Xochitepec (CmpRG)

This compound glyph for Xochitepec appears on the edge of the map just above the head painted on the top of the central tepetl glyph for Cenpoualla (Cenpohuallan, Zempoala). It appears in a rectangle bordered with red lines and sits next to a drawing of a church with a bell tower topped with a cross. This structure, which in keeping with the style of communication found on the map, is a kind of semantic element that exablished Xochitepec as an inhabited place. The box, which is an element that Barbara E. Mundy believes is marking off divisions between territories held Cempoala’s subject communities, also contains semantic elements that must indicate what kind of plants growing in the vicinity, in this case a nopal cactus, a maguey plant, and some kind of tree (see the historical contextualizing image). Peter Gerhard tells us that the Cempoala region is “a rolling, maguey-covered country of volcanic cones rising slightly above the plain…” that in the later sixteenth-century began to sprout haciendas devoted to pulque production (pgs. 67-68). As with any place named in some way with a tepetl glyph, a deeper reading suggests that Xochitepec may well have been located near (or on, originally) a hill given the same name. For more information about this Relación, see Mundy, Barbara E., “Mapping Babel: A Sixteenth-Century Indigenous Map from Mexico,” The Appendix, 1:4 (October 2013), and the same author's The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), particularly pg. 129 and her discussion of the function of the red lines seen on the map. For information about the Cempoala region, see Gerhard, Historical Geography of New Spain (1972).