cabildo (CST35)

This painting of the town council members of Santa Catalina Texupan is included here as an example of iconography for the term cabildo (Spanish for town council, a term taken into Nahuatl) which does not actually appear here in the companion text. What appears are all the individual titles for the officers of the town council and related occupations. All these terms come from Spanish, but these are jobs held by the local Indigenous nobility. See the dictionary field for the titles and their roles. Each member of this group of heads, which are shown in profile looking toward the viewer’s left, has a banderole with the job title underneath his head. All but two of the titles are in the plural, because multiple men would fill those jobs. The banderole is a European artistic tradition that this Native notary has adopted. It is interesting for the way it combines textual and pictorial writing, as Kevin Terraciano (Codex Sierra, 2021) points out. The men look much alike except for the varying colors of their hats (and the hat of the fiscal is a different shape). They all have red collars, too, except the fiscal. It is somewhat curious that three of the men have a staff of office (which should be called a topilli in Nahuatl) and three do not. At this moment in time (1561) the members of the cabildo are being paid a total of 130 pesos. The breakdown for how much each man made is not explained in the companion Nahuatl text. The treasury from which the money came for paying the men is shown as a brown chest to the left. This chest has white trim, small stepped legs, and gray metal (probably iron) locking mechanisms. The usual practice in the council was for three men to have keys, and all three keys had to be used at once, so that no one could secretly and illegally dip into community funds. This tradition came from Europe, too. The small white circles on the chest and the gold circles that sit atop the banderoles might be coins (pesos or tomines), but that remains to be investigated. The gloss gives the job titles again, along with the verb tlatequipanoa, to serve, which is how the community saw the work of these men, as a type of service to the community.