Load-bearers

With no pack animals and no wheeled vehicles, the burden of transporting goods - and carrying messages - fell almost entirely on human load-carriers and couriers. The common Nahuatl term for a porter was tlameme, also found as tlamama - literally ‘he/she/it carries something’, with the plural tlamamahqueh. Whilst a courier could cover up to 12-15 miles in an hour of running, the same distance would likely take a porter a full day to complete.
For long-distance trade - at which the Mexica excelled - merchants had to contract the services of a large number of carriers, relay fashion, each serving local lords in the region where they lived, in order to complete a porterage chain, stretching in some cases over hundreds of miles.
Complicating the logistics involved even more, it’s worth bearing in mind that more porters might well be needed on the return compared to the outward journey.
Each used a tumpline (mecapalli), usually tied to a wooden frame, with a box or basket of goods attached (see pic 1, top).

Pic 1: Mesoamerican carriers (top) and courier (bottom) on the road

We see another example of a cape or blanket being used as a tumpline - just like the young five-year-old boy in the main picture, above - and another ritual context for carrying on the back in Mexica weddings, where by custom, an amanteca - traditionally a matchmaker, though here in the Codex Mendoza (pic 3) she’s glossed as a physician - carries the bride to the wedding ceremony.
John Schwaller sums up the importance of load-carriers in Aztec society thus:-
’By association, serving as a porter or bearer could be interpreted as an occupation with both divine and ritual associations. The deities carried their burdens; the leaders of the nation carried the deity; a ritual specialist carried a woman to her marriage; and priests had the duty to carry figurines of deities in other feasts and rituals’ (2024: 139).

Pic 3: A Mexica matchmaker carries a bride to her wedding ceremony; Codex Mendoza fol. 61r (detail)