cacahuatl (TK217r)

People who know Spanish will imagine that cacahuatl means peanut, but the term cacahuate is a false cognate. In sixteenth-century manuscripts cacahuatl usually refers to the cacao bean, although it can refer to nuts. The peanut, however, was usually tlalcacahuatl, the nut that grows in the soil. The cacao bean was the source of the hot chocolate that the privileged Nahua elite drank. It also became a global delight, not just as a hot drink but in many additional forms. In this case, the colonial overlord (the encomendero, holder of a grant of the right to extract tribute in kind and labor from the Nahua community) demanded the large number of eighteen loads of the prized cacao beans. This manuscript was produced as part of the community’s resistance to the unreasonable taxation being demanded vis-a-vis the size of their numbers, especially as the population was declining as a result of diseases inadvertently brought over from Europe.

Side Note: The folio numbers are not always clear in the copy published online by the British Museum. Marc Thouvenot gives this page the number K15_A in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K15_A.