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6th Annual Nahuatl London Study Day

9th Jun 2021

The 6th London Nahuatl Study Day via Zoom

We attended - this year for the first time online via Zoom - the 6th Annual London Nahuatl Study Day, admirably organised and hosted once again by Dr. Elizabeth Baquedano, Institute of Archaeology, University College London. For 2021 the organiser teamed up with the National University of Mexico (UNAM), ENES Morelia, and UNAM-UK. (Compiled by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)

The Study ‘Day’ actually consisted of a full weekend, with an introductory talk on Friday evening, an Aztec Hieroglyphs worksop on Saturday and a Beginners Nahuatl Language Workshop on Sunday. For us, without a doubt the highlight was the keynote lecture given by Dr. Jerry Offner, Houston Museum of Natural Science, and titled ‘Defender of our lands! Five centuries with the living codex of Cuaxicala, Puebla, Mexico’. Supported by superb visual material, Dr. Offner told the extraordinary story - in which he himself played a role - of the Tlalamatl Cuaxicalan, a centuries-old deerskin Land Paper that has been cared for and safeguarded by the people of Cuaxicala, despite several attempts to persuade the community to part with its precious codex, which has served for many years as proof of the town’s historical land borders.

On Saturday participants were given a series of exercises in reading glyphs taken from various postcolonial Nahua documents, by Dr. Albert Davletshin, Instituto de Antropología, Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa. This was instructive and straightforward for participants with a basic knowledge of the agglutinative structure of the Nahuatl language, but may not have been that easy to follow for complete beginners.

The final workshop, led by Dr. Ignacio Silva Cruz, a native Nahuatl speaker from Santa Ana Tlacoteco now based at ENES Morelia/UNAM, was a gentle and thoroughly enjoyable introduction to spoken Nahuatl, taking us through basic greetings, introductions, elementary conversation exchanges, foods, colours and more, interspersed with historical and folkloric anecdotes. He ended with a splendid example of a word/phrase in Nahuatl consisting of 36 characters:-
Cenca namechmotlazohcamachililia, meaning ‘I thank you all’. Our own personal favourite phrase, thanks to Dr. Silva:-
Nocal mocal, the Nahuatl equivalent of Mi casa, tu casa, a quintessentially Mexican gesture!

(Screenshots by Mexicolore)