Q: And this is for hereafter, not just simply the 2000 census?

A: Presumably, it will be for the hereafter. Though one never knows how long it will last. But for now, it looks permanent.

Q: In 1961, you wrote an article that pinpointed Aztlán not simply as a site but rather a whole region. Can you explain why you put forth that theory?
A: Well, I was aware of the tradition that the Aztecas had migrated from Aztlán. And I was also aware of some of the other things that we’ve talked about today, namely that the maps and other things showed the homeland as being north of the present Mexican border. I was, at that time, very interested in the fact that northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States really constitutes a single region in terms of geography. It’s mostly a desert area, very similar native cultural traditions, overlapping language boundaries, the common history, of course, of all of the modern peoples living there. And as a result, I decided to try to come up with a name that could be used to refer to that region, because Southwest, obviously, is a ethnocentric term, northwest, also, is not accurate if you include the U.S. area. So it came to me to call this region Aztlán, and so I thought it was a large enough region that it would certainly embrace the original Aztlán. So that’s why I did it. That was about 1961, ‘62, when we had the Native American movement in southern California, which attempted to bring together indigenous people from north of the boundary and south of the boundary in one movement.
Q: In 1965 you wrote a book called Aztecas of the North and it wasn’t published for several years thereafter. Is there a reason that it was not published immediately?
A: Well, I queried many publishers, Eastern publishers, Chicago, New York, and so on. And at that time, it appeared that no one was interested in publishing a book about Mexican Americans. Perhaps my book was a little too radical, in any case. They didn’t think there was a market for it. Which I thought was incredible, but it had to wait till 1973 before I could find a publisher. So I think that’s the main reason: they just didn’t think there was a market; they were very Eastern oriented. And, I think, this trend continues today, in the New York publishing industry, where there’s very little interest in the Southwest and Chicanos and so on. It seems to me.

Q: Eight years after you wrote this notion of Aztlán as being the Southwest, the Denver Youth Conference, in 1969, adopted the idea as the rallying cry of the Chicano people. How did you feel about that?

A: I thought it was fantastic, but at that time, I was extremely active in many native movements, and I was of course following what was happening in the Chicano community very closely, and so it just seemed to me one of many logical things that were happening at that particular period of time. But I thought, of course, that it was so great that the MEChA, and other elements in the Chicano community were developing this concept of a homeland in the north.

Q: Can you explain why the maps you have made are so unconventional?

A: Well, of course, the north-south maps that we have are Euro-centric maps. They’re designed because, of course, Western Europe dominated the Colonial Period, and they drew the maps always with Western Europe in the center, or at the north, and as you know they also made Europe bigger than it should be in relation to other continents, and so on. So around 1970 or ‘71, I started making some maps that were turned around, where South America is at the top of the map. Patagonia, Tierra le Fuego, and so on, is up at the top of the map, and it goes down with Canada at the bottom of the map. I was very interested in seeing that the Carribean becomes like the Mediterranean of America.
Then I also experimented, recently, with maps, having them face towards the sunrise, towards the dawn. Why not have them face towards the sunrise direction. And when you turn a map to face the sunrise direction, you really can get the feel for how Yucatan moves very easily along with the currents, all the way to the mouth of the Mississippi and Louisiana. And of course this helps to explain why you have, within the United States, great Mexican type cities, such as Kahokia, Moundville, and many others, with pyramids, and so on, that resemble, very closely, the pyramids that you find developing in Central Mexico, and also, of course, in coastal Peru. What we really have is a unity, in many ways, in the continent, and in the continent’s history. We know, for example, that there was regular trade between coastal Peru and the coast of Nayarit, using rafts with sails, probably balsa type rafts, but there was a regular trade over a very very long period of time.
My own research has shown that the native people in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Carribean, were using sails, making very very large vessels, holding up to as many as ninety men in them, sometimes with the decks covered with wood, so that a cabin could be built on top of the deck, and of course carrying freight. Columbus, himself, ran into a Maya boat of the type on one of his trips around Yucatan. So [a] great deal of movement took place by water. We know that. A great deal took place by water. We had lots of seagoing Indian people during that period of time.

Q: Could you tell us about some significant Native, North American sites that echo architecture as a result of communication between what we now know as Central American Aztecs/Mayans?

A: There’s a great deal of continuity between the development, archeologically, of pyramids and planned cities, ball courts and things like that, between Meso America and the Andian, Peruvian, region in the south, and also, the Mississippi Valley and other areas, in what is now the United States. We have many great cities in North America that [are] of Meso-American type, such as Kahokia, which is a huge city, probably had forty or fifty thousand people at least, from about 1200 to 1500, on our present calendar. [It was] surrounded also by forty or so smaller cities, and another very large city in southern Indiana called Angel, of a similar type. And this particular city of Kahokia has a marker that has what looks like the Maya symbol for time, or the sun, that was found, buried in the ground near what was probably the little observatory. And of course it has the pyramids that are of Meso-American type. But these pyramids actually may have begun in southern Louisiana. The oldest pyramids in Americas, the oldest mounds, I should say, are found in Louisiana about 5000 years ago. And from there they spread to the coast of Peru, and the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, of Mexico, in what comes to be known as the Olmeca region, or what I call Tollan, because this is the ancient name for that region. Tollan is an area of complex culture in the Mediterranean of America. And of course, eventually, when we get away from this ethnocentric Anglo-centric kind of history that’s taught in the United States, eventually, North American history will begin with the Carribean and the Gulf of Mexico, and this region of high culture as it develops all around these waters. And develops as a continuity, and is the heritage, of course, of all of us in North America today.

Q: You’ve stressed the importance of maps throughout your work. Given the power of maps, what do you think is the importance of the maps we’re discovering today?

A: Well, I think that the maps that you’ve found and that others have found are going to be extremely important. Because they tend to bear out several things. One is, of course, the unity of the indigenous people. The fact that the present political boundaries have not been boundaries for very long. And that these boundaries should not interfere with our relationship to each other, and I’m talking about not only indigenous nations, but also of course of other peoples who live in America today. America, of course, is not the United States. America is the entire continent. And I think that’s another thing that we must make very very clear, is that there never was any America except the entire continent, until very very recent times. America may also be an indigenous term, incidentally. Perhaps not derived from Amerigo Vaspucci, but I won’t go any farther with that today. But, in any event, I think that the maps help us to understand that the peoples known as Mexican-Americans, Chicanos, and so on, have their roots in what is now the United States. And whether that’s back thousands of years, or whether it’s only back to 1064, they help to reinforce that knowledge of basic origin and relatedness.

Q: Go ahead and tell us about the origin of the word "America."

A: Well, there is a very early map, I forget the exact date. But I think it’s about 1507, something like that, which shows an island, just off the coast of Venezuela, probably, supposed to be Nicaragua, but they think it’s an island at that point, because they haven’t yet been along Central America to see that it’s part of the mainland. And it’s called T. Amaracay. Some people would say it’s Tamaracay, but probably it stands for Tierra Amaracay, or T-A could be Tierra Maracay. I have a theory that the term America comes from Maraca. We have lots of place names all around the Carribean, such as Maraca Yu, Maracaibo, Amaraca, which come from the word Maraca, basically, which is the gourd. And the gourd is very important because a lot of people in the Carribean believe that was one of the origins of human beings, that human beings came out of a gourd. And, of course, it’s central to the ceremonies of the area, and also North America and South America are both shaped like gourds. Isn’t that interesting? Of course, there was a mountain range in Nicaragua, known as the Sierra Americay. And some people believe that the name America comes from Americay, the mountain range. of course, others still believe that it comes from Amerigo Vaspucci, but the problem with that is that most documents have him known as Alberico Vaspucci, not Amerigo, so the question still isn’t settled of where the name America comes from. But in any case, it was first applied to the region of present day Venezuela and Columbia and Nicaragua, later to the entire continent, and the only people who were known as Americans for hundreds and hundreds of years were the native people.