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The Life Within

Stanford University Press

Chapter One

I leave this house facing [east], the home of God, to Juan Estacio, along with another facing west, together with a corral and a little kitchen. And I say that Juan Estacio is to take all of a piece of land going with the house, planted in magueyes. No one is to dispute with him in the future. And I say that the Virgen de los Dolores is [to be in the church of] Carmen. All the [other] male and female saints are to stay in the house and be residents; Juan Estacio and his precious mother named Polonia Antonia are to serve them there. –María Hernández, San Miguel Aticpac (Toluca area), 1737–

IN THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY María Hernández, like many other indigenous people in the Toluca Valley at that time, took measures to bequeath her property shortly before dying, and she included in her testament a description of the house that she was about to leave. It is precisely because people like María felt the need to give details about their places that we now have some idea of the household structures they lived in. At first glance, her testament raises some questions: Did she have one or two houses in the end? And what did she mean by the buildings facing east or west, and one being called the home of God? By addressing these and other issues we can reach a better understanding of the Nahua household and residential structure in the Valley.

The standard view of the Nahua house complex in preconquest and colonial times is one of a set of buildings around a patio, connected to the land parcel on which they stand. However, evidence like that of María Hernández reveals that by the late colonial period this structure is more intricate than has been thought. What I propose in the following pages is to consider it as made up not just of the buildings and the lot, but also of the saints, the three elements constituting distinct and yet deeply interconnected parts of a single unit to which they were all indispensable. And this unit's shape changed over time, as we will see; it was not a static entity, as often portrayed. Thus the view is shifting from two to three elements and acquires a chronological dimension. This new understanding of the household structure explains more cogently the way the Nahuas conceived their domestic space, or so I believe. Let us first consider, then, each of the three elements and after that the roles they play in inheritance, the ultimate reason to bring them up in a testament.

The House

Archaeological evidence has long shown that preconquest Nahua houses were usually complexes. Since the significant development of household archaeology in the 1980s, many sites have been excavated in Mexico, and various patterns have emerged; however, it is safe to say that there is a predominant model for the precolonial time, in fact applicable to the whole of Mesoamerica, that of the patio group, a set of structures, variable in number, disposed around an open, unroofed patio. Usually the original house is simple, made of one or two rooms, while more buildings can be added later, to accommodate new members of the household. Complex compounds, made of various structures grouped together, could be found in large population centers (such as Teotihuacan or Tenochtitlan), especially for the residences of the elite, while smaller settlements in the countryside usually consisted of rather separate residential units, each of them surrounded by some land. In truth, elite dwelling and urban complexes have enjoyed most of the spotlight so far, and just a few nonelite structures have been excavated. Moreover, very little is known about residential compounds in the Toluca Valley before the conquest (and afterwards, for that matter), although some recent excavations promise significant results. While awaiting upcoming developments, I have relied on the available information for small countryside communities in central Mexico. After all, the average Toluca Valley settlements most likely resembled them.

Documents from the first stages of the colonial period have confirmed the persistence of the patio model: In the sixteenth century and often later as well, Nahua houses tended to consist of two or three residential buildings around a patio, either freestanding or attached to each other, each occupied by different closely related nuclear families, recreating at the household level the principle of cellular organization typical of the altepetl. Juan de San Pedro in Culhuacan gives us an excellent example when he says that in addition to the house where he was born, "the house where I lie, which faces west, ... is my young man's house, because I was still a youth when I built the house, not yet married.... my house that faces east ..., we two, my wife and I, built after we married." In addition, there were sometimes other buildings with more specific functions, such as storerooms, sweat-baths, rooms for public gathering, and the like. The compound was usually surrounded by a fence or wall, with an opening functioning as the only entrance/exit. To what extent the pattern of a special structure for each nuclear family in the household was still observed in eighteenth-century Toluca is a question for further investigation and even speculation; before addressing this issue, however, we need a few general ideas and certain vocabulary.

On the whole, about 72 percent of the testators in the Valley felt the need to make some disposition about at least one house before dying, and men refer to a house complex much more often than women do; thus, gender is an important factor when it comes to owning a residence. Of the rest, we have no idea, but surely more than a few among them were not wealthy enough to possess a building or were not the ones with the power to decide about the structure in which they were living. Women and men alike used two traditional Nahuatl terms in reference to the house. Calli, or the physical structure, is the most common word, and is often used in the corpus in the reverential form, caltzintli. A second word, common but less frequent than calli, is -chan, always in the possessive form, which can be translated as the English home. Traditionally there was a quite sharp distinction between calli as the physical structure and -chan as simply the place where one dwells, whatever its physical attributes might be, one's home. In the present corpus -chan is still used in the sense of living place, but the two terms seem to be approaching each other in meaning because there are a few cases in which -chan could be interpreted as indicating the building.

We are now ready to have a close look at the components of the house compound in the Valley, bearing in mind that descriptions are not given in a systematic way and are subject to subregional variation. Many testaments mention certain specific buildings that facilitate a better understanding of the whole complex, although an exhaustive analysis is not possible due to the lack of complete descriptions. María Hernández is a very good example, and she refers to a "home of God," a kitchen, and a corral; let us follow these hints, starting from the most intricate one, the home of God, which hides a fascinating evolution.

In the later sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, many Nahua household complexes came to have what was often called a santocalli, a "saint-house," a separate building where the sacred images resided just as the family members had their own houses. The structure may well have a close connection to the preconquest altars located in the patio or special rooms. Of the original word there is only one trace left in the Valley corpus: Don Josef de la Cruz, from Tenango del Valle, mentions two images of saints with their santocalli. On the other hand, the term ichantzinco Dios, the expression used by María Hernández, is very frequent in the Toluca area; it literally means "the home of God," which Spanish translators uniformly rendered as oratorio, "oratory." In fact, the Nahuatl term is commonly used in the central barrios of Toluca and in San Juan Bautista and Santa Ana, very close to this core, and the actual Spanish loanword appears less often there, while it is the only word used in other parts of the Valley. In Tenango del Valle, for example, it is used by Salvadora Josefa, and also by a group of testators in Xilocingo and Xonacatlan. Only one testator, Andrés Nicolás, right in the heart of the Toluca area, uses both expressions together, and by saying that "the oratory, the precious revered house of our lord God" is to be the home of his daughter Felipa de la Cruz, he gives us a precious hint about the nature of this building.

The word oratory seems to imply some change in the direction of Spanish notions; an oratorio was, by the meaning of the word at least, a place to pray, which corresponded in fact to a specific room within the houses of elite and relatively wealthy Spanish people in New Spain. The change apparently went beyond the manner of naming the building holding the saints. Indeed, in many of the complexes of the Toluca corpus only two elements are mentioned, the ichantzinco Dios or oratory, and a kitchen (to be discussed in the following pages), but no residential building. On the face of it, it would seem that these people have no place to live at all. The only likely solution is that the ichantzinco Dios was not merely an oratory, but a main residence, which also contained an altar or altars with the saints' images. Now what Andrés Nicolás meant by the oratory being the home of his daughter becomes more comprehensible, and is corroborated by information found in a lawsuit in Spanish from 1755 concerning adultery in Santa Ana, very close to Toluca. Ambrosio Hipólito reports that one night at around a quarter past eight he was in the kitchen warming up, while his wife and children were sleeping in the oratory, when he saw his wife's lover entering it; aside from the upheaval that such a sight must have caused, this detail effectively shows how the term referred to the residential building.

It is quite difficult to compare the late-period indigenous house that is emerging through the Toluca documents with the Spanish dwellings of the same period, especially because studies of the latter deal mainly with the urban setting. However, some interesting conclusions may be drawn in terms of possible influences. Unsurprisingly, Spanish residential patterns were varied, but from the opulent two-story house to the simple two-room accesoria of the artisan, the basic principle of what I would call a "compact residence" seems to apply. The members of the household were living together in the same building, if wealthy with separate bedrooms, of course, but all sharing one building and the service rooms (kitchen, oratory, bathroom, and the like), when available. In addition, rooms were often directly connected, with doors between them. And residences were usually multifamily, in the sense that a building contained various rooms on various levels, occupied by different households according to their degree of wealth or, better said, poverty. Thus sharing space with nonkin individuals was normal. Patios were definitely important, coming from the Andalusian and Castilian tradition, and they were closed spaces, with the house being built all around them, in a rather different fashion from the open patio of the Mesoamerican pattern, with the exception, perhaps, of the complex residences of the ancient cities. If we compare this with the early-period indigenous structure of a few separate buildings, each with a single independent door onto the patio and each for a nuclear family, the difference is quite striking. So, what does the Toluca Valley a century later tell us in this context? From the mention of only one residential building in which the whole family was living (apart from some special buildings that we will consider shortly), it would seem likely that the Nahua household complex had moved in the direction of the Spanish pattern of residence: from separate buildings around a patio for each couple, to a single main residential building for everyone in the family, including the saints (see Figure 1.1). Could it be that this transformation was happening only in this area by this time? I suspect not, although only research on other regions can provide certainty.

The building designated as either ichantzinco Dios or oratorio is usually the first in the complex to be listed, but there are other components, as seen in María Hernández's testament. She mentions "ce cocinita," a little kitchen, and some other testators make such references, including Salvadora Josefa, from Tenango del Valle, the same who uses the term oratorio, as we have seen before. Only the Spanish term cocina is used in the corpus, and no indigenous word with a similar meaning is found. The traditional term cihuacalli, "woman-house," had disappeared, and in any case there is no certainty about its exact meaning for the Nahuas; it is more likely to have referred to female ownership and inheritance than to the use of the building. The appearance of the cocina may in fact reflect a change in house design because, while the kitchen seems to be an essential component of all Spanish dwellings, whether as a separate building or as a shared facility, we cannot say the same for the indigenous residence. Preconquest sites have revealed different patterns, from portable braziers possibly for cooking in the patio, to a special space within a room, or a specific building with that function. Given the traditional allocation of household duties, a kitchen as a specific building was probably primarily the province of women. Early special terminology for women's property has then disappeared in the Toluca corpus (cihuacalli), but women seem to have gained an entire building within the compound, for better or worse.

The specific function of a building, be it the main residence or the kitchen, is not the only thing that we know of it; in the sixteenth century each building within the complex was normally described first by its orientation to the cardinal directions, with the central patio as an unspoken reference point. As the complex owned by María Hernández shows ("I leave this house facing east ... along with another facing west"), it seems that houses in eighteenth-century Toluca area retained the earlier arrangement of having a single door opening is not the only thing that we know of it; in the sixteenth century each building within the complex was normally described first by its orientation to the cardinal directions, with the central patio as an unspoken reference point. As the complex owned by María Hernández shows ("I leave this house facing east ... along with another facing west"), it seems that houses in eighteenth-century Toluca area retained the earlier arrangement of having a single door opening on a central patio, and their locations were still given in terms of their "facing" in a certain direction, meaning that their doors opened onto the patio in that direction, so that a building described as facing east was on the west side of the patio. The door was in fact the only opening in the building, given that usually there were no windows. This way of describing a house structure is found nowhere else in the Valley; even when some specific buildings are mentioned, such as an oratory or a kitchen, as in Tenango del Valle, Xilocingo and Xonacatlan, no cardinal direction is given.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Life Within by Caterina Pizzigoni Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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