Class struggle: Chonchayotl - an annual mock battle between Mexica/Aztec students

At first glance, this annual fracas - held on the third day of the sixteenth month, at the end of the festival called Panquetzaliztli - seems to be another case of rather gratuitous Mexica ritual warfare, pitting young male students from the two types of Aztec school (élite calmecac and commoner telpochcalli) against each other in a display of intercollegiate rivalry. Moreover, the event is only mentioned in two (sixteenth century) sources, Sahagún’s Florentine Codex and Primeros Memoriales.
The presence of a strange figure called Chonchayotl (pic 1), however, shows that this ritual had firm religious underpinnings. Sahagún describes this ixiptla character (a human chosen to represent a deity) using words like ‘wild’, ‘dishevelled’, ‘bloody’ and ‘frightful’. He was on the side of the élite student priests, and, as can be read in the Nahuatl text (pic 2, arrowed) he represented Huitzilopochtli, to whom the festival of Panquetzaliztli was dedicated.
At midday the fighting began, and ‘verily they harmed each other...’

Pic 1: Chonchayotl, Florentine Codex Book 2

• As a way to achieve ‘greater social cohesion’ and ‘an opportunity for social reversal in which students would battle one another and get their teachers involved’ (Schwaller)
• As a letting-off of steam and an outpouring of resentment on the part of cadet students in a festival in which ‘warriors-in-training fought hard against the impersonator of the god they were bound to serve and against the priests who shaped his image’ (Harris)
• As ‘pseudo-combat containing a large share of play... Once a year the duality of the educational system, a reflection of a social competition, found its expression in the form of a game. The punishments inflicted on the young men who fell into the hands of their “adversaries” are significant... Here each side applied its own norms to the other. The action was not an innocent one. In symbolic terms, to pierce the ears, the chest or the thighs of a young man was to confer on him de facto the status of a young priest. Conversely, the nettle punishment, when applied to a young calmecac student, made of him an apprentice-warrior. Just beneath the surface is the outline of a veritable battle where the essential objective was to capture the other party, the adversary’ (Duverger).

Pic 3: ‘If one of the young warriors was captured, the priests made cuts on his ears, his arms, his chest and his thighs with agave thorns...’ Florentine Codex Book 2, detail