By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO, Calif. —I am definitely getting used to the idea of calling
myself a San Diego State University student. I tell people about my
graduate studies in history there with pride—so much so that I am looking
unblinkingly at the dreaded Sept. 18 deadline, known otherwise as the
"last day to add or drop classes."
On the other hand, I don't think I'll
ever be comfortable calling myself an "Aztec," and that is not
simply because 40 years ago when I was graduated from UCLA, I was a
"Bruin." My uneasiness stems from the two ways one can look at
an institution of higher learning identifying itself with an ancient
civilization.
Six years ago, San Diego State debated whether its various depictions of
Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, were racist. In accordance with the
"red man Indian" stereotype, he had a red face. At football games,
the "Monty" mascot ran around wildly—all very demeaning for a man
who ruled over a city of some 200,000 and whose empire may have controlled
millions of people.
So after debates involving alumni, faculty and students
the SDSU administration decided to change the university's logo and eliminate
the red face. "Monty" became "Montezuma," and instead of
being a mascot, he was to become the university's goodwill ambassador.
But alumni denounced this as so much unwanted "political
correctness" and the conch-blowing mascot returned to help the Aztec
sports teams vanquish their opponents.
Various campus buildings are named after aspects of Aztec culture—the most
recent being the new health services complex which was named Calpulli Center.
Back in the days when Mexico City was known as Tenochtitlán, it was divided
into four quadrants or calpulli, each of which had a measure of
self-governance. A large assembly area in the Aztec Center is
Montezuma Hall, where students often bring interesting speakers. The
university itself is said to sit atop Montezuma Mesa.
So what's the problem? You won't find this in any of the university's
brochures, but one major aspect of Montezuma's Empire was the intimidation and
control of the population by mass human sacrifice. Proficient warriors, the
Aztecs forced vassal states to pay tributes to them in agriculture goods,
crafts, precious stones and humans to be sacrificed on the altar of their god
Huitzilopochtli. Aztecs also sacrificed the less fortunate in their own
society.
I couldn't help but think of the train station and gas chambers of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps while reading descriptions of the
Aztec's Huitzilopochtli cult in La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City, a
work by Jonathan Kandell that is so respected it is required reading in the
history course I am taking about colonial Mexico.
Both autosacrifice—that is, the cutting of oneself to offer one's
blood—and involuntary sacrifice were practiced by various Mesoamerican
people's in the belief that human blood would appease the gods, who controlled
such terrifying aspects of nature as hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes.
The bodies of human sacrifice victims later were divided and
eaten—cannibalism being then an accepted practice.
When brothers Montezuma I (the king) and Tlacaelel (his prime minister)
came to power approximately a century before the reign of Montezuma II (the
figure with whom SDSU identifies), they elaborated a ritual of mass murder
that, coupled with their people's military might, enabled them to terrify
other city-states into submission. The ritual was well institutionalized by
the time of Montezuma II, who did nothing to moderate it.
The Aztec's god, Huitzilopochtli, was described as a sun god in need of a
constant diet of human hearts in order to fuel its way across the
heavens. If the sun did not receive enough hearts, its course across the
heavens could be stopped and the world destroyed. Accordingly, it was
nothing less than patriotic duty for the Aztecs and their vassal states to
offer human lives for sacrifice. If you're squeamish, you may want
to skip Kandell's description of the sacrificial procedure:
In the already ritualized ceremony, a victim was led up the
steps of the pyramid. Reaching the platform at the summit, the prisoner
was toppled onto his back on a large ceremonial stone set in front of
Huitzilopochtli's statue. Four priests with long, blood-encrusted hair,
wearing blood-soiled black robes, each held a leg or an arm, and a fifth
priest secured the victim's neck with a rope. Then Motechuzoma (an alternative
spelling for Montezuma) raised a heavy obsidian knife above his head, quickly
rammed it into the victim's thorax, reached a hand into the gaping wound and
wrenched the heart loose. The organ, still beating, was held aloft by the king
and its blood was sprinkled in the air, in the general direction of the
noontime sun, to fuel its course across the heavens. The heart was
then jammed into the open mouth of Huitzilopochtli's statue, nourishing the
god. The lifeless body of the Chalca (a defeated enemy people) warrior
was removed, and another prisoner took his place on the ceremonial stone
slab. Motecuhzoma and Tlacaelel took turns dispatching the first few
victims. The remainder were executed by the chief priests, relieving
each other when fatigue set in.
These sacrifices were not just occasional aberrations of
a society otherwise noted and admired for its marvelously engineered pyramids,
orderly market places, high level of astronomy, and beautiful crafts.
Tlacaelel, living well into his 90s, served as prime minister to a succession
of kings. In 1487, after a new temple for Huitzilopochtli was completed,
the ceremony of human sacrifices took four full, blood-soaked days, with the
estimates of the number of sacrifice victims ranging from 20,000 to 80,000.
Today, some people scoff that so many people could be so efficiently murdered,
but we know that some people today also scoff about the 11 million victims of
the Holocaust, 6 million of them Jews. Mass murder in any age is all too easy.
It would be easy to simply shrug off the mass murders of the Aztecs as
something that happened a long time ago, and to make jokes that this is all
symbolically represented at San Diego State, as at all other universities, by
the students being the sacrificial victims, the executioners being the
professors, the method of execution being one's "grades," and the
malevolent emperor and prime minister being high-ranking members of the
university administration.
However, I wonder if some time in the very distant future, another university,
far removed from the terror, and admiring the high-level of German
"civilization," won't someday decide to take "the Nazis"
as its nickname, have a mascot goose-step around a football field, and perhaps
even award "Adolfs" to important alumni.
Clearly, I am raising here an uncomfortable set of questions about how
appropriate it is for a university aspiring to greatness to associate itself
with the Aztec empire. It is not only academic inertia that militates
against considering any change in the university's identification, there is
also the problem of the feelings that such an inquiry might inadvertently
hurt.
I believe it is entirely appropriate for San Diego State University, located
in an area once part of New Spain and later of Mexico, to strongly identify
with that heritage. SDSU should find a way to continue to honor California's
Mexican roots. But let us reexamine the strong identification with the
rulers of the Aztec culture, lest we disrespect the memories of their many
Mesoamerican victims.
If a function of a university truly is to ask difficult questions, ought not
SDSU pose those questions about itself?