Agents of Nahua Collecting: Mothers, Disguised Merchants, and Experimenters

In this presentation, Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry analyzes three agents of Nahua collecting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: mothers called cuauhcihuatl, merchants called oztomecameh, and experimenters called motoyeyecoltiani. These three appeared in colonial texts as celebrated figures who achieved the status of collecting for the benefit of the community, whether they birthed children, explored material resources across enemy lines, or experimented with materia medica. The paper presents both a semantic and a textual investigation. Nahuatl-language descriptions of experimenters, for example, elaborated on their role in determining the efficacious properties of fauna and flora; meanwhile, Spanish-language translations relegated them to hechizeros/as “sorcerers” (Florentine Codex, Bk11, fol. 131r) and “tempters” that led others astray (Molina 1571, vol. 2, fol. 35r). Mothers, merchants, and experimenters were not the only ones who collected, but they characterized the multilayered concept of such activities in the Nahua world. Thus mothers, upon giving birth, were showered with powerful epithets like tlamani “captor” and cuauhtli “eagle,” titles reserved for high-ranking members of the Nahua military. This paper seeks to demonstrate that Nahua collecting was part of a daily life, official modes of merchantry, and complex Indigenous knowledge housed in the oral traditions that kept healing practices alive.