Tlaxcaltecatl (Mdz42r)
Tlaxcaltecatl (Mdz42r)
This representation of the ethnicity Tlaxcaltecatl, includes a man's head attached to a simplex glyph for tortilla (tlaxcalli), which also stands for the place with which the man is affiliated, Tlaxcallan (Tlaxcala, today). The simplex glyph consists of a round black-line drawing with vertical black hash marks, adding texture, and a (left) hand in the middle that reminds us of the action of slapping the dough into the thin, round, corn cakes that come to be tortillas. The hand is a yellow-tan with white fingernails. It is upright. The man's head is shown in profile, looking to the viewer's right. His skin is tan flesh tone. His hair is short and painted purple, probably meant to convey brown or black. At the top of his head is a white heron feather device, with the feathers pointing the opposite direction as the man is looking.
Stephanie Wood
The -tecatl ending here suggests an affiliation with the altepetl of Tlaxcallan, hence the idea of the name showing an ethnicity, given that people identified most strongly with the settlement where they were born and grew up.
In some contexts, the hand could convey a phonetic "ma" (relating to hand, maitl, or the verb to take/grab/capture/hunt, ma. But this is not the case here. The gloss helps identify the reading of the ethnicity, Tlaxcaltecatl, associated with the famous place, Tlaxcallan (Tlaxcala, today). The heron feather device might have had an association with that place.
The hash marks on the tortilla are somewhat similar to the marks on ears of corn that can be seen in the thumbnails below, right. They may be iconographic for maize/corn--as opposed to flour, for example, which became a grain used for tortillas only after the introduction of wheat by Europeans. Of course, corn remained the favorite grain for tortillas in the central areas even after contact.
tlaxcaltecatl
Tlaxcaltecatl
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, but by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
ethnicities, etnicidades, feathers, plumas
Codex Mendoza, folio 42 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 94 of 188.
Original manuscript is held by the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1; used here with the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0)
