Tlatoani and Cihuacoatl: Ritual Performance and the Rethinking of the Nahua Family

When one begins to leaf through the amate bark papers of the early sixteenth-century Codex Borbonicus, produced in the valley of Mexico, one witnesses an individual called the cihuacoatl, the second person in charge of a Nahua city-state.  We see few figures in Nahua pictorial manuscripts that we know are cross-dressed individuals, but the cihuacoatl is one, and he runs the Toxcatl ceremony, a festival designed to promote masculine valor in warfare. His image in the center of the ceremony shows him wearing a blouse and a skirt, both decorated in the manner of the goddess Cihuacoatl (“serpent woman”), and carrying a well-decorated shield, a symbol of masculinity, and a weaving batten, a symbol of femininity.  Seeing this text, and thinking about the ceremony that the traditional Nahua writer/painter intended to represent, I began to analyze the multiple relationships between the cross-dressed priest in the ritual world, the goddess that he signifies, the tlatoani (“one who speaks”), the indigenous ruler, whom he serves, and the families over which he rules.  This paper shows that Nahua symbols suggest a husband/wife type relationship between the tlatoani and the cihuacoatl, though they do not suggest any actual sexual relationships (and both would have been married to women).  I use evidence from the codices of grand preconquest rites, other preconquest performances discussed in songs, and postconquest political documents that present the roles of the tlatoani and the cihuacoatl, comparing these to testaments and other mundane notarial documents that scholars most often use to talk about Nahua families.  I argue that social historians who have analyzed the Nahua family as a simple heterosexual relationship, even while admitting gender complementarity, have gotten it wrong.  The Nahua sense of family extended beyond such coupling.