it could unwittingly re-create colonial hierarchies even within projects of decolonization. This critique also sheds light on how Native peoples function within the colonial imaginary-including the colonial imaginary of scholars and movements that claim to be radical. At the same time, Native studies can build on queer of color critique's engagement with subjectless critique. In the move to go "postidentity," queer theory often reinstantiates a white supremacist, settler colonialism by disappearing the indigenous peoples colonized in this land who become the foils for the emergence of postcolonial, postmodern, diasporic, and queer subjects. With respect to Native studies, even queer of color critique does not necessarily mark how identities are shaped by settler colonialism. Thus a conversation between Native studies and queer theory is important, because the logics of settler colonialism and decolonization must be queered in order to properly speak to the genocidal present that not only continues to disappear indigenous peoples but reinforces the structures of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy that affect all peoples.
‘At the beginning, with Thomas More, utopia sets out an agenda for the modern world. Today, five hundred years later, what are the uses of utopia?’ (Kumar, 1991, p. 85). This paper provides an answer to this question by examining More's utopian ‘method’ which, it is suggested, offers a model way of thinking imaginatively and prospectively about the form and content of social reform in general and educational change in particular.
Alicia Gaspar De Alba is an associate professor and founding faculty member of the César Chávez Center for Chicana/Chicano Studies at University of California, Los Angeles, and also the associate director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. She is the author of La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge: Poetry y Otras Movidas (Arte Público, 2003); Sor Juana’s Second Dream: A Novel (University of New Mexico, 1999); Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (University of Texas, 1998); The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories (Bilingual, 1993). She is also the editor of Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003). Her second novel, Desert Blood/The Juarez Murders, is forthcoming from Arte Público Press in 2005. She is a native of El Paso, Texas, and recently organized an international conference on “The Maquiladora Murders, or, Who Is Killing the Women of Juarez?” at UCLA, co-sponsored by Amnesty International.
1. The research for this work was supported by the Rockefeller Association Fellowship for Latino Cultural Study at the Smithsonian, the Institute of American Cultures at UCLA, and UCMexus.
2. Webster’s College Dictionary, 2d ed. (New York Random House, 1997), 622. One of the definitions of place is "the portion of space normally occupied by a person or thing" (994). The word utopia comes from the Greek ou [not] + tóp(os) [place].
3. "I do not know where Kansas is, for I have never heard that country mentioned before. But tell me, is it a civilized country?" [the Witch of the North asks Dorothy]. "Oh, yes," replied Dorothy. "Then that accounts for it. In the civilized countries, I believe there are no witches left; nor wizards, nor sorceresses, nor magicians. But, you see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized, for we are cut off from all the rest of the world...." (Baum, 11-12)
4. In my case, my list of signifiers would read like this: Mexican + female + middle class + lesbian + bilingual + first-generation Chicana + U.S. citizen + fronteriza + born-again pagan + feminist + writer/poet/professor + Ph.D. + "Xena" fanatic.
5. Elleguá, the trickster god of the crossroads, likes to hide behind the mischievous Santo Niño de Atocha; Changó, the fierce lightning rod of social justice whose colors are red and white, has chosen Saint Barbara as his Catholic alter ego; Changó’s wife, Oshún, sexy goddess of fertility, creativity, and love, likes the disguise of the Virgin of Charity, patron saint of Cuba, with the three little figures in the canoe at her feet staring up at her in absolute adoration. I dedicate this essay to the santera who first introduced me to these three orishas in 1987; to this day, "esta Mexicana" wears the elekes she prepared for me in her Spanish Harlem botánica.
6. The most notable of these Santería artists were the Cubans Wifredo Lam, Juan Boza, and Ana Mendieta.
7. Passed in the state of California in 1994 by an overwhelming majority vote, this [End Page 136] Proposition denies basic health care and educational rights to undocumented immigrants and their children.
8. Moctezuma was the reigning emperor of the Aztecs at the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the sixteenth century; Geronimo led a band of insurgent Apaches who fought off Anglo invasions of their homeland in Arizona in the nineteenth century.
9. Certainly, an analysis of the prevalent leitmotifs in the art and literature produced by Chicanos—that is, by Chicano men—in the early years of the Chicano Movement substantiates Chávez’s point. José Antonio Villareal’s Pocho (1959), Corky Gonzales’s I Am Joaquín (1969), Armando Rendón’s Chicano Manifesto (1971), Tomás Rivera’s Y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971), Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy (1971), Aristeo Brito’s The Devil in Texas (1972), Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1972), Rudolfo Anaya’s...
The lynching of persons of Mexican origin or descent has been largely overlooked by historians of American mob violence. This essay offers the first attempt to construct a systematic set of data on the subject. The authors contend that between 1848 and 1928, mobs lynched at least 597 Mexicans. Traditional interpretations of western violence cannot account for this phenomenon. The actual causes of mob violence against Mexicans were several-fold: race and the legacy of Anglo American expansion, economic competition, and diplomatic tensions between Mexico and the United States. Throughout this era, Mexicans formulated numerous means of resistance against Anglo mobs. These included armed self-defense, public protest, the establishment of mutual defense organizations, and appeals for aid to the Mexican government. The central aim of this essay is to broaden the scholarly discourse on lynching by moving beyond the traditional limitations of the black/white paradigm. Placing the experience of Mexicans into the history of lynching expands our understanding of the causes of mob violence and the ways in which individuals and groups sought to resist lynching and vigilantism. The essay is based on numerous archival sources in both Spanish and English. These include diaries, letters, memoirs, folk culture, newspapers, government documents, and diplomatic correspondence.
Conflicting Colonial accounts of the Aztec conquest of Oztuma
are resolved by correlating new archaeological data, a collection
of Early Colonial documents from the town of Ixtepec, and other
better-known sources. The correlation of archaeological and
ethnohistoric data suggests that, contrary to some interpretations
of the histories of the Aztec Empire, the Aztec fortress of
Oztuma was separate from and contemporaneous with a Chontal
fortified site known by the same toponym, and that the Chontal
of Oztuma were not exterminated by the Aztecs during the rebellion
of 1487. Instead, Chontal Oztuma maintained internal political
cohesion while integrated into the Aztec hegemony. The Aztec
and Chontal sites together formed the defensive line of the
imperial frontier facing the Tarascans. This study represents
a shift in focus in Aztec studies from the Aztec imperial core
to its constituent hinterlands, emphasizing the complexity of
political and strategic interactions.