choloa (MH560r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the conjugated verb ocholoque (“they ran away”) shows a bird's eye view of two alternating footprints.
Stephanie Wood
This is a reference to the people who fled their communities to avoid paying the heavy tribute debts that mounted as people were dying in the epidemics. Colonial authorities were either not reducing the tributes or the process for reducing them was very slow. Running away was an act of resistance to unreasonable colonial economic demands.
Footprints are used in Nahua hieroglyphs to express a number of verbs, nouns, and prepositions. Some examples appear below.
Stephanie Wood
o chologue
ocholoque
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
footprints, huellas, run away, huir, correr, escapar
choloa, to run, flee, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/choloa
huir
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 560r, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=199&st=image
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