Folklore of the Ciudad Blanca and History of the Nahuas of NE Honduras

What is the Folklore Related to the Ciudad Blanca Area of the Mosquitia?

By Wendy Griffin

The poisonous snakes of the Ciudad Blanca area, like the lance de fer snake, form a significant part of the folklore, medicine, and ceremonies of the Pech Indians. On the seal of the Pech Federation (FETRIPH) there is the head of Pech Indian and his head a hat with a snake on it. The face, hat and snake are half dark and half light.  The light side shows the part of the Pech culture that the Pech are willing to share with outsiders, and the dark side shows the part they are not willing to share.

The location of “Kao Kamasa” (or, white house) where the Pech hero Patakako was buried is a part of their culture that the Pech have not been willing to share. The Pech oral histories of “Kao Kamasa” or White House where the enemies of the Pech sacrificed the Pech and tore out their hearts and ate the Pech, is one of the origins of the current myths concerning the Ciudad Blanca-- supposedly a lost city in Rio Platano Biosphere area of the western Honduran Mosquitia area, now inhabited partly by the Pech Indians. This story is part of the greater legend of the Pech hero Patakako (His name means Our person who does, makes or who creates in Pech),  and appears in other accounts like that of the Nine Brothers and Cacao and Jicaro, collected by Dr. Lazaro Flores and published in 1991 in the book “ Dioses, Heroes, y Hombres en el Universo Mitico Pech” (Gods, Heros and Men in the Pech Mythical Universe) coauthored with me and in Lazaro Flores’s 1989 book Mitos y Leyendas de los Pech: Los guardians de los Patahua (Myths and Legends of the Pech, The Guardians of the Patahua). The Patatahua is the Pech name for the people who lived in the stone ruins like the Ciudad Blanca near them in the Mosquitia and Olancho rainforest. According to Pech Indian Angel Martinez Patatahua means our ancestors, the grandfathers and great grandfathers who came before us.

The Nahua Indians of Olancho furthermore have oral history traditions related to the Ciudad Blanca. An elder of the community of Jamasquire, a community near Catacamas, Olancho, thought the Ciudad Blanca was a Nahua Indian city at the time the Spanish were attacking Honduras. The Indians of the Valley of Olancho, which includes the area between Juticalpa and Catacamas, sent their riches to the Ciudad Blanca to be protected from the Spanish offensive. The area near the Ruins thought to be the Ciudad Blanca is still a gold producing district like that in the head waters of the Rio Platano, reported Pech Indian Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres. Torres describes her experiences panning for gold there in the book Los Pech de Honduras (The Pech of Honduras).

Nahua Indians in Central America, as evidenced by Nahua place names and certain artifacts and architectural styles, seem to have clustered around places with specific resources like obsidian, gold, cacao, tule or Carrizo to make petates and baskets to haul the products in, green feathers, the feathers of the scarlet macaw and the quetzal and the feathers at least 27 other kinds of birds, the parrots themselves, Central American cotton, dye plants or insects or animals in seashells used to make dyes, green stones, copper, quartz crystals the Indians called diamonds, salt, liquidambar, rubber, and jaguar skins and claws, big hardwood trees appropriate for making canoes, medicinal plants, which formed part of the long distance trade route that extended at least from Costa Rica to through the Aztec Empire in Mexico to the American Southwest at the time of the Spanish Conquest. For example, the feathers of scarlet  macaws or parrots, native to Honduras and especially the Olancho and Mosquitia regions, were used in Pueblo Indian ceremonies in the US Southwest.  The Indian slaves from other tribes were also known to form part of this trade between Mexico and Central America and between the different Central American polities.

The Ciudad Blanca area and Olancho in general was and is rich in many of these kinds of resources. The Nahuas were not the only merchants travelling along this trade route by canoe, as there is certainly clear evidence of Post Classic (900-1500 AD) Mayan long distance traders, too along the Yucatan, Guatemalan and  Honduran coasts. Some ethnic groups active along this trade route, such as groups called Puntun Mayas, Nonalacos, Toqueguas, etc. in colonial era Spanish or Mayan documents are thought by some people to have included both Maya and Nahua speakers and possibly people of other ethnic groups, too. Nahua is thought to have been an important trade language even before the Spanish came, and many Indian males in Central America were often bilingual (Nahua and other Indian languages) at the time of contact. The situation of Central American Nahuas is not unlike Honduras’s position in international trade in the 19^th and 20^th centuries and the roles of gringo businessmen and English in international trade here.

One theory on why it is called the White City are the Nahuatl name Huehuetlapalan or Xucotaco in another language, a Mayan name according to the Wikipedia in English articles on Theodore Morde and Ciudad Blanca, which Hernan Cortes reportedly used to refer to the Ciudad Blanca area east of Trujillo. Jesus Aquilar Paz’s son also associated Huehuetlapalan with the Ciudad Blanca in Honduras in Ted Danger’s video on the Ciudad Blanca on Youtube, “Getting to Know the Rio Platano Biosphere in Search of the Ciudad Blanca”, available in English in four parts and in Spanish in one part. According to the Ce Acatl article on Wikipedia in Spanish, Huehuetlapalan is where Ce Acatl, the Toltec king also known the by the honorific title Quetzalcoatl, Naxcit (Precious stone) among the Mayas, or Son of Maguey (a plant the Maya Chortis use to make rope products like bags and ropes) among his descendants, died or disappeared after he left the Mexican coast.

The Ladinos of Honduras have different traditions concerning the Ciudad Blanca. Some Ladinos are descendants of the Indians who went to live in the Ciudad Blanca and related previously Nahua speaking areas, thus their input can be important in understanding the history of the Ciudad Blanca. One Ladino related that the person who is buried at the Ciudad Blanca is Quetzalcoatl and that there is a crystal skull decorating his tomb.

 There is nothing taught on Quetzalcoatl in Honduran school curriculum. Neither is the name/honorific title of the last Toltec King Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, who supposedly founded the kingdoms of Payaqui (among Nahuas) or in the Nahua language Hueyatlato (el mayor, the Big One: the Most Important one) and Cuscatlan in Central America after leaving Mexico talked about.  Nothing is taught regarding the Aztec and Pipil god Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent or Quetzal-snake, who was associated with the morning star, Venus. So it is likely that the interviewed Ladino heard this story as it was handed down orally. Since Gods are not generally buried, it is likely that this version of the legend refers to the Toltec king Quetzalcoatl.

In Spanish language Wikipedia  there is in fact a lot concerning this king-- both in the Ce Acatl article and in the Señorio de Cuscatlan article. Even though he has been dead about 1,000 years, the memory of this King remains alive in such cultural icons as the name of an El Salvadoran soccer team; and  a Mexican Indian studies organization in Mexico City Ce Acalt, S.A.; and their website with a web magazine by and about Mexican Indians. His recompilation of Toltec law was mentioned by several Spanish chroniclers, and when he gave the Maya Quiches and the Cakchiquels a picture book and symbols of power, they mention this in Mayan books like the Popol Vuh and the Annals of the Cakchiquels.

Even though Agalteca, Yoro and Agalteca, east of Comayagua, are now spelled with the letter g, when Hernan Cortes wrote in 1524 that the Acaltecas would not promise to serve him, in his letters to the king, he spelt it with a c. Acatl means a water reed in English, which is tule in Honduran Spanish and Pop in Mayan languages. The name for Tula or Tulan, the capital and city of origin of the Toltecs according to several Indian accounts, in Mayan glyphs is a bundle of reeds used for making petates or  “tule”. This name of this city associated with the Toltecs was also pronounced “Pop”.  In Nahua, the name Tulan, would mean “the place of tule water reed”.  Now archaeologists believe Tula or Tulan, originally referred to the ruin outside of Mexico City generally  known by the Aztec name in Nahuatl Teotihuacan (the Place of Adivination). As this area had a lot of shallow lakes, it would have in fact been a good place to harvest tule which grows along the edge of bodies of water. Later the people who had to leave Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico beginning around 400 AD called some of their other capitals Tula like Tula Chulula, Tula Chichen Itza, and Tula, a coastal city in Hidalgo, Mexico, in memory of Tulan in Central Mexico.

One Toltec neighborhood in the Valley of Mexico founded after the fall of Teotihuacan between 500 and 600 AD was Culhuacan. The Toltecs who left the Valley of Mexico named other places after Culhuacan, including a ruin called Palenque, according to Chiquimula online website, and a “pueblo de indios” (Indian community) in the Ulua Valley near San Pedro Sula, according to the 1537 Pedro Alvarado list giving “Encomiendas” or Indian villages to Spanish Conquistadors. In this list there is also a Indian community called Chulula in the Department of Cortes where San Pedro Sula is located. This act of the Founding of San Pedro is available on the Internet.

So the name Acaltecas, could refer to people who followed Ce Acatl, or people from the place of tule, Tulan, or from Agalta, the valley in Olancho where the town of San Esteban is located. Near San Esteban, originally San Esteban Tonjagua, there has been reported the ruin of a Toltec style observatory, a life size statue of clay like those of Xipe Totec, the Aztec god of young corn, and a clay cup with the face of the rain god Tlaloc or Quia. The finding of Xipe Totec statues and Tlaloc cups are used to identify Pipil-Tolteca archaeological sites.  Both of these types of artifacts were known in the Valleys of Cholula and Mexico in Central Mexico in the Classic Period (300-900 AD).  

 The stories of el cipotio, which are told by Chortis, Lencas, and Ladinos in Honduras and among Pipiles in El Salvador, Honduran anthropologist Lazaro Flores thought were related to the stories of Xipe Totec, whose statues have been found in the Ciudad blanca area as well as the Valley of Agalta, Olancho. In Olancho, Colon and the Mosquitia  stories like cipotío stories are told by the Pech, Ladinos and Miskitos with the Spanish name “duende” ( a general name for nature spirits in Honduran Spanish). In Olancho Chris Begley has also reported finding a ballcourt. All the archaeological sites called Agalteca in Honduras, and there are several, have ballcourts, apparently in postclassic (900-1500 AD)  and non-Mayan contexts. Stone ruins with similar styles of pottery to the Ciudad Blanca and Trujillo/Bajo Aguan have been reported, mapped and photographed in Agua Amarilla, a Pech community that is part of El Carbon above the Agalta Valley in Olancho.

The post classic ceramics of the Agalta Valley are the same as the Trujillo area, the lower Aguan area, the Ciudad Blanca area, and similar to the Bay Islands and the Sula Valley area.    Place names ending in –gua like Chapagua (the damp house in Nahua, according to Reyes Mazzoni, a Honduran anthropologist), near Trujillo, Tonjegua near San Esteban or Toquegua near San Pedro Sula or Managua and Nicaragua in Nicaragua, are often found in areas associated with ceramics associated with Nahua speakers, other places names or chief names in Nahua, reports of social structures with chiefs or lords, nobles, common people and slaves, and large Mesoamerican style ruins with cut stone work with plazas and temple mounds. Gua- at the beginning of place names like Guatemala (the place of many forests in Nahua according to Wikipedia) are sometimes associated with Nahua speakers, too. Osvaldo Munguia reported hearing once a whole radio show in Honduras just on place names that started or ended with –gua.

 “Managua” was a name for the rain spirits or gods collected among the Lencas of Honduras, although most Lencas now call them “angelitos” (little angels). The perseverance of Nahua language terms in what is generally considered the Lenca area of Honduras led Honduran historian Mario Martinez Castillo to write a whole short book on the presence of Mexican Indians before and after the Conquest in the area that was supposedly Lenca.   Most of the lakes in Central America like Lago de Guijar in the Honduran/Salvadoran/Guatemalan border area or Lago de Yojoa (previously Lago de Taulabe-the House of the Jaguar in Lenca) were sacred sites for rain ceremonies, so it makes sense that Lago de Managua would be sacred, too, and that the island Omotepe in Lake Nicaragua was considered sacred to the Nahua speaking Nicaroa is well documented in colonial sources.

Near Agalteca, Yoro there is a large archaeological site with about 50 large mounds including plazas. Also among the stories of the oral history of Agalteca, Yoro is the story that the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma came personally to the North Coast  to try to conquer the area and make it pay tribute, reported Roberto Rivera of Tulane. Honduran schools also do not teach about Aztec emperors so this is probably an oral tradition, too. It matches the oral history collected by Fray Torquemada in his colonial era book Monarquia Indiana that Moctezuma I tried to conquer Honduras to make it pay tribute in gold, green stone, feathers, resins like rubber, cacao, etc. The Aztec Emperor that Cortes met was Moctezuma II, not the earlier Emperor who tried to conquer Honduras.

According to the Wikipedia page on the Ciudad Blanca in English, Mayan and Nahuatl sources identified that the Ciudad Blanca as the place where Quetzalcoatl was born, as opposed to where he died, according to a Honduran Ladino man.  Perhaps this is because Quetzalcoatl was an honorific title, so that a son or the next Toltec king whether he was actually family or not, could have the title. According to a Miskito tradition, collected by Miskito Scott Wood, a king whose name means “Lucero” (Morning Star) in Miskito was the king who unified all the Miskito kingdom all the way from Rio Tinto in Honduras to Bluefields in Nicaragua.  Gotz von Houwald in his book Mayagna also reported a Miskito story collected in Creole English, that the king of the Mosquitia Morning Star was the son of the old drift man, which could match Ce Acalt who arrived in Central America by canoe.  The relationship between the Toltec king’s  title of Quetzalcoatl in Nahualt, and this name being associated with the Morning Star Venus, and the fact that  the Miskito king was also called Morning Star in Miskito will probably never be known.

The Pech story of Kapani (morning star) and his twin brother the evening star about the origin of flute made from the bone of jaguar, appears to also have been a Aztec story which appears  in a Aztec codex as a scene from the story with the morning star, in his form as god of the hunt,  hunting the jaguar to get the bone for flute is shown.  This jaguar bone flute is known as “flauta Azteca”, an Aztec flute in the archaeological reports. The Pech also associate the morning star Kapani with the hunt. For example, it is forbidden to hunt during the earliest morning hour when the morning star is in the sky, but the sun is not yet up, a time known as kapani (at the time of the morning star) in Pech, because the animals are under the protection of the morning star at this time.

The Cakquiquel Maya name for the country of their Nahua speaking enemies in Central America at the time of Conquest “Acatan” would also be the place of “acalt” or tule in Nahua, either referring to Tulan, or the followers of the Ce Acatl, and related to the Honduran cities called Acalteca or Agalteca.

 I do not know if some relationship exists between these words, like Agalteca, and Aguanteca (person from Aguan in Nahua) which is a place name in Olancho, the Aguan river which is the route the Agalteca Indians of Yoro would use to reach the sea, Aguaquire, a creek and village in the Culmi, Olancho area, and Aguateña (the dance of the Valley of Olancho town Jutiquile, another Nahua name related to “Jutes” edible snails in Olancho. These shells are often found in abundance in possibly Nahua related archaeological sites).  As noted above, the Spanish often switch sounds from not hearing them well.

Spanish stories of “la Ciudad Blanca” are merged with early colonial era reports of gold in the area east of Trujillo, known originally in Spanish reports as “Taguzgalpa”, the house where gold is melted or founded, possibly a Nahua name  according to Gotz von Houwald, before the area was called the Mosquitia. Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes said specifically that he came to Trujillo, Honduras specifically because he had heard reports for 7 years before he came to Honduras of the richness of gold in Honduras from Mexican Indians in Mexico. Several times while Hernan Cortes was in Mexico in the early 1500’s, the Spanish meet people who tell the Aztec authorities that they come from the countries founded by Ce Acatl, and the merchants of Veracruz, Mexico show him a cloth map of all the rest  stops (posadas) and trade fairs (ferias)  between Veracruz and Panama, including the Honduran coast, which they said they travelled to by canoe.

The city of Xoconosco in Southern Mexico had a special relationship with both the Mangue speaking  Chorotega (people from Cholula in Mangua) and Nahua speaking Nicarao Indians of Cholula, Mexico, sometimes called cholulatecas (people from Cholula in Nahua) in the colonial records, who immigrated to Central America, including the Gulf of Fonseca area in the Department of Choluteca. From the name Cholulateca which comes the names of the city and department of Choluteca in Honduras. As they fled Cholula to flee high taxes and slavery due to losing a war, they spent a lot of time near Soconosco. In the case of the Nicaraos, they said they were there 8 lives of old men. Again due to losing a war, the Nicaroas fled further south, finally arriving in Izalco (the place of obsidian), El Salvador. There is still an indigenous community at Nahuizalco, El Salvador, famous for its tule mats (petates) and its Carrizo baskets still today. The name of the community probably comes from the Nahuas of Izalco.

 According to one Mexican website on the meaning of place names in Nahuatl, Acatl can mean both tule and Carrizo, which would be odd as tule is a water reed while Carrizo is a bamboo like plant that only grows in the forest in the mountains above 1,500 feet. Acalt has also been reported as also referring to the water reed called junco in Honduran Spanish in Santa Barbara Honduras, which is slightly different from tule but they both grow in similar environments, reported Honduran anthropologist Adalid Martinez.  Maybe Acalt in Honduras meant something like a plant that you can weave to make things. The people from Santa Barbara often call them Junqueros or Junqueras (men and women of junco), which might be a Spanish translation of Acalteca, too.

The Santa Barbara area is famous for originally having many Nahua place names like Petoa-Palapa (Palapa in the Mexican word for the open thatched roof shelters Hondurans call “Champa”), Quiatlan (the place of Quia the Nicarao rain god, now Quimistan), Ilamatepeque (Mountain of the Grandmother, the Nicarao name for the Creator goddess), etc. and artifacts related to Mexican Indian influence, and was the site of a large Post-Classic city with 10,000 inhabitants connected by the canoe trade to Mexico and the rest of Central America known as Naco, which was the capital of a state which extended as far north as Choloma, outside of San Pedro Sula when Cortes arrived in 1524.

It is not clear if the valley of Copan, where Copan Ruinas is located, in the Department of Copan, was also part of the contact era state of Naco. In 1537  Pedro Alvarado assigned Copanique in the valley of Naco to a Spanish conquistador as an “encomienda”, but it is not clear if this community given in the “encomienda” is in the Copan Valley or if the rulers of Naco brought slaves from the valley of Copan or even the Post Classic community called Copan located in the department of Ocotepeque, Honduras to work in their gold mines and the slaves named their new community in the Naco valley Copanique.

From Izalco, El Salvador the Nahua speaking Nicaroas eventually spread out investigating the North coast of Honduras, the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua and finally populating heavily the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua, displacing the Chorotegas on the Nicaraguan Pacific Coast who had earlier displaced the ancestors of the Sumus, including the Tawahkas, the Matagalpas, and the Miskitos who fled to the rainforest.

The Indians of the Naco area and the Trujillo area in Honduras said they came from the south when the Spanish came, so that would match the idea of immigrating north from El Salvador, where various Nahua speaking states  or ethnically mixed states eventually were founded including Payaqui (between Nahuas) a confederation together with the Chortis, Cusctalan and Izalco. The Indians of the Sula (Sula means dove or pigeon in Nahua, but Deer in Miskito) and Naco area, the Comayagua area, the area now in Intibuca, Lempira and Ocotepeque which the Spanish called Gracias a Dios and had its capital in Cerquin, in the Olancho (from Ulanco the place of rubber in Nahua) area and in the Trujillo area reportedly all paid tribute to Copan Galel, the Chorti leader, a captain of the Toltecs at Esquipulas, Guatemala, according to Spanish at the time of contact.

The Indians of these different areas where Nahua place names are common also came to one another’s aid when the Spanish attacked them, such as Olancho Indians and Bay Island Indians requesting help from the Trujillo Indians and receiving it while Hernan Cortes was in Trujillo.  If all of these states were linked by tribute to Esquipulas which was within the area where Payaqui was reportedly founded by Ce Acatl, the Toltec king who left Mexico to come to Central America, and  to the Chorti leader Copan Galel, It is possible that the names Hueyatlato (el mayor—the big one, large one, the highest level one)  and Payaqui referred to whole interlocking system of Nahua speaker founded and led ethnically mixed states at the time of Spanish Conquest, and that is why the name was both reported in the Olancho/El Paraiso area and in the Chorti area by the Spanish in the 1500’s.

 Perhaps one reason why the Nahua Indians of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala were called  Pipiles, from the Nahua word “pipiltin” the leaders or the ruling class (which included religious leaders,  political leaders and military leaders), is that Nahua speakers were indeed the leaders of multiethnic states during the Post Classic (900-1500 AD) in Honduras and at the time of Spanish conquest, a position many continued to hold during the colonial period, when the Spanish exempted hereditary chiefs from tribute payments or forced work requirements. One Honduran Ladino man said Hondurans used to call El Salvadorans “Pipils”, even though the Eastern part of El Salvador was principally Lenca plus some communities speaking a language related to Matagalpa, called Cacaopeira, into the 20^th century. The linguistic relationship between Lenca, Matagalapa, Ulwa and other Sumu  or MISUMALPAN languages is not known, although some linguists think they are related, and that the Lencas were not originally Mesoamerican Indians, but rather became so under influence of the Mayas.

The name of the Chorti leader at the time of Spanish Conquest Copan Galel is from Nahua. Copan is related to the word for bridge in Nahua. Copante in Honduran Spanish is a tree trunk that people cut down to put across a creek to walk on to go to the other side of  a creek that has no formal bridge, confirmed Honduran anthropologist Adalid Martinez. Effectively the Chorti area was a bridge for the land path that went between Guatemala city area to Naco, passing though La Jigua, where the La Puente archaeological park near La Entrada, Copan is now and then on to the Coast, reported the Spanish in the colonial period.

 Also to get from Mexico to the Caribbean ports like Nito at Rio Dulce, Guatemala and Naco in Honduras by canoe and then to the El Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Nicaraguan areas of large populous Nahua speaking states in the Post Classic, it was precisely necessary to go through the Chorti area, either going down the Montagua River in Guatemala or going down the Chamelecon River in Honduras which passes near San Pedro Sula. Canoe routes also connected the North coast to the Lenca area such as around Comayagua (not a Lenca language place name and located near a site called Agalteca). That these canoe routes existed is confirmed by petroglyphs that are only seen from the river level. Archaeologists think some of the petroglyphs mean rapid waters ahead while others are like signposts, meaning here is the territory of such and such city. Both of these types of petroglyphs exist along the Rio Platano heading towards the Ciudad Blanca area, report a number of people and examples of them can be seen in Scott Wood’s new book La Mosquitia desde Adentro (The Mosquitia from Inside).

Other canoe routes reached Yoro and Olancho cities from the Coast, including through the Aguan River that flowed near Papayeca, Colon and Agalteca, Yoro. In the 20^th century people of Catacamas, Olancho still knew where the “desembarcadero” was, the place to unload canoes coming in by river which connected to Guayape and Patuca Rivers. Going down the Paulaya or the Rio Platano is necessary to portage part of the way to reach the large archaeological sites near the Guampu river, or it was possible to go down the Patuca river. The identity of the Indians between the Coast and the Guampu River is debated with Eduard Conzemius identifying them as “Payas” (a word that might refer to both the Pech and their Mesoamerican neighbors), but  Batuka is a Tawahka word, and in some colonial documents it seems  the Tawahkas were called Batuka Indians.  From the Patuca River it was possible to reach the Honduran department of El Paraiso which also has large temple mounds near the border going down the Guallambre River, and on to Nicaragua (going past Azacualpa, El Paraiso and through the Azacualpa Valley and to the Pochteca River), and the Choluteca and Tegucigalpa areas.

In the Aztec tribute lists the city of Xoconosco had to pay tribute to the Aztec capital in feathers of green parrots, in petates of cacao, in jaguar skins, gold, and other things that were produced in Central America such as the Ciudad Blanca area and in the Olancho and Trujillo areas, but were not produced in Xoconosco.  This may have forced the Xoconoscos to become pochtecas, the name of the Aztec long distance merchant class in Nahuatl.  The pochtecas are remembered in the name of the Pochteca River which separates Honduras from Nicaragua in the El Paraiso area, which is reached by going down the Patuca and Guallambre Rivers, past Azacualpa, El Paraiso through the Azacualpa Valley.

According to Dr. Hugo Nutini, until his recent death a specialist in Nahua Indians at the University of Pittsburgh, the place name “Azacualpa” means “in the place of the temple of the god of the Pochtecas”, although other places translate it simply as “in the pyramid”.  Azacualpa is a common place name in Honduras, such as the Chorti Maya town near Antigua Ocotepeque, Azacualpa, Santa Baraba,a town near the gold mining region of Sula, Naco, and Quimistan Santa Barbara, Azacualpa, Olancho now Esquipulas del Norte near the Nahua Indian communities of Jano and Guata, and Azacualpa, El Paraiso the entrance to the Azacualpa valley which leads to the Pochteca river. The Azacualpa Valley in El Paraiso was never conquered in the colonial period according to Roberto Rivera, a Tulane University anthropology student.

 Still in the 19^th century, the Ladinos of Danli, El Paraiso said the contraband (smuggled goods) came by canoe from the coast with Indians who spoke “la voz Azteca” (Nahuatl). The Indians at the mouth of the Ulua river in northwestern Honduras also reportedly still spoke “la voz Azteca” (Nahuatl) in the middle of the 19^th century, according to traveller William Wells. In Honduran Spanish over 300 words from Nahua are still used including for foods, plants, crafts, animals, certain spirits like the Sihuanaba or Siguanaba (spirit of a woman in Nahua), and the sisimite (a tall hairy creature like a man who lived in the forest, similar to Bigfoot or the Saquatch in the NW United States), among other things. For example the words for children around Tegucigalpa are cipote (a male child), cipota (a girl child), and cipotillo (a little child). In some places, people even still use the work “sigua” (girl), like if you ask how many “niños” (which can mean boy children or just children in Spanish) a woman has, she may answer I have no “niños” (boy children), just siguas (girl children).

 

   

What happened to the Nahua Indians of the North coast and Ciudad Blanca Areas of Honduras?

By Wendy Griffin

The Spanish began attacking the Olancho Valley in the 1520’s from the North Coast of Honduras, and from the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua at the same time as reported by Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortes. There were numerous Indian rebellions which sometimes kept the Spanish out of the gold fields in the Olancho valley during 15 years, and the Spanish finally had to abandon the gold fields there by the mid-1500’s, partly due to a shortage of manpower, because the Indians and Blacks ran away into the mountains and the jungle.

To reach the valley of Olancho, where Catacamas and Juticalpa are now, from the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua, Spanish Conquistador Capitan Rojas had to pass through a province known as “Payaqui” (Among Nahuas) or “Hueyalatlo” (the big one, the major one). According to other Spanish colonial documents, Payaqui (Among Nahuas) was originally founded in the Chorti area (eastern Guatemala, Copan ruinas, Ocotepque, northwestern El Salvador) as a confederation between the Chorti and the Nahua speaking followers of the Toltec king Ce Acatl. When Christopher Columbus discovered the merchant in a canoe between the Bay Islands and Trujillo, the merchant said to the west of Trujillo were the Mayas. To the east were the Tayas or Payas (the handwritten copy is not clear if it is a p or t.)

The Nahua speakers of the Valley of Agalta seemed to have named all Pech villages in the Agalta and Sico river area Tayaco (the place of the Tayas), until the 20^th century when they switched to Spanish and then called these villages El Payal (the place of lots of Payas in Spanish). The Pech report Tayaco or El Payal on Rio Sico had a separate name in Pech used by the Pech.  Similar things happen with Garifuna villages which all have separate Garifuna names which have nothing to do with the names these villages are known by in Spanish or in English, and the Spanish speakers sometimes refer to all of them as morenales (the places with lots of black people or Garifunas) or in older texts like the Honduran novel Barro, caribals (the places with lots of Caribes as the Garifunas were called Caribes Negros or Black Caribs).

 One example of how this multiple naming system works and the way the arrival of new elites affects names can be seen in the area around Puerto Castilla about 16 km from Trujillo. Puerto Castilla (which means Port of Castille—Castille is a place in Spain, although it was only given this Spanish name by the Honduran government in the early 20^th century) is still known as “Sandy Fly Bay”, among some older Garifunas, the name the Black English speakers called it during the Truxillo Railroad days when they were the main inhabitants of Castilla. The land Puerto Castilla is on is still called Punta Caxinas, by both Garifunas and Spanish speakers, its old probably Nahua Indian name and each part of this peninsula has Garifuna names like Inaya and Deresa which refer to different places which the Garifunas use to differentiate different agricultural zones, but the Ladinos just call that whole Garifuna area Barranco (means something similar to a ditch or depression in the land in Spanish) or as their Honduran government land title says “La Puntilla” (the little point or spit of land out in the ocean).

People likewise can have two names, depending on the language of the person they are talking to. There are gringos in Trujillo known as Eduardo and Juan, even though back in the US and Canada or with gringo friends, they are known as Ed and John. Garifunas frequently have another name called “apodo” (nickname) besides their official on their Honduran government birth certificate name, and this was even more common when the Spanish church first required the Garifunas to use Spanish saint’s names as first names. In songs and stories and ultimately buildings named for them, often these “apodos”, like the Garifuna name Gulisi for the daughter of chief Satuye remains, while no one knows what her Spanish first and last name were to know who were her descendants. The people in Trujillo called Vicky and Andy (Garifunas), and Edy (a Ladino) are all native Hondurans who officially have Spanish names, even though they are known by English names, even to Spanish and Garifuna speakers.

So the fact that a chief has a Nahuatl name when talking with a Nahuatl translator like Mazatl (deer in Nahuatl) a chief in the Trujillo area or Mazate (deer in Nahua) in the Ocotepeque area, does not necessarily mean that he is a native Nahua or Nahuatl speaker, just as Nahua place names could be given for places not controlled by Nahua speakers like Tayaco, which the Pech remember as being Pech. The same happens in the US, where millions of people consider the largest city in the US is called Nueva York rather than New York, and the southern most island of the US has a Spanish name (Cayo Hueso-Bone key or little island), as well as an unrelated English name (Key West).

 As is the case of New York, Post-Classic states in both Mexico and in Central America were often multi-ethnic.  Port cities in particular tended to be multi-ethnic in Central America in the Post Classic, both with permanent and temporary foreign merchants, the political and religious elite,  the common people who may or may not have been part of the same ethnic group as the elite, and slaves of other ethnic groups brought in for sale and work.

Foreign elites would also both have local people make things to the style that they considered adequate or important as well as import things in the style and manner they considered important.  In the case of US banana companies, the exceutives did not feel that Honduran clay houses met the criteria of adequate housing and insisted on building  the wooden houses, both for themselves and for the English speaking Black, Garifuna, Spanish speaking Hondurans, Jicaque and Miskito Indians who were their workers.  Although built to American tastes, in fact most of the work was done with Jamaican carpenters who sometimes had Garifuna assistants. So the fact that this housing was American style wooden houses or workers barracks did not mean either the people who lived in them nor the people who built them were Americans. Honduran literature at the time like Prision Verde and modern oral histories of workers who lived in the houses as children, report mixed feelings about living in these styles of houses.

So the fact that the Post Classic ceramics of Northeastern Honduras some of which have the decorations of the pottery of Cholula and Teotihuacan in the Classic period, but is not as fine as the pottery there, and have shapes like incense burners which the local Pech Indians who previously lived in the area did not and still do not use, may indicate making things to the style of Nahua speaking leaders, even if the people who made them may not have been Nahua speakers.

Having local people make things to the tastes of a different (elite or nonlocal origin) ethnic group always has problems, as any gringo who has tried to get Honduran workers to build a gringo style house for him to his specifications will tell you. The fact that Honduran pottery of the Post Classic on the North Coast has a lot of similarities, but also differences with Mexican Classic Period styles, as well as the change in housing styles and city organization between the Classic and Postclassic periods in the Pech and Lenca areas  of Honduras may reflect this phenomenon.

 Religious buildings and things used in religious ceremonies in particular needs to meet important criteria, and non-local elites would be very strict in building these types of buildings, even though the workers or potters or painters might be of a different ethnic group or religion like Mormon churches or Episcopalian churches or Methodist churches on the mainland in Honduras, mostly probably built by Spanish speaking Catholics, or Post Classic temples in the Ciudad Blanca area or in Northeastern or Northwestern or Central Honduras, which would have included local Indians and non-local slaves as workers as well as recently arrived immigrants.

That Tenampua archaeological site in the Comayagua Valley is Post Classic has a different building orientation, different building style, particularly of floors, is located at the defensive position in the mountains instead of near water in the valleys like the classic period Lenca sites, and has walls and a ball court, while older Lenca sites do not have defensive walls, appears to indicate that at least the people who give the orders on how cities and temples are built and organized are not the same people as in the valley during the classic  and earlier periods in the Comayagua Valley sites like Yarumela, in spite of the profusion of Ulua Polychrome ceramics at the site which usually indicates Lencas.

Both because the Nahua speakers called the Pech Tayas and because the state where these Nahua speakers lived was called Payaqui, both the Pech and probably the Nahua speaking Indians of northeastern Honduras were both known as “Payas” in colonial documents. Sometimes all unconquered Indians—Tolupanes, Nahua speakers, Pech, Tawahkas, etc. were known as “Jicaques” (the people who were here before us in Nahua) in colonial documents or as Chontales (foreigners) or even Caribes (meaning wild untamed Indians, not related to the Caribs of the Caribbean islands or the Garifunas).  All good articles or books on the Indians of Northeastern Honduras or the Nicaraguan Mosquitia start out trying to guess what modern Indians the colonial names referred to in each place.

At its height in the 1540’s there were an estimated 32,000 people operating pans for washing gold, known as “bateas” or “bowls” in Honduran Spanish, both men and women, of which only 1,500 were black slaves and almost all the rest Indian slaves along the Guayape River in Olancho, according to Linda Newson’s The Cost of Conquest, and Pastor Gomez Zuniga’s new book on gold mining in the sixteenth century in Honduras, published by IHAH, so the population of the area was significant even after the initial epidemics and slaving raids.  These Indian slaves were brought from all over Honduras and even from Guatemala and El Salvador. The population of the Trujillo area was described as higher than the Valley of Mexico by the Spanish conquistadors, which would be almost impossible if the Indians had been Pech who were hunters and fishermen. The Spanish continually complained about the “muchidumbre” (the great number) of warlike Indians in areas east of Trujillo, in Olancho and the Mosquitia, known all together as Taguzgalpa” the house where gold was melted” by the Spanish.

 In the Ciudad Blanca area near the Rio Platano in the Mosquitia, and along the Patuca in the Tawahka area, a mining area known as Yare, and along the Rio Sico in the Pech area, a mining area known as Tayaco (place of the Pech in Nahua), the Spanish started gold mining in the rivers with Indian slaves between 1524 -1534, but  the Spanish were pushed out by the mid-1500’s, notes Honduran historian Pastor Gomez Zuniga in his recent book Mineria Aurifera, Esclavos negros y Relaciones Interetnicas en el siglo 16 (Gold Mining, Black Slaves and Interethnic Relations in the 16^th century) published by the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH) last year. The Spanish report some of Indian gold miners in the Rio Platano area attacking and eating the other Indians in this early period. The Spanish also report Indians in unconquered parts of Northeastern Honduras smuggling gold dust out, such as by the Rio Coco which the Spanish never controlled in the colonial period and exporting the gold dust to Costa Rica which had a native gold jewelry industry. Very few gold pieces are known to have existed in Honduras at the time of contact, and maybe only three in the classic period (300-900 AD) including one buried under a stela at Copan Ruinas. Honduras seems to have produced gold dust for export both to Mexico and to Costa Rica, and was not a center of gold jewelry or statues making itself, although it seemed that Hondurans did make things of copper. The copper mine may have been at Manto, Olancho, a town which was destroyed at the end of the Wars of Olancho in 1865, the departmental capital was moved to Juticalpa and Manto never really prospered after that. To export out of Manto, the connection was probably through the Aguan River in Yoro located north of Manto.

During the rest of the 300 years of the colonial period, the Spanish  never again regained control of much of Northeastern Honduras, including most of Yoro and Atlantida, most of Colon, much of Olancho, most of El Paraiso and all of the modern department of Gracias a Dios (La Mosquitia), according to various historians, anthropologists, and geographers such as William Davidson, Linda Newson, Roberto Rivera, and my studies in the History of the Indians of Northeastern Honduras.

Many of the Nahua speaking inhabitants and other Indians of Northeastern and northwestern Honduras were captured and sold in the Caribbean islands like Cuba and Santo Domingo to work in the mines or in Panama to work carrying Spanish goods from one coast to the other to help the conquest of Peru prior to the end of Indian slavery in 1545, reported Linda Newson in her book The Cost of Conquest (Also published as El Costo de la Conquista in Honduras.)  For example the entire populations of Juticalpa, Olancho, Sonaguera, Colon and Papayeca, a capital city probably in the Aguan Valley of the a large province in the Trujillo area of Colon were sold as slaves, which is why Juticalpa,  Sonaguera, and Olanchito in the Aguan Valley were mulatto towns during almost the entire colonial period.

 A few hundred  Indians stayed in their towns near Trujillo on the coast and Agalteca, Yoro in the Aguan Valley and in the Bay Islands until 1645 when the Spanish tried to capture them and send them to live in northwestern Honduras or to guard the fort of Santo Tomas on the Guatemalan Carribbean Coast, where many of them died of fevers.

 Some Indians escaped capture and returned to resettle Utila and Agalteca before the end of the colonial period, but others remained rebellious in the mountains of Yoro, where some intermarried with the Tolupan Indians. For example many of the Tolupan’s god’s names collected by Anne Chapman in her book The Masters of the Animals, are in fact in Nahua like Teot (God in Nahua), Toman, and Tata (Grandfather) Trueño (Thunder).

In the 1536 “repartimiento” of San Pedro Sula, when conquistador Pedro Alvarado gave villages as “encomiendas” or grants to the other Spanish conquistadores, many of the place names in the mountains on the east side of the Ulua River, in what is now Yoro and Atlantida were in fact in Nahua. Mesoamerican type archaeological ruins, described as “Chorotega” in the 1940’s by Heye Foundation funded anthropologist  Von Haagan, were reported in the mountains of Yoro where the Tolupans then lived.  Recently archaeologists reported ruins with ball courts and many temples mounds in Western Yoro, reported Roberto Rivera, a Tulane university anthropology student.

 Nahua style hollowed out log type drums, known as Toncontin  in Honduras, like the Tegucigalpa’s airport’s name or tunkul, were reported among the Indians of Agalteca, Yoro, reported Honduran historian Dario Euraque, and among the Tawahka Indians reported Don Dioniso Ordoñes, a 82 year craftman describing a Tawahka drum known as “drum” in Tawahka. An Aztec style god of the Wind Ehuecatl stone statue was also found in Yoro and is on display in the San Pedro Sula Museum. The Garifunas report seeing corn grinding stones along the Coast, such as during the construction of the resort Marbella, near Tela, and the ceramics associated with the Nahua speaking Indians of Trujillo and the Aguan Valley are found all the way between La Ceiba and Trujillo reported Roberto Rivera’s father, who as an agricultural economist for CURLA gets shown these ceramics and corn grinding stones that farmers dig up planting plantains or corn.

According to Dario Euraque’s book Conversaciones historicas con el mestizaje (Historical conversations with the theory that all Hondurans are mestizos),  the Spanish speakers and mulattos of Olanchito, Yoro claimed that the “Jicaques” (unconquered/non Christian Indians) of Northern Honduran ate people. This phrase “Jicaque” thus may also refer to the Nahua speakers living in Yoro and Atlantida, rather than just the Tolupan Indians who speak Tol who were also traditionally called “Jicaques”.

These Nahua speakers of the North Coast, such as the Trujillo, Lower Aguan and Ciudad Blanca area may also have hidden  also probably in the Mosquitia where they may have been known as the Rah by the Miskitos. The Rah were also famous among the Miskitos for eating people, being very warlike, telling war stories, and for staying up all night for wakes for dogs, according to Miskito Indian Scott Wood’s new book on the history of the Mosquitia   published by the Ministry of Culture in Honduras this year.

Nahua speakers thought that dogs guided the soul of the master across a river to “heaven”, so that may have something to  with the custom of doing wakes for dogs, among the Rah. Miskitos who were visting in a Rah village and did not stay up all night to wake the dog, were put to death by the Rah, according to the Miskitos and mixed Rah-Miskito descendants from Ahuas and Brus Laguna.

Most Nahua speakers in Mexico were descendants of  people originally  from Northern Mexico, who lived by hunting and collecting wild plants, called “Chichimeca” by the Nahuatl speaking Aztecs. David Dominici translated “Chichimeca” as “Dog people”. Dogs would also have been important as assistants in hunting, both to the Chichimeca, to the Rah, and to their Miskito-Rah descendants.

The Miskito story about how men and women got together also includes a dog at the very beginning, that the dog protected the man and saved him from being eaten by an alligator and since them men have taken care of dogs. Osvaldo Mungui, the director of MOPAWI, an environmental agency in Mosquitia and who told this story, reports having seen Miskitos exchange a whole cow for a dog, and said more investigation still needed to be done to understand the importance of dogs in the Miskito culture, some of which they may have inherited from the Nahuas. Dogs existed in the Americas before the Spanish conquest.  The Pech words for coyote “paku” and dog “paku akaya” (domesticated coyote) show that among some cultures the ideas of these two animals were related.

 Simon Burchell from England  who has written two books on Cadejos (dogs that appear with glowing eyes, and grow, and can either be protective and warn of something, or can cause death) also sees some relationships between Nahua beliefs of coyote (a Nahua word) and the current Central American stories of “cadejos”.  In Honduras folklore of Ladinos, Lencas and Chortis,  witches (brujos or brujas) can change into the form of a coyote, or a dog or a jaguar or a pig, also show that other Hondurans see relationships between these animals. The word “Nahuat” in place names according to Alberto Membreño means “brujo” or witch. The word for an animal protective spirit among Lencas, and Mayas, “nagual” is related to  the idea of “witch” or Nahua priest/shaman because the shaman could reportedly change into the shape of his “nagual” or animal spirit which protected and helped him. These ideas of Nagual as protective  or shamanistic helper spirit and Nahua as shaman seem to have existed in Mesoamerican cultures since the time of the Olmecs (around 1,000 BC when trade with them is noticeable in Honduras), as these words seem to be loan words from the Mixe-Zoque languages which the people who are Olmecs are thought to have spoken. The Olmecs were in contact by trade with Central Mexico as well as the Montagua River area of Guatemala where they got jade from and Olmec influenced pots are found in Lenca areas and in the Olancho Valley and near Trujillo in Honduras.

The name of the town Esquipulus, Guatemala probably comes from the Nicarao god Esquipul, the Black Tiger at Night or Jaguar/Panther who devours human hearts, the Nicarao version of the Aztec god Smoking Mirror, who could change into a Jaguar, and to whom human sacrifice had to be made, Human sacrifice was also required by the gods Quia, remembered in the place name  Quiatlan (the place of the Rain God, Quia, now Quimistan, Santa Barabara) and Ilama (Grandmother creator goddess of the Nicarao, in the place name Ilama or Ilamatepque, Santa Barbara).  The Pech Indians who live near the Ciudad Blanca area mention specifically a tiger which tears out the heart of their hero Patakako while he is sleeping in the sky in the house of the grandmother and another Patakako (our doer, creator in Pech, perhaps referring to the Grandfather god from whom are descended all the Nicaraos), seems to show these gods like Ilama, her husband and Esquipul, were also held by the Ciudad Blanca Indians and supports the idea that the Rah were the descendants of these Indians.

The Rah used to control the Aguan Valley and would attach the Spanish of Trujillo, according to the oral tradition, collected by Scott Wood.  Most of the Rah either intermarried  with the Miskitos or those near Ahuas on the Patuca River were put to death by poisoning their water, an act ordered  by the Miskito King for eating a mixed Rah-Miskito child. The bones of the dead Rah of the Patuca River are found at Raititara which means large Cementary in Miskito, near Ahuas.

The relationship of the “Tawira” (unmixed Indians in the Mosquitia who had beautiful straight hair) who led the slave raids against the Sumu Indians of Nicaragua and the Indians of Costa Rica and Panama, and the Nahua Indians of the Ciudad Blanca, Trujillo, and Olancho areas who were also famous slavers is not yet clear.  Miskito Indian Scott Wood in his book, La Mosquitia desde Adentro, divides the Miskito Indians into the Honduran Miskitos known as Mam, the Sambo-Miskitos who were mixed with escaped African slaves, and the Tawira (the people of beautiful or abundant hair). 

Originally the Tawira lived in Honduras, but became upset about the mixing of Miskitos with Africans and when the mixed Miskitos became the kings of the Mosquitia, the Tawira moved to settle south of Sandy Bay, in the Nicaraguan Mosquitia, according to the book Blackness in Central America. This book also reports it was the Tawira and the not the Miskito-Sambos (mixed with Africans) who were active  in the colonial era Indian slave trade in the Mosquitia, which continued until at least 1843, and who were very good at long distance trade by canoe.

 The origin of the Tawira is not clear, as historians have believed that most of the Indians the Miskitos mixed with south of Sandy Bay were Sumu speakers. The Sumu or Mayagna tribes that the Miskitos absorbed through either language switching or intermarriage include the Prinzu and the Kukra, most of the Bawinka, among others. One story of the origin of the Miskito Indians with the name Miskito is that a chief of Indians who came far from the North named Miskut came to Honduras which his people and settled first in the Brus Laguna area in the Hondruan Mosquitia and then  in the Sandy Bay area on the Nicarguan side of the border.  These people were known as Miskut uplika nani (the people of Miskut) which became shortened to Miskutu by the local Sumu Indians. English colonial documents show Indians called Miskitos in the 1500’s along a Miskito shore in Honduras, before the supposed shipwrecks which brought African blacks to the Mosquitia in the area around the current border with Nicaragua at Cabo Gracias a Dios and the Rio Coco. This story of Miskut coming from the North (which could include Mexico, the homeland of the Nahuas) and this being the origin of the name of the Miskito people has been published in several sources including La Gente de miskut y otros cuentos (the People of Miskut and other stories) by Miskiwat, translated and reported in Honduras This Week, and Scott Wood’s book La Mosquitia desde Adentro (The Mosquitia from Within).  This is a separate migration from Rivas and Pacific Coast of Nicarauga  which seems to the origin of the majority of the modern Miskitos and the Sumu language speaking Mayagnas of Nicaragua and Tawahkas of Honduras.

The phenomenon of various tribes and races ending up in zones of refuge is known to have happened in the United States, too, where for example among the Seminole Indians of Florida (whose name means renegade), at least two different Indian languages have been identified, including Muskogee Creek which was native of Georgia, so that Indians can ran away a long way from home to hide from invaders.

The mixing of these Indians in areas of refuge with runaway blacks who did not want to be slaves has also been widely noted, such as the case of Black Seminoles.  This mixing of different Indians and Blacks running away in the Carribbean to a free area of refuge like the unconquered island of St. Vincent is also what gave rise to the Garifunas, who are a mixture of Blacks from Africa, Carib Indians and Arawak Indians and whose language includes elements of all of these.  So there may have been Nahua speakers or other Mesoamerican Indians among the Tawira  Miskitos in the Mosquitia in the colonial period.

 That the Tawira Indians gave the name of “mam” to the  Honduran Miskitos is suspicious, because Mexicanized Indians also called the Mayan Indians of Huehuetenango Guatemala Mams,   which means “mute” according to the author of The Pipil-toltecas of Guatemala. They presumably called the Guatemalan Mayans and the Hondurans Miskitos “mute”, because they did not understand their language. Nahua Indians of Central America and Mexico are actually quite famous for not differentiating between different tribes of Indians calling them “jicaques” (those who were here before us), “Chontales” (foreigners), or Chichimeca (translated variously as Dog people or barbarians, people’s whose language sounds like chichi, which in Honduran Spanish is the sound monkeys make, not dogs).

 They did the same with their languages saying several different tribes spoke “chontal” (the language of foreigners) or “pupuleca” (a garbled language). These words are reflected in place names like Chichigalpa, and Chontales, Nicaragua, Hicaque River in Atlantida, in plant names like chichipate (the medicine of barbarian tribes) as opposed to nahuapate (the medicine of Nahua speakers,) and the use of plant names in place names like chichicastenango, the place of chichicaste, the Central American Nahua name of stinging nettle, used to treat arthritis.

Different tribes have these names as their traditional tribal names in English and in Spanish, like Chontal, a group of Mexican Mayas related to the Chorti-Maya, and the Jicaques, the traditional name for Tolupan Indians who spoke Tol which confuses students when they read colonial documents as they think Jicaque only refers to Tolupanes, when in fact it was applied to a wide variety of Indians. Maybe the reason that colonial documents have lots of references to “Jicaque” (wild or uncivilized non Christian Indians) travelling by canoe and using bows and arrows in Yoro, but in the 1940’s the Tolupan Indians had no canoes and no bow and arrows even though they had words for them, is that maybe these sightings of Jicaques were of other ethnic groups such as Nahua spakers, Rah or Miskito Tawira or other Miskito Indians or even Sumu speakers like Tawhakas, all famous for their abilities with canoes.

The fact that some of the Nahua speakers and even some of the Lencas may have run away and hidden in the mountains of Yoro could explain some other of the interesting observations of people like Padre Manuel de Jesus Subirana.  He said the Jicaque Indians of Yoro he worked with spoke the same language as the Indians of Ilamatepeque, Santa Barbara and that that is why he used Indians from Ilamatepeque as translators in the missions in Yoro.  Any of these Indians could have been bilingual.  The original language(s) of the Indians of Ilamatepeque is very confusing as the colonial era documents identify them sometimes as speaking Care, the largest Lenca dialect, the Indians themselves deny they spoke Care and that they did not understand the priests who spoke Care, and they and a handful of Santa Barbara villages like Nueva Celilac and Ilamatepeque and Gualala spoke Jucap, a totally undocumented language.

The name of the Ilamatepeque community is obviously in Nahua and appears to have been part of the state of Quimistan and Naco which also included an archaeological site on the Ulua river known as El Coyote which shows the same patterns of artifacts as a Toltec associated site in El Salvador and an early Postclassic site which existed in Copan Ruinas in a neighborhood known as El Bosque for 100 years before before being attacked and burned, which may have been associated with the kingdom of Payaqui (among Nahuas) or Hueyalatlo (el Mayor-the big one, the most important one). The Aztecs also did ceremonies in the ruins of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico even though their city was a short distance away at Tenochtitlan, so maybe Nahua speaking Toltecs would have done the same in Copan Ruinas.  The meaning of the name Toltec reportedly means people who are knowledgable in practical arts (like weaving petates of tule, making Carrizo baskets, maybe healing, etc), although it also appears to be related to the Nahua words for people from Tolan or Tulan (the place of tule) which would be Tolteca or Tulteca.

 One of the special artifacts at these Honduran and El Salvadoran Toltec associated sites is green obsidian, which was from a special probably Toltec controlled mine in Hidalgo, Mexico, more than 1,000 miles away, although they also had obsidian from La Esperanza, Intibuca’s mine and mines in El Salvador also at these sites. Artifacts from Mayan controlled obsidian sites in Guatemala are not at these sites in the Post Classic (900-1500 AD). This same mix of different types of non-Mayan obisdeans is found at Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico, which some researchers believe was also called Tula or Tulan (the place of tule) by the Toltecs.  I have not seen green obsidian reported for Northeastern Honduras, but most of the area is unknown by professional archaeologists.  Black obsidian teeth for “macanas” (Aztec war clubs which had a sword of Mahoghany with a row of obsidian teeth above and below) are found in the Trujillo Museum and were reported by the Spanish conquistadors in Olancho. From the macana come the Honduran Spanish words “macanazo” (a severe beating) and “macanear” (to beat severely, several times), but they have not been tested for place of origin.  The obsidian and the stone for the corn grinding stones found in the Ciudad Blanca area, reported Honduran archaeologist Emilio Aquilar, are not natively available  in the area and were brought in by long distance trade routes. 

 Naco in the Santa Barbara was a big center for making obsidian tools in the Post Classic in Honduras with 100 times more obsidian than anywhere else in the area, but the obsidian worked there also was probably brought in from elsewhere in the form of cones, like those shown at the Trujillo Museum. According to David Dominici, the Toltecs tried to set up a monopoly on the obsidian trade, which apparently meant trying to control the major obsidian producing mines in El Salvador like at Izalco (the place of obsidian) and  Isatepeque (the mountain of obsidian) and in Honduras at La Esperanza, Intibuca. Some Lenca artifacts appear near obsidian sites in the late Post Classic period in El Salvador, surrounded apparently by thousands of Nahua speaking Pipiles.   Perhaps these Lencas had experience in obsidian mining in the La Esperanza area and were enslaved and made to work in El Salvador in the obsidian mining industry there, just as the Spanish hauled Honduran, Guatemalan and El Salvadoran Indians and eventually Black Africans all over Honduras to mine for gold in the sixteenth century.

Hernan Cortes’s letter to the King of Spains included in Antonio Vallejo’s 1911 book on Honduran land laws clearly shows that the Spanish in great part, based their whole system of encomiendas and collecting tribute on the Aztec and other Nahua speaker systems of forced labor and paying tribute, with the first encomiendas in Honduras started the year after Cortes’s letter was written. This would help explain why the Honduran word for tribute collector in the colonial period was calspique, the Nahua word for tribute collector.

In the 2001 Ethnic census some people in Ilamatepeque identified themselves as Lencas. In the other towns that it does one of the largest Guancascos in Honduras with in honor of the Black Christ of Esquipulas, Gualala and Chinda, Santa Barbara, no one identified themselves as Lenca, although anthropologist Adalid Martinez reports many Indians there. One possibility is that all the Indians have become Ladinos, but what Atanasio Herranz argues is that there is problem with the term Lenca, that originally it only referred to a small group, mostly those south of Tegucigalpa in like Aguanterique. In the other parts of the area now known as Lenca, other names for the Indians like Care or Jucap or Colo were used, who may or may not have spoken a dialect of the Lenca language. In Santa Barbara, there is the added element of strong Nahua speaker influence. The use of the word Lenca for all these Indians dates to E.Q. Squier’s books in the mid-1800’s about Honduras in which he reports the words in one part of Honduras are like those in the Lenca area, so they must have all been Lenca. Since knowledge of Lenca exists only as few words lists, because the language has mostly died out with no fluent speakers, the deciding which Indians are which is difficult, the same in the areas of Yoro or the Chorti area of Honduras.  Even deciding who is Indian and who is not Indian is a hotly contested subject in parts of Honduras, El Salvador and Eastern Guatemala.

 So there are a number of reasons why people in towns in Western, Central, Southern and Eastern Honduras that were colonial “pueblos de indios” (Indian towns) would not chose to call themselves Lencas, even though they are Indians. One might be because they may have descendants of the Pipils or Nahua speakers. Also they could have known their family’s tribe by another name either like Jucap  which they called themselves or “Jicaque” or “Paya” what the Nahua speakers and the Spanish called them or because their family had spoken another dialect of Lenca, not called Lenca but something else like Care.

Also they could be mixed of different Indian tribes or they just not know what their tribe or their language was called as has happened with the Indians of the Texiguat and Catacamas regions. There is also the totally separate issue of not wanting to be called an Indian at all,  because of the discrimination against Indians. Who wants to be called a Lenca Indian, if what they teach in school is that the worse thing you could be was a Lenca Indian?, as a former Lenca teacher from La Campa, Lempira reported happened to her in school.  

 Similar issues affect the Indians in the Chorti Indians area of Honduras. El Salvador and Guatemala. Virginia Tilley writing about modern Indians in Western El Salvador is upset some El Salvadoran Indians call themselves Nahua-Mayas.  But in fact, if the Mayas were in Western El Salvador in the Classic period and the Pipiles/Nahuas were in Western El Salvador in the Post Classic period, some of the Mayan Indians ran away, but others probably stayed and mixed with the Pipils. For example, Masahuat appears to have been Maya in the classic period. In the early Postclassic it was part of the mixed Nahua Chorti confederation Payaqui (among Nahuas). At the time of conquest it was almost all Nahua speaking Pipils. So apparently the Maya Indians intermarried with the Pipils.

A common theory about the language Alguililac, mentioned in the colonial period documents for Western El Salvador, Ocotepeque and Copan Ruinas in Honduras, and the Department of Chiquimula, Guatemala is that it is a dialect that resulted from the mixing of Chorti and Pipil. The switching of the r to l in the names of the languages Cholti (and maybe Chol) in the colonial period in Eastern Guatemala and the Department of Cortes Honduras to Chorti in the modern period is the influence of the Nahua language of the Pipils.  There are a number of indicators of Chorti intermarriage with Nahua speakers including Nahua last names like Suchite and Oaxaca among the Chorti, Chorti words that are derived from Nahua, including knowing many medicinal plants with Nahua names, Pipil stories among the Chortis like the sisimite, la Sucia, el cadejo, sometimes with Nahua names for the spirits like cipotío, nagual or nagualito, etc. and maybe some elements of the crafts, dances, and ceremonies which were affected by the contacts with Pipil-Toltecs.

The marriage books for Western Honduras indicate both marriages of Indians of different tribes such as Lencas and Pipils or Chortis and Pipils, as well as Indian marriages with the Spanish and a very high number of Indian marriages or other relationships with blacks or mulatos. The Catholic church was strict with Blacks that they needed to marry in the church or else they were guilty of a crime of living in sin that could be legally punished, so in fact there was extensive extant documents about marriages of Blacks and mulattos in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico.

Also if the blacks were legally married, even if they were slaves, they could not be legally sold away from their spouse under Spanish law, so it was to their advantage to be legally married. The children of free Indian women, but enslaved African men were under Spanish law free people and in the beginning did not pay either  tribute or forced labor.  According to Mario Martinez’s study some Indian fathers or grandfathers specifically liked mulatto or African sons in laws because they were often “arrieros” mule drivers and knew how to carry products by the mule to they could help their father in laws sell or take the tribute payments to the Spanish encomienda owners who lived in towns.  Many Indian tribes in Honduras the fathers and elders were strict about who could marry their daughters and some put tests to make sure they will be good sons in law, after which they expect a legal wedding. Studies show the Spanish brought many more African males than females, and many of the African females ended up as partners of the Spanish themselves, so that African males to formed families often had to marry Indian women. 

If the Africans or Spanish spoke any Indian language in the colonial period, they usually  spoke Nahua, so it was easier to marry with Nahua speaking Indians than the other women with whom they might not be able to speak to the girl or especially to her parents to seek a legal marriage. So there were a number of factors which affected rapid and early the “mestizaje” and ladinoization which historians have reported in Western Honduras in the Ocotepeque and Copan departments and which may have particularly affected the Nahua speaking Indians. The bad relations between Ladinos or Mestizos in Eastern Guatemala and in Honduras and the local Indians like the Chortis in Western Honduras or the Pech in Eastern Honduras may be influenced not  just by the racism and anti-pagan bias of the Spanish, but also by the strong disrespect of the Nahua speaking Indians with whom they married towards the other Honduran Indians, whom they previously had attacked and eaten. Although the word “albatoiney” translated as “meat of slaves” as a term for the other Indians in the Mosquitia is attributed to the Miskito Indians, the concept is more like the Nahua speakers or the Rah, than what is known of the Miskito Indians.