In the Navel of the Moon

No one really knows for sure how Mexico got its name. I find the place, the name, and the whole lost in the mists of time angle appealing. When Spanish freebooters arrived, the locals they encountered spoke Nahuatl. This “encountering” consisted mostly of rapier thrusts and arquebus blasts, so perhaps the natives were mostly unavailable for comment about place names.

In Nahuatl, meztli (rhymes with Nestle) means moon, and xictli (sheek-ti-lee, best spoken with a Daffy Duck pronunciation) means navel. So for a long time Europeans thought Mexico meant the navel of the moon. Unless it didn’t. Other names like “place of springs,” and “killed by an obsidian arrow” were favored by other intrepid scholars who were scratching their heads and wondering why they were up to their ankles in a swamp with obsidian arrows sticking out of them all of a sudden.

About twenty-five years ago, the Mexicans got tired of people arguing about where the name of their country came from, so they convened an azul-ribbon panel to do what intellectuals do best: argue about it some more. They decided that the Aztecs (the Nahuatl, more or less) once had a leader of some sort named Mexitli, and he decided they should stop wandering around and set up shop for good in what is now Mexico City. His friends called him Mexi, and co in Nahuatl means “place of”, so you end up with Mexico.

Here’s Mexi’s picture, sorta:

I’m not sure I’d want my country to be named after a guy in a straitjacket, with two left feet, his dentures flying out of his mouth, and a barrage balloon of Binky from Matt Groenig’s Life In Hell comics tied to his topknot, but it’s not my country and they didn’t ask my opinion.

I know how modern intellectuals think. I imagine they fixated on the dubious idea they knew the nickname of a guy in a loincloth in the 1300s first, and they worked backward from there until they got the “facts” they needed to make it work out. My Latin is pretty limited, but I pretty sure I’m referring to ex post facto thinking, or petitio principii, or maybe post hoc ergo propter hoc, perhaps ratione conclusa, or it could be spaghetti bolognese. It’s one of those, surely.

Well, I’m in the Yucatan, and everyone around here is Mayan, more or less, and didn’t have a lot to do with the Aztecs back in the day, and don’t have much to do with Mexico City nowadays, either. The Maya, on the whole, look different than Mexicans from farther north. They’re low to the ground, and tend to be stout. A tall Maya is around 5′ – 6.” They’re a wonderful medium brown color, and generally don’t have things like freckles or any other imperfections in skin tones. They have straight, black hair as thick as minks, with dark brown, almond shaped eyes. With a description like that in hand, you can imagine what they think when we walk down the street. Oh look, the nice Italian lady is walking her albino giraffe again.

It took Hernan Cortez two years to conquer the Aztecs. The Aztecs were powerful, but not popular. They had an empire, and empires have a tendency to engender ill feeling from the assorted vassals. Cortez made alliances with various tribes in the area who tired of the Aztec’s approach to open heart surgery. That made it easier to turn Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) into just another excuse for a Spanish town hall.

The Spaniards decided they wanted the Yucatan peninsula, too. Instead of 2 years, it took them 175 or so. The Mayans were tough opponents, proud, pretty sophisticated, and could knap an obsidian arrowhead with the best of them. Perhaps the most vital thing they had going for them was a decentralized state. The Aztecs were an empire, and once you marched into the capital and fertilized the royal palace with the royalty, the war was more or less over. The Yucatan was more like a series of city-states, like Italy or most of central Europe once was. The locals fought like balams (jaguars), and once you beat them, there was another set right down the road to start all over again. And you had to hack your way through the jungle to do it, too.

But it was worth it, on the whole. The Yucatan is where the world of mammals was born, really. A meteor strike there killed off the dinosaurs. If it wasn’t for the Mayans, we wouldn’t have tomatoes, or avocados, or tobacco, or chili peppers. We wouldn’t call 200-mile-an-hour windstorms hurricanes, because they’re named after the Maya god Huracán. Many people still sleep in hamacas here, although we call them hammocks. Without the Mayans, we wouldn’t have known what to call them, and telling your wife you’re going out in the back yard to put your ass in a sling wouldn’t have the same connotation of relaxation, would it?

But above all, there’s one contribution of the Mayan people that tops all the others. Mi esposa y Yo will go out tonight and stroll down the magnificent Paseo Montejo in the cool of the evening, and eat our anniversary dinner under unfamiliar constellations. And for dessert, we’ll have chocolate (chokolatl) something or other, prepared by the very people who invented it. We’ll treat our waiter to a heaping helping of our barbarous Spanish, and tip him enough so that he doesn’t turn to his co-workers after we leave and call us the lint in the navel of the moon.