UCLA

When Iberians invaded the American mainland in 1519, they encountered an empire that rivaled their own. This empire—led by the Nahuatl-speaking Mexica—covered an impressive landscape across the Valley of Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Coast. What threaded these diverse communities together was a state religion, developed and maintained by the Mexica, and at its head were religious leaders known as tlamacazqueh, or “the givers of things.” These figures animated the Mexica world with the works they made for state ceremonies, but sixteenth-century Iberian authors obscured them in fear of their non-Christian ways, while later scholars, as a result, attended to better-documented state artisans outside the religious sphere. Through an analysis of Mexica art and architecture, the Nahuatl language, and early colonial Nahuatl texts, this dissertation reclaims the role of making in Nahua religion and re-centers the tlamacazqueh as skilled makers with artistic knowledge.

The tlamacazqueh mastered techniques to create sacred artworks that drew on the bodily senses and thus animated Nahua religion. These skills, I argue, were part of a Nahua concept of artistry called tōltēcayōtl. In individual chapters, I explore the spaces where these religious leaders learned (īxtlamachtiā) their skills; how they cut (tequi) materials and created new forms with flint knives; how they molded doughs and folded fig bark to place (tlāliā) and present sacred energies; and how they wrapped (quimiloā, ilpiā) sacred art with smoke and woven fibers to create surfaces that could perceive. Therein, I explore the relationships between these Nahua makers and their made things to complicate Euro-American frameworks of animacy and personhood, explore Indigenous concepts of relationality, and center the artistic, ecological, and imperial knowledge and networks that constellated around these individuals.

Since religious leaders and their practices did not suddenly vanish once the Mexica Empire fell to Iberian invaders in 1521, I also follow the tlamacazqueh and their artistic skills as they transformed alongside Europeans, Africans, and other Indigenous groups in the slippery middle ground that defined the transatlantic world of sixteenth-century New Spain. In fact, religious leaders took drastic measures to protect sacred artworks in the fallout of war, becoming community mediators and practitioners who maintained their sacred and artistic knowledge. By straddling these pre- and post-Invasion worlds, which indeed Nahuas saw not as separate but sutured, I shed light on how the tlamacazqueh disseminated, presented, performed, and essentially made two imperial religions: one Mexica and the other Ibero-Christian.