A pochtecatl (plural pochteca) was a professional long-distance traveling merchant in the Aztec Empire. They were a small, but important class as they not only facilitated commerce, but also communicated vital information across the empire and beyond its borders. The pochteca also traveled outside the empire to trade with neighboring lands throughout Mesoamerica. Because of their extensive travel and knowledge of the empire, they were often employed as spies.

Status in Aztec Society

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Pochteca occupied a high status in Aztec society, below the noble class. The pochteca were responsible for providing the materials that the noble class used to display their wealth. These materials were often obtained from foreign sources. The pochteca also acted as agents for the nobility by selling the surplus tribute that had been bestowed on the noble and warrior elite. The pochteca traded the excess tribute (food, garments, feathers and slaves) in the marketplace or carried it to other areas to exchange for trade goods.

Due to the success of the pochteca, many of these merchants became as wealthy as the noble class, but were obligated to hide this wealth from the public. Trading expeditions often left their districts late in the evening, and their wealth was only revealed within their private guildhalls. Although politically and economically powerful the pochteca strove to avoid undue attention. The merchants followed their own laws in their own calpulli, venerating their god, Yacatecuhtli, “The Lord Who Guides”, an aspect of Quetzalcóatl. Eventually the merchants were elevated to the rank of the warriors of the military orders.

Organization

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The pochteca were organised into twelve guilds, each based in one of the urban centers of the Valley of México:

Tenochtitlán

Tlatelolco

Huitzilopocho

Cuautitlán

Azcapotzalco

Mixcoac

Texcoco

Huexotla

Cóatlichan

Otompan

Xochimilco

Chalco

The markets were part of a complex interlocking system. In the Valley there were four levels of market:

The great market of Tlatelolco which met daily.

The markets of Texcoco and Xochimilco.

The Macuiltianquiztli – every five-days markets of the city-states Huitzilopocho, Cuautitlán, Azcapotzalco, Mixcoac, Huexotla, Cóatlichan, Otompan and Chalco.

The markets of the smaller towns and villages.

Some of the cities were famous for specialized markets:

Azcapotzalco was a major slave market.

Texcoco sold ceramics and clothing.

Acolman specialised in dogs and food animals introduced by the Nisei.

Tepepulco sold birds, important for their feathers.

The highest official of the pochteca in Tenochtitlán was the Pochtecatlailotlac, the Merchant-Arbiter who also sat as one of the judges in the Tlacxitlan, the highest court of law.

Each of these cities included a merchant district and a market, the tianquiztli, though the greatest market was the tianquizco in Tlatelolco, the fifth campan of Tenochtitlán. Tlatelolco included seven calpulli inhabited by the pochteca: Pochtlan, Ahhuachtlan, Atlauhco, Acxotlan, Tepetitlan, Itztolco and Tzommolco. Each of the pochteca calpulli were governed by the Pochtecatlatoque – the Merchant Speakers or Leaders. Those of the Pochtlan and Acxotlan districts had special titles:

The Tlailotlac of Pochtlan was the arbiter in mercantile affairs, overseeing the commerce of the Pochteca Teucnehnenqueh, the ‘travelling lords’. Elderly experience merchants, the Pochtecahuehuetqueh, helped him manage the mercantile concerns of the district.

The Acxoteca of Acxotlan was the Merchant-General of the Naualoztomeca, the ‘disguised merchants’.

Each of the Pochtecatlatoque were aided by the pochtecatlatoque. The pochtecatlatoque were the elder of the pochteca, and were no longer travelers, but rather acted as administrators, overseeing young pochteca and administering the marketplace.

The volume of trade passing through the great tianquizco of Tlatelolco was unsurpassed in Mesoamerica. It served not merely to distribute goods but as the great clearing house of the Empire. Such was the organisation required to manage this massive entrepreneurial center that the Aztec state founded special institutions and officials to oversee it.

The Pochtecatlailotlac, the ‘first of the merchants’ was the effective governor of Tlatelolco, answering to the Huey Tlatoani and accounted a magistrate of the Teuctlahtohqueh, the imperial judges.

The Tianquizpan Tlayacanqui, the Marketplace Judges, oversaw the enactment of pochteca laws and sentenced any thieves caught within the confines of the tianquizco. The Pochteca Tlahtocan commercial court had three levels and between three and five judges would sit in court each market day.

The omnipresent Tianquiztlacanqui administered the day-to-day running of the market, checking for compliance with the laws and looking out for fraudulent dealing. They also ensured the payment of the imperial trade tax, the pochtecatequitl, enforced on all sales.

Types of Pochteca

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The professional merchants were classified into the following roles:

The importers: pochteca and oztomeca.

The wholesalers, the tlaquixtiani.

The retailers, the tlanecuilo.

The pochteca were divided into the following types:

The Pochteca Teucnehnenqueh, the pochteca trading on behalf of the nobility. They were considered the higher rank of pochteca, carrying out some private trade as well.

The Pochteca Naualoztomeca, the ‘disguised merchants’, seeking after rare goods often on their own behalf but also as spies for the state. A oztomecatl (plural oztomeca) was a merchant-guard or vanguard-merchant seeking out new markets and resources and goods of interest to Tenochtitlán. Senior warrior-merchants were known as Teyahualonime, with a merchant-general given the title of Acxotecatl. Often the trade performed by these warrior-merchants was a precursor of military conquest.

Within these groups there were also:

The Tecouanime, the slave merchants. These people were often referred to as the richest of merchants, as they played a central role in bathing the slaves used for sacrificial victims.

The Iyahqueh, merchants based in outlying trade stations and depots, supporting the long trade routes.

The Tlanamacani, salesmen acting as agents for the pochteca guilds.

Lesser Traders

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The Tlanecuilo or Tlanecuiloani, the regional traders and pedlars were not part of the pochteca guilds but were an important part of market commerce. They traded in foodstuffs and utilitarian goods rather than the luxuries carried by the pochteca and frequently specialised in specific items, such as:

The Huauhnamacac traders who sold the seeds of amaranth (pigweed). In several ceremonies images of the gods (notably Huitzilopochtli) were made with amaranth mixed with honey to be eaten by the people.

The Iztanamacaque, sellers of salt.

The Tlacemanqui traders who sold items, including silver and gold.

The Tlanamacac producer-sellers who came to the markets to sell their produce.

See also

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Aztec society

References

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The Aztecs of Mexico, George Clapp Vaillant (1901-1945), Penguin Books edition (1953), pp.122-23; also Plate 38 depicting portion of the Codex Florentino.

Aztec Warfare, Ross Hassig, University of Oklahoma Press (1995).

Daily Life of the Aztecs, Jacques Soustelle, Phoenix Press edition (1995), pp 60-65, 85-86.

Armies of the Aztec and Inca Empires, and other native peoples of the Americas, and the Conquistadores 1450-1608, Ian Heath, Foundry Books (1999), pp 50-51.

Mexico’s Indigenous Past, Alfredo Lopez Austin & Leonardo Lopez Lujan, University of Oklahoma Press (2001), pp 235-236.

The Aztecs, Michael E. Smith, Blackwell (2003), pp 112-114.

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The Tepehuán (Tepehuanes or Tepehuanos) are an indigenous ethnic group in northwest Mexico, whose villages at the time of Spanish conquest spanned a large territory along the Sierra Madre Occidental from Chihuahua and Durango in the north to Jalisco in the south. The southern Tepehuán community included an isolated settlement (Azqueltán) in the middle of Huichol territory in the Bolaños River canyon. The southern Tepehuán were historically referred to as Tepecanos.

The Tepehuán languages are part of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family, within which it is grouped with O’odham to form the Piman family.

The name is pronounced [tepe'wan] in Spanish, and is often spelled Tepehuan without the accent in English-language publications. This can cause confusion with the languages called Tepehua ([te'pewa] in Spanish) and collectively referred to as Tepehuan in English. These are spoken on the other side of Mexico, and are closely related to Totonac and not at all to Tepehuán. The names of both groups come from Nahuatl and mean ‘mountain dwellers’ or ‘mountain people’.

Nahuatl is a group of related languages and dialects of the Nahuan (traditionally called “Aztecan”) branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Collectively they are spoken by an estimated 1.5 million Nahua people, most of whom live in Central Mexico. All Nahuan languages are indigenous to Mesoamerica.

The Classical Nahuatl word nahuatl is thought to mean “a good, clear sound”. This language name has several spellings, among them Náhuatl (the standard spelling in the Spanish language), Naoatl, Nauatl, Nahuatl, Nawatl. In a back formation from the name of the language, the ethnic group of Nahuatl speakers are called Nahua.

Nahuatl has been spoken in Central Mexico since at least the 7th century AD. It was the language of the Aztecs, who dominated what is now central Mexico during the Late Postclassic period of Mesoamerican chronology. During the preceding century and a half, the expansion and influence of the Aztec Empire had led to the variety spoken by the residents of Tenochtitlan becoming a prestige language in Mesoamerica. With the introduction of the Latin alphabet, Nahuatl also became a literary language and many chronicles, grammars, works of poetry, administrative documents and codices were written in the 16th and 17th centuries. This early literary language based on the Tenochtitlan variety has been labeled Classical Nahuatl and is among the most studied and best documented languages of the Americas.

Today Nahuatl languages are spoken in scattered communities mostly in rural areas. There are considerable differences among varieties, and some are mutually unintelligible. They have all been subject to varying degrees of influence from Spanish. No modern Nahuatl languages are identical to Classical Nahuatl, but those spoken in and around the Valley of Mexico are generally more closely related to it than those on the periphery. Under Mexico’s Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas (”General Law on the Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples”) promulgated in 2003, Nahuatl along with the other indigenous languages of Mexico are recognized as lenguas nacionales (”national languages”) in the regions where they are spoken, enjoying the same status as Spanish within their region.

Nahuatl is a language with a complex morphology characterized by polysynthesis and agglutination, allowing the construction of long words with complex meanings out of several stems and affixes. Nahuatl has been influenced by other Mesoamerican languages through centuries of coexistence, and with them forms the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area.

Many words from Nahuatl have been borrowed into Spanish and thence have diffused into hundreds of other languages. Most of these loanwords denote things indigenous to central Mexico which the Spanish heard mentioned for the first time by their Nahuatl names. English words of Nahuatl origin include “avocado“, “chili“, “chocolate“, “coyote” and “tomato“.

The place of Nahuatl within Uto-Aztecan

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Main articles: Nahuatl dialects and Pochutec

In the past the branch of Uto-Aztecan to which Nahuatl belongs was called “Aztecan”. From the 1990s on, the alternative designation “Nahuan” has been frequently used as a replacement especially in Spanish language publications. Since the monograph of Lyle Campbell and Ronald Langacker (1978), the Nahuan (Aztecan) branch of Uto-Aztecan is widely accepted as having two divisions, “General Aztec” and Pochutec.

General Aztec encompasses the Nahuatl and Pipil languages. Pochutec is a scantily attested language which went extinct in the 20th century. The notion that Pochutec should not be considered a variety of Nahuatl was already several decades old, but Campbell and Langacker adduced new arguments for it. Other researchers maintain that Pochutec should be considered a divergent variant of the western periphery.

“Nahuatl” denotes at least Classical Nahuatl together with related modern languages spoken in Mexico. The inclusion of Pipil (Nawat) into the group is slightly controversial. Lyle Campbell, who has worked intensively with the Pipil language, classifies Pipil as separate from the Nahuatl branch within general Aztecan, whereas dialectologists like Una Canger, Karen Dakin and Yolanda Lastra prefer to include Pipil in the General Aztecan branch, citing close historical ties with the so-called eastern peripheral dialects of General Aztec.

History

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Pre-Columbian period

On the issue of geographic origin, linguists during the 20th century agreed that the Uto-Aztecan language family originated in the southwestern United States. Evidence from archaeology and ethnohistory also supports the southward diffusion thesis, specifically that speakers of early Nahuan languages migrated from the northern Mexican deserts into central Mexico in several waves. But recently, the traditional assessment has been challenged by Jane H. Hill, who proposes instead that the Uto-Aztecan language family originated in central Mexico and spread northwards at a very early date.

The purported migration of speakers of the Proto-Nahuan language into the Mesoamerican region has been placed at sometime around AD 500, towards the end of the Early Classic period in Mesoamerican chronology. Before reaching the central altiplano, pre-Nahuan groups probably spent a period of time in contact with the Coracholan languages Cora and Huichol of northwestern Mexico (which are also Uto-Aztecan).

The major political and cultural center of Mesoamerica in the Early Classic period was Teotihuacan. The identity of the language(s) spoken by Teotihuacan’s founders has long been debated, with the relationship of Nahuatl to Teotihuacan being prominent in that enquiry. While in the 19th and early 20th centuries it was presumed that Teotihuacan had been founded by speakers of Nahuatl, later linguistic and archaeological research tended to disconfirm this view. Instead, the timing of the Nahuatl influx was seen to coincide more closely with Teotihuacan’s fall than its rise, and other candidates such as Totonacan identified as more likely. But recently, evidence from Mayan epigraphy of possible Nahuatl loanwords in Mayan languages has been interpreted as demonstrating that other Mesoamerican languages may have been borrowing words from Proto-Nahuan (or its early descendants) significantly earlier than previously thought, bolstering the possibility of a significant Nahuatl presence at Teotihuacan.

In Mesoamerica the Mayan, Oto-Manguean and Mixe-Zoquean language families had coexisted for millennia. This had given rise to the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area (a linguistic area being one where a set of language traits have become common among the area’s language by diffusion and not by evolution within a set of languages belonging to a common genetic subgrouping). After the Nahuas migrated into the Mesoamerican cultural zone, their language too adopted some of the traits defining the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. Examples of such adopted traits are the use of relational nouns, the appearance of calques, or loan translations, and a form of possessive construction typical of Mesoamerican languages.

A language which was the ancestor of Pochutec split from Proto-Nahuan (or Proto-Aztecan) possibly as early as AD 400, arriving in Mesoamerica a few centuries earlier than the main bulk of speakers of Nahuan languages. Some Nahuan groups migrated south along the Central American isthmus, reaching perhaps as far as Nicaragua. The moribund Pipil language of El Salvador is the only living descendant of the variety of Nahuatl once spoken south of present day Mexico.

Beginning in the 7th century Nahuan speakers rose to power in central Mexico. The people of the Toltec culture of Tula, Hidalgo, which was active in central Mexico around the 10th century, are thought to have been Nahuatl speakers. By the 11th century, Nahuatl speakers were dominant in the Valley of Mexico and far beyond, with settlements including Azcapotzalco, Colhuacan and Cholula rising to prominence. Nahua migrations into the region from the north continued into the Postclassic period. One of the last of these migrations to arrive in the Valley of Mexico settled on an island in the Lake Texcoco and proceeded to subjugate the surrounding tribes. This group was the Mexica (or Mexihka), who over the course of the next three centuries founded an empire named Tenochtitlan. Their political and linguistic influence came to extend into Central America and Nahuatl became a lingua franca among merchants and elites in Mesoamerica, e.g., among the Quiché (K’iche’) Maya.

Colonial period

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With the arrival of the Spanish in 1519, the tables were turned on the Nahuatl language: it was displaced as the dominant regional language. Nevertheless, due to the Spanish making alliances with first the Nahuatl speakers from Tlaxcala and later with the conquered Aztecs, the Nahuatl language continued spreading throughout Mesoamerica in the decades after the conquest, when Spanish expeditions with thousands of Nahua soldiers marched north and south to conquer new territories. Jesuit missions in northern Mexico and the southwestern US region often included a barrio of Tlaxcaltec soldiers who remained to guard the mission. For example, some fourteen years after the northeastern city of Saltillo, Coahuila, was founded in 1577, a Tlaxcaltec community was resettled in a separate nearby village, San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala to cultivate the land and aid colonization efforts that had stalled in the face of local hostility to the Spanish settlement. As for the conquest of modern day Central America, Pedro de Alvarado conquered Guatemala with the help of tens of thousands of Tlaxcaltec allies, who then settled outside of modern day Antigua. Similar episodes occurred across El Salvador and Honduras, with Nahuatl speakers settling in communities that were often named after them. In Honduras for example, two of these barrios are called “Mexicapa”; another in El Salvador is called “Mejicanos”. (The postconquest presence of Nahua peoples well inside present day US territory is well documented. For example, a map of Santa Fe, New Mexico drawn ca. 1768 by José de Urrutia shows a pueblo (”village”) or barrio named Analco spread along the southern bank of the Santa Fe River, opposite to the Spanish town. This settlement of Analco, labelled “E” on the map, is accompanied by the text: “Pueblo ò Barrio de Analco que debe su origen à los Tracaltecas que acompa[ña]ron à los primeros E?pañoles que entraron à la Conqui?ta de e?te Reino” (”village or quarter of Analco, which owes its origins to the Tlaxcaltecs who accompanied the first Spaniards who entered into the conquest of this region”).)

As a part of their missionary efforts, members of various religious orders (principally Fransciscan friars, Dominican friars, and Jesuits) introduced the Latin alphabet to the Nahuas, who were eager to learn to read and write both in Spanish and in their own language. Within the first twenty years after the Spanish arrival, texts were being prepared in the Nahuatl language written in Latin characters. Simultaneously, schools were founded, such as the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco in 1536, which taught both indigenous and classical European languages to both Indians and priests. Missionary grammarians undertook the writing of grammars of indigenous languages for use by priests. The first Nahuatl grammar, written by Andrés de Olmos, was published in 1547—three years before the first French grammar. By 1645 four more had been published, authored respectively by Alonso de Molina (1571), Antonio del Rincón (1595), Diego de Galdo Guzmán (1642), and Horacio Carochi (1645). Carochi’s is today considered the most important of the colonial era grammars of Nahuatl.

In 1570 King Philip II of Spain decreed that Nahuatl should become the official language of the colonies of New Spain in order to facilitate communication between the Spanish and natives of the colonies. This led to the Spanish missionaries teaching Nahuatl to Indians living as far south as Honduras and El Salvador. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Classical Nahuatl was used as a literary language, and a large corpus of texts from that period is in existence today. Texts from this period include histories, chronicles, poetry, theatrical works, Christian canonical works, ethnographic descriptions, and administrative documents. The Spanish permitted a great deal of autonomy in the local administration of indigenous towns during this period, and in many Nahuatl speaking towns Nahuatl was the de facto administrative language both in writing and speech. A large body of Nahuatl literature was composed during this period, including the Florentine Codex, a twelve-volume compendium of Aztec culture compiled by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún; Crónica Mexicayotl, a chronicle of the royal lineage of Tenochtitlan by Fernando Alvarado Tezozómoc; Cantares Mexicanos, a collection of songs in Nahuatl; a Nahuatl-Spanish/Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary compiled by Alonso de Molina; and the Huei tlamahuiçoltica, a description in Nahuatl of the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Grammars and dictionaries of indigenous languages were composed throughout the colonial period, but their quality was highest in the initial period. The friars found that learning all the indigenous languages was impossible in practice, so they concentrated on Nahuatl. For a time, the linguistic situation in Mesoamerica remained relatively stable, but in 1696 King Charles II issued a decree banning the use of any language other than Spanish throughout the Spanish Empire. In 1770 another decree, calling for the elimination of the indigenous languages, did away with Classical Nahuatl as a literary language.

Modern period
Throughout the modern period the situation of indigenous languages has grown increasingly precarious in Mexico, and the numbers of speakers of virtually all indigenous languages have dwindled. Although the absolute number of Nahuatl speakers has actually risen over the past century, indigenous populations have become increasingly marginalized in Mexican society. In 1895, Nahuatl was spoken by over 5% of the population. By 2000, this proportion had fallen to 1.49%. Given the process of marginalization combined with the trend of migration to urban areas and to the United States, some linguists are warning of impending language death. At present Nahuatl is mostly spoken in rural areas by an impoverished class of indigenous subsistence agriculturists. According to the Mexican national statistics institute, INEGI, 51% of Nahuatl speakers are involved in the farming sector and 6 in 10 receive no wages or less than the minimum wage.

From the early 20th century to at least the mid-1980s, educational policies in Mexico focused on the “Hispanification” of indigenous communities, teaching only Spanish and discouraging the use of indigenous languages. As a result, today there is no group of Nahuatl speakers having attained general literacy in Nahuatl; while their literacy rate in Spanish also remains much lower than the national average. Even so, Nahuatl is still spoken by well over a million people, of whom around 10% are monolingual. The survival of Nahuatl dialects as a whole is not imminently endangered, but the survival of certain dialects is, and some dialects have already become extinct within the last few decades of the 20th century.

The 1990s saw the onset of diametric changes in official Mexican government policies towards indigenous and linguistic rights. Developments of accords in the international rights arena combined with domestic pressures led to legislative reforms and the creation of decentralized government agencies like CDI and INALI with responsibilities for the promotion and protection of indigenous communities and languages. In particular, the federal Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas ["General Law on the Language Rights of the Indigenous Peoples", promulgated 13 March 2003] recognizes all the country’s indigenous languages, including Nahuatl, as “national languages” and gives indigenous people the right to use them in all spheres of public and private life.

In February 2008 the mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard, launched a drive to have all government employees learn Nahuatl. Ebrard stated he would continue institutionalizing Nahuatl and that it was important for Mexico to remember its history and its tradition.

Geographic distribution

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Main articles: Nahuatl dialects, List of Nahuan languages, and Nahua peoples

A spectrum of Nahuatl dialects is currently spoken in an area stretching from the northern state of Durango to Veracruz in the southeast. Pipil (also known as Nawat[51]), the southernmost Nahuan language, is spoken in El Salvador by a small number of speakers. According to IRIN-International, the Nawat Language Recovery Initiative project, there are no reliable figures for the contemporary numbers of speakers of Pipil / Nawat. Numbers may range anywhere from “perhaps a few hundred people, perhaps only a few dozen.”

Based on figures accumulated by INEGI from the national census conducted in 2000, Nahuatl is spoken by an estimated 1.45 million people, some 198,000 (14.9%) of whom are monolingual. There is gender disparity in monolingualism, with females representing nearly two thirds of all monolinguals. The states of Guerrero and Hidalgo have the highest rates of monolingual Nahuatl speakers as a proportion of the total Nahuatl speaking population, calculated at 24.2% and 22.6%, respectively. The proportion of monolinguals for most other states is less than 5%. Put another way, more than 95% of the Nahuatl speaking population in most states speaks at least one other language, usually Spanish; nationally, the figure is about 86% of the total.

The largest concentrations of Nahuatl speakers are found in the states of Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí, and Guerrero. Significant populations are also found in Mexico State, Morelos, and the Federal District, with smaller communities in Michoacán and Durango. Nahuatl became extinct during the 20th century in the states of Jalisco and Colima. As a result of internal migrations within the country, Nahuatl speaking communities exist in all of Mexico’s states. The modern influx of Mexican workers and families into the United States has resulted in the establishment of a few small Nahuatl speaking communities in that country, particularly in New York and California.

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