Coatepec (CmpRG)

Coatepec was one of the sujetos of Tlaquilpan, one of Cempohuallan's four caberceras [head towns]. The placement of the place glyph next to a church agrees with the Spanish text of the Relación itself, which emphasizes that all of Cempoala’s dependent communities have churches. Aside from the semantic element of the church mentioned, above, this glyph shows much less obvious Spanish influence than some of the others found on the map. It appears along one edge of the manuscript below and to the right of two tepetl, Ometepec and Huitznahuac (see the historical contextualizing image and entries for these two landscape features elsewhere in the Visual Lexicon). There are also two maguey plants in the vicinity, suggesting an area that, according to Peter Gerhard, is “a rolling, maguey-covered country of volcanic cones rising slightly above the plain” that eventually featured a number of estates dedicated to the production of pulque (67-68). For a study of the RG, see Mundy, Barbara E., “Mapping Babel: A Sixteenth-Century Indigenous Map from Mexico,” The Appendix, 1:4 (October 2013), Mundy (1996), and Ballesteros García (2005), 62. For further information about the Cempoala region, see Gerhard, Historical Geography of New Spain (1972).