tlamama (TK214v)
This painted simplex Nahuatl hieroglyph represents a porter (tlamama), a man who carries things on his back. He appears in profile, facing toward the viewer’s right. He wears only a loincloth, and he is barefooted. A wooden carrying frame (perhaps a cacaxtli) on his back contains five gray hens (called gallinas in the Spanish-language gloss). The frame is attached to a woven strap (usually called a mecapalli) that goes over the top of the man’s head. He also holds this strap near his neck with both hands, keeping it in place as he walks. He is in motion, with his right foot lifted slightly off the ground.
Stephanie Wood
The contextualizing image shows three individual men, each of whom worked as a tlamama. The nearby text refers to the local Spanish colonizer’s demand for 1,200 of these men. The quantity of tributes in kind on this page of the codex is so huge–including 32,000 loads of maize and more–that such a high number of porters might have been required to carry everything to Tetzcoco or Mexico City. The transportation was surely very onerous, not to mention the agricultural work and the raising of the 300 hens. This manuscript was produced as part of the community’s resistance to the unreasonable taxation being demanded vis-a-vis the size of the community, 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 K12_B in his TLACHIA digital collection, https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/tepetlaoztoc/K12_B.
Stephanie Wood
los tamemes
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
cacaxtli, taparrabo, cargar, transportar, mecapal, frijol, frijoles, bolsa, carga, tamemes, tributo, tributos, colonialismo, resistencia
tlamama, a porter, one who carries things, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlamama-0
cacax(tli), a carrying frame, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cacaxtli
mecapal(li), tumpline, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/mecapalli
el tameme
Stephanie Wood
The Codex Kingsborough, also known as the Códice de Tepetlaoztoc, and the Memorial de los indios de Tepetlaoztoc, is not on display. It was transferred from the British Library and is now held by the British Museum. It is shared on line at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am2006-Drg-13964
©The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Please also cite the <em>Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphsem>, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities Projects, 2020-present) and this URL.
