The Virgin's Children: Life in an Aztec Village Today by William Madsen PDF

An soaking up account of the descendants of the traditional Aztecs and of the survival in their tradition into the 20 th century within the Valley of Mexico is gifted during this interesting quantity. targeting San Francisco Tecospa—a village of a few 8 hundred Indians who nonetheless spoke Nahuatl, whose lives have been ruled by means of supernaturalism, and who saw with purely mild amendment a lot in their Aztec heritage—this tale bears out the anthropological precept that recommendations are probably to be approved after they are valuable, communicable, and suitable with validated tradition.

Nowhere is the Indian genius for combining the previous and the hot greater exemplified than within the tale of ways the Virgin of Guadalupe got here to meet the position previously performed through the pagan goddess Tonantzin and of the way Christian saints changed the Aztec gods. on the time of this learn, the Tecospans nonetheless known as the Catholic Virgin Tonantzin, yet their notion of the mummy goddess had replaced profoundly considering Aztec times.

Tonantzin the Pagan, a hideous goddess with claws on her fingers and ft and with snakes entwining her face, wore a necklace of hearts, arms, and skulls to symbolize her insatiable urge for food for corpses. Tonantzin the Catholic—also referred to as Guadalupe—is a stunning and benevolent mom deity who many times remains God’s anger opposed to her Mexican young children and solutions the prayers of the poorest Indian, with out considered return.

In Tecospa the line to social attractiveness lay within the functionality of spiritual works, and the overlook of formality legal responsibility subjected either the person and the group to the anger of supernaturals who punished with disease or different misfortune. faith was once inextricably part of each section of lifestyles, and it's the complete lifetime of the Aztecan that's recorded the following: fiesta, garments, nutrition, agricultural practices, courtship, marriage, being pregnant and childbirth, demise, witchcraft and its therapies, clinical practices and attitudes, homes and residential existence, ethics, and the hot-cold advanced that classifies every little thing within the Tecospan universe from God to Bromo-Seltzer.

With a marked simplicity of fashion and language William Madsen has produced a profoundly major anthropological learn that's pleasant analyzing from the 1st sentence to the final. The drawings, the paintings of a ten-year-old Tecospan lad, are extraordinary for his or her penetrating perception into the culture.