Q: Where would you place the other groups that we’ve come to know as the Anasazi, the Sinaguas and other people, whose ruins we’ve seen? Did they come after what may have been the precursors to Aztlán, or were they contiguous with them?

A: Well, we do have some information on migrations of many of these groups. The migrations
of the people that come to be known as the Anasazi are relatively recent. In other words, we’re talking about [these movements being], say, a thousand years ago, maybe fifteen hundred years ago. There’s plenty of room, within the Southwest, for other peoples to have been moving around during the same period of time. For example, we also have the migration records of the Athopaskan-speaking Navajo people and Apache people, taking place in the same areas at the same time. And also adopting people who were probably speakers of other language families into, let us say, the Navajo group, for instance. But you have to remember that when we’re talking about Anasazi or pueblo people, one of the reasons I decided to apply the term Aztlán in 1960 or ‘61, to the entire Southwest and northern Mexico, was not just because of my knowledge of the tradition about Aztlán, but also because the native people of a good part of Sonora and part of Chihuahua are also pueblo Indians. And in places like Sahuaripa, for example, in Sonora, you had terraced pueblo dwellings, very similar to Taos, New Mexico. So when you talk about pueblo Indians, you’re talking about people who also extended down into Sonora. And these people were speaking Uto-Aztecan languages. They were speaking branches of the Pima family or the Opata-Tewi family, and so there were still Uto-Aztecans who were pueblo Indians, even in the historic period of European contact.

Q: Given that we know Aztlán was somewhere in the Southwest, is the migration to Tenochtitlán something that would have happened over a short period or a long period of time?

A: Many of the chronicles tend to date the departure of the Aztecas or the Mexitin, as they’re called often, from Aztlán at about 1064, [by] our present calendar. One says 1090, I believe. As I recall, it takes about two hundred and eighteen years or two hundred and eighty years--something like that--before they manage to reach the Valley of Mexico. Then, of course, another couple hundred years before they found the great city of Tenochtitlán. So it is a migration according to the records that we have that took a considerable period of time. It could, of course, have actually begun earlier, and those dates may have been set to it later. We don’t know, exactly, how accurate those dates are, but I have no reason to challenge them myself, at this point.

Q: It is said that Aztlán is a lake, has seven caves, is a place of whiteness, a place of herons and egrets. Given that, where might Aztlán be located in the Southwest?

A: Well, I think there are several places where one could start out. There was a great city along the coast of Sinaloa, known as Aztetlán, and this was a very very large city, which, of course, was depopulated by the Spanish conquest. But it was a large city, not as large as Tenochtitlán, of course, but a city of considerable size, and also the Spaniards marked a river along the coast on some of their maps called the Rio de Aztetlán. I place it at about [what we know as] the Rio Yaqui.
These could represent places where the Aztecas stopped and lived for periods of time, left part of their people behind, as they migrated south. I think one of the things that possibly could be done would be a textual analysis of later Aztec Nahuatl to see if there are any words left over from any northern Uto-Aztecan dialects. One might find that there are some relics in the Aztec speech of the late period that will tell a little bit about their history of what their language was formerly like. We know that they abandoned, or at least some of the texts indicate, that they abandoned their former language and adopted the official Nahuatl of the Valley of Mexico, at some time. So they probably were speaking a little bit different dialect before that time. Probably not too different, but maybe some relics could be found. So there are lines of research that could be followed.
In any case, it is quite clear that they are parts of a larger community of what we could call Mexicanic or Uto-Nauhuan peoples, who are in turn a part of a larger group of people we call Native Americans during the 1492 period. We can just call them all Americans and just leave it at that. These are the original Americans.

Q: How did the Spanish explorers of that era construct their maps?

A: Every map maker was a little bit different. There was a lot of copying, of course. They tended to copy other maps. But the thing that tended to drive the map making were reports from the field in diaries, journals. They would look at journals, or sometimes, perhaps, they had access to maps prepared by people who had been out traveling. So a scholar of maps can often tell when the information from a particular expedition finds its way to the map makers, because all of a sudden there are new place names that show up, new rivers, new coast lines, new geographical information. So when you find on a map something about Teguayo and the Aztecs coming from an island and a lake in that area, and so on, that, undoubtably, comes from a very specific source. The source itself may never be found. It may have been destroyed or lost or may have been oral. But we know that some map makers saw a source. Subsequently, of course, it could have been copied, then, by other map makers. But again, you may find new information coming in, as some of the maps will show much more detailed information than the earlier maps. Then you know that somebody else has had some additional information that they’ve fed in to the map makers.

Q: Could you tell us why, in your book, you see the Chicanos as the northern-most Aztecs.

A: The word Mexicano, from which, I believe, Chicano is derived, from the Nahuatl Mexicano, is a term that all during [the] Colonial Period referred to people who spoke Nahuatl. It is a term that refers to indigenous American people. So that when the, the republic was established, between 1810 and 1821, they were going to adapt the term Anahuac, which again is a native term, referring to the land between arin, but when they finally decided to adopt the term Mexicano, Mexico, they consciously adopted an indigenous name. They consciously identified with themselves, as an indigenous American people. Of course, that was very logical, because, overwhelmingly, the ancestry of the Mexican republic’s people is from the original American people. It is estimated about 80% of the genes are derived from original American people.
I grew up in southern California. El Monte. And a lot of my friends, my classmates, the field workers who were in the field next door to my house who came in and drank water from our faucet, I interacted with them all the time, and first started learning Spanish at that time and all these people were brown indigenous people. And so I grew up with an awareness from my earliest age that people known as Mexicanos and so on, were Indian. Native people. I mean, I never had any doubt about that. And so it always took me as a surprise, later on, when some people began to say well these were whites with Spanish surnames or something like that. I never could quite understand that.
So when we look at the people from Mexico, and the
Chicanos--and I should say something about Chicanos. Chicanos have their roots in the Southwest for another reason, too. And that is because many pueblo Indians, many California Indians, and others, through intermarriage, and otherwise, became ancestors of the present Chicano population. The Chicano population doesn’t only come from what is now the republic of Mexico. It also stems from what used to be Mexico, north of the border, the present border. And so, in any case, these people are very definitely related to all the other indigenous people and they constitute the largest group. Whereas the Navajo may only number two hundred, three hundred thousand people, you know, the Chicanos number into the millions. And so, obviously, this is the largest group of indigenous people in the United States, today.

Q: Given what you just told us, how would you suggest that the Mexican-Chicano population answer the census?

A: Well, it’s very interesting that after a lot of prodding, the federal government and the central organ of the federal government that has control over ethnic definitions, the O.M.B., Office of Management and Budget, has decreed that all persons who have their origin in the people who were here before Columbus, can indicate their identification as American Indian or Alaska Native. In other words, if you have ancestry, and if you have community connections or relations, or if it’s important to you that you are descended from pre-Columbian Americans, then you can check the American Indian/Alaska Native box on the 2000 census.
Now this is the first time that has really been open to native people from South America, Meso America, Central America, and it specifically says, people from South America and Central America in the new definition. And so it’s interesting what will happen is that of course under the 2000 census, Chicanos can check all of their racial ancestry. If they want to check American Indian because they have indigenous Mexican ancestry, they can check that. If they want to check Caucasian, because they have some Spanish ancestry or something, they can check that. If they have African ancestry, they can check that. So they can check more than one. But it definitely gives Chicanos the opportunity to fully embrace their indigenous ancestry if they choose to do so. And, of course, that’s quite separate from the Hispanic/Spanish origin question, which is a different question that will be on the census.