Tiçiyotl and Titiçih: Gendered Understandings of Nahua Healing Knowledge, 1575–1620

After the Spanish conquest of what is now Mexico (1521), doctors such as Francisco Hernandez, and clergymen including Bernardino de Sahagún, and Hernan Ruiz de Alarcón wrote treatises and encyclopedia-like accounts that resemble modern ethnographies. These men particularly struggled with the placement of indigenous healing knowledge which traversed European concepts of medicine and religion. Iberians contorted indigenous knowledge and its practioners into Western concepts and gender norms. For example, what Nahua peoples of central Mexico understood as tiçiyotl (healing knowledge) Spaniards viewed as a crude form of medicine corrupted by the devil. The individuals Nahuas called titiçih (practioners of tiçiyotl) Spaniards forced into their preconceived categories of physician (for men) and midwife (for women). Using the 1584 trial records of two titiçih (male and female) persecuted by the Church for sorcery and idolatry, supplemented by a reading of other archival documents from Mexico and Spain, my paper argues that these ritual specialists were much more than midwives and physicans. European midwives were undervalued-women excluded from positions of power both in medical and religious institutions. My talk will argue that the Eurocentric term “partera” naturalized Spanish gender norms and limited Nahua women to a role that was marginalized in Iberia. In Nahua conventions, female titiçih were vital components of their local political and religious economies. Archival evidence shows that Nahua men and women were titiçih, and their duties overlapped what Europeans perceived as religious, medical, and political planes, a source of conflict as Spanish colonialism spread throughout central Mexico.