Pittsburgh Woman’s Honduran White City and City of the Monkey God Theories

Pittsburgh Woman’s Theories of Honduran White City and City of the Monkey God Mysteries

By Wendy Griffin 2/8/2017

When joint Honduran government.-National Geographic expeditions to the rainforests of Northeastern Honduras in 2015 and 2016 reported that they had found a city in the área near where the lost White City (Ciudad Blanca in Spanish) or another legendary city The City of the Monkey God were said to be, there was a lot of interest. Eight million people read the initial National Geographic report. This year there has been additional interest with the publication in January 2017 of bestselling writer Doug Preston’s new book on the 2015 and 2016 expeditions called “The Lost City of the Monkey God”.  Amazon.com reported the book was the number one best seller in Native American books when it first came out. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh has copies to lend. 

Pittsburgh native Wendy Griffin was not surprised that they found the ruin of a large city with outlying settlements in the White City area. As a volunteer with the Honduran Indians’ bilingual intercultural education program since 1987, she has been researching the history, legends, and languages of Northeastern Honduras for 30 years.  The issue of mysterious large ruins of earth and stone in areas where mostly semi-nomadic rainforest Indians were known to be living popped up almost as soon she began her research for the book “The History of the Indians of Northeastern Honduras Prehistory-1992”,completed in Spanish in 1992 and in English in 1994. 

What Civilization Built Many of the Ruins in the White Area?

This National Geographic found ruin has been named City of the Jaguar, because of a carved head of a Jaguar there, But due to her long research in the area, Griffin feels it is not a Jaguar, but rather a Panther. And it holds the key to the identity of the Indians who built some of the ruins in the White City area of Northeastern Honduras. While the archaeologist who went to the ruins thought it was a new previously unknown civilization, Wendy Griffin’s research indicates that it may have been built by immigrants from some of the best known archaeological sites in the World, refugees from a ruin called Teotihuacán (place of divination) by the Aztecs, northeast of Mexico City and from the Valle of Cholula (place of refugees) southeast of Mexico City.

Teotihuacán is now thought to have been called in Nahuatl Tulan (place of tule, a water reed used to make a mat used for sleeping, a place where people were so close together they were like tules in the water), by the Toltecs (called Tultecas in Central American colonial documents), the inhabitants of the Valle of Anahuac where México City is before the Aztec Empire arose in Tenochitlan (now Mexico City). According to colonial era Méxican documents the Nahuas speakers fled the area of Teotihuacan to Cholula, where they were later again displaced  by invading peoples from the North.  The Valley of Cholula had already been inhabited by Mangue speakers who became known as Chorotegas (people from Cholula) when they became displaced. These Nahua speaking immigrants arrived in Central America at different times and are known diversely as Pipiles (the leaders), Nahuas (witches), Mexicanos (people of the tribe of the Aztecs the Mexica), Nicaraos (the name of a Nahua chief in Nicaragua at the time of contact for whom the country is named), and Cholulatecas (people from Cholula). 

The Chorotegas arrived in Honduras first, settling on the Gulf of Fonseca in Southern Honduras at the end of the Classic period (300-900 AD), seriously disrupting the Maya Chorti state of Copan which extended to the Coast in Western El Salvador on their way through. Places names like Nacaome, Diure, and Liure and maybe Perspire are thought to be in the Chorotega language Mangue. However, the Chorotegas of Costa Rica reported that the Chorotegas of the Gulf of Fonseca had been displaced, forcing them to move first to Nicaragua and then displaced again by the treachery of the Nahua speaking Nicarao, forced to move to Costa Rica. In Honduras Liure reportedly still has Indians who still do a Guancasco or "guacaleo", a ceremony of peace, with the Indians of Texiguat.  

The Indians who replaced the Chorotegas in Southern Honduras seemed to have been Nahua speakers who gave such place names as Choluteca (people from Cholula in Nahua) and Calpules (from calpulli, an administrative district run by a clan in the Nahua states in Nahua). According to the Indians of Trujillo when Cortés arrived who had Nahua names and place names, they came from the Southern Sea, as the Spanish called the Pacific. The Nicarao, the Nahua speakers of the Cholula Valley also called Cholulatecas in colonial Honduran documents, said from the Valley of Cholula they went first to Xoconosco, now Soconosco, Mexico where they lived for many generations. But losing a war there, the wise men of the tribe had a vision that the Nicarao should travel south to a place of twin mountains. 

First they settled in Izalco in El Salvador, the site of an obsidean mine. Then they went north to Naco. Then they went along the Coast to Trujillo.  They then went back south--which probably meant going down the Paulaya River, western edge of the White City area, to the Culmí area where they could catch the Lagarto River (Alligator River) to the Guampu River and then down the Patuca River. This continues south through the Guallambre River until where it almost reaches the Choluteca river. This goes to the Coast. The Nicaroa then spread into Western Nicaragua eventually settling on the mainland in front of the twin mountains on the island of Omotepe in Lake Nicaraga.  They may also have gone down the Platano River east of the Paulaya where the mountains in the head waters had the Nahua names meaning Twins, which they might have thought satisfied the vision of the shamans. It is possible to go on foot between the end of the Paulaya River and the headwaters of the Platano River or the headwaters of the Platano River to the Patuca River, but it is some rough jungle.  The Pech Indians still hunt on foot in this area.  The builders of the White City area ruins seemed to have avoided building in the section of the Patuca River between the Guampu and the Coast, even though it is very navegable. There may have been very hostile Indians living there, perhaps the Rah, who the Nicaraos were anxious to avoid.  More will be said about the Rah later. 

See Griffin's Spanish blog www.culturaindigenahondureña.blogspot.com for the Feb. 9, 2017 article on Nahua crafts in Honduras and Why the White City is in the Honduran Moskitia for a list of Nahua crafts noted in Honduras and the raw materials needed to make them, many of which were found in the Moskitia rainforest. In Honduras most of the common names for these crafts and their raw materials are still in Honduran Spanish as words derived from Nahua. Sometimes this Nahua influence extends even to the local indigenous languages around the White City like the Tawahka word for bark cloth, generally known by the Miskito word tunu in Honduras, is called amat by the Tawahkas in the Tawahka language. Among the Nahuas, amate was the word for a type of ficus tree from which the outer bark was used to make paper (still called amate paper in Mexico, now a popular craft) and the inner bark could be used to make cloth. Among the speakers of Sumu, of which Tawahka is one dialect, the word for jaguar (tigre amarillo) or puma (tigre colorado) is “Nawa”, according to Eduard Conzemius’s book Ethnographical Survey of the Miskito and Sumu Indians of Honduras and Nicaragua. The belief that some shaman could change themselves into a jaguar was also reported among the Miskitos in that book.

For those who don't read Spanish or who don't know what the different crafts look like, see the blog entry in this blog for information on Crafts from the areas adjoining the White City which show Honduran Nahua influence in the Burke Museum collection, which has the photos online. These Honduran crafts were donated to the Burke Museum by Wendy Griffin specificly to show the crafts of the main craft plants, many of which will be mentioned in this article.   

In spite of media reports that the National Geographic discovery  was of  an unknown civilization, in fact, the White City area, located between the Paulaya River (River of Blood in Miskito) and the Patuca River (a Tawahka name), and north of the Guampu River, has been visited by noted American, Canadian, European, and Honduran archaeologists, anthropologists,  and geographers since the beginning of the 20^th century. The Wikipedia article on Ciudad Blanca as  a legendary ruin was traditionally  known in Spanish, which Griffin helped, edit includes some of the more noted people who have worked in the area. Conzemius’s Miskito and Sumu book as well as articles by William Duncan Strong and Doris Zemurray Stone in the Handbook of South American Indians,Vol, IV, includes descriptions and analysis of most of the archaeological features described in Preston’s book for the City of the Jaguar.

Who was the God Represented by the Statue of the Jaguar at the City of the Jaguar?

An Ah hah moment came not when Griffin first saw the photos of the Jaguar head found at the City of the Jaguar. Then she did not have any reaction.  It was reported as a possible were-jaguar, a human shaman in the process of becoming a jaguar.  Were-jaguars are a common motif in Mesoamerican art and are thought to be related to Mesoamerican rain gods like Tlaloc of Aztecs. There are legends in many parts of Honduras about witches (Nahua means “brujo” or witch) who can change into different animals like tigers (jaguars, panthers, pumas), dogs, coyotes, owls (la lechuza), and pigs. Both male and female witches could change into animals in Honduran legends. The local Miskito Indians who may have absorbed into their tribe the builders of the White City ruins tell stories specifically of shaman who could change into tigers, noted anthropologist Eduard Conzemius.

Recently she was working on an article for Honduran anthropologist Lazaro Flores on early foreign explorers of the White City area.  He had sent her a link to William Duncan Strong’s field notes on the Río Patuca on the far eastern side of the area where the White City is thought to lie. Strong wrote about how he found an obsidian blade in a mound in a village called Wankibila (the name is Miskito, even though he says it was a Sumu village at the time.)  He drew the blade. Obviously it was a “tooth” of a Aztec style sword club known in Spanish as a "macana". The idea of the macana has remained in Honduran Spanish in the words “macanear” (to hit hard repeatedly) and “macanazo” (the hurt from being hit hard repeatedly). The wood used to make the macana was Honduran mahoghany, "caoba" in Spanish, which was previously commonly found in the forests around the White City area. 

These macanas were known to have existed in the Olancho area where the Spanish reported the Indians hid them in the straw of their house roofs. Then at night, they would take them out of hiding and attack the Spanish.  Griffin  knew they had existed in the Trujillo area, because there is plastic container full of obsidian teeth from macanas in the Rufino Galan Museum in Trujillo. She has also found one that washed up on the beach in Trujillo where she lived for many years. But this was nice confirmation of her theory that the obsidian trade continued on past Trujillo, down the Paulaya, Platano, and Patuca Rivers to the White City area, and then on to Southern Honduras and Pacific Coast Nicaragua where the main body of Nicaraos lived.

As she thought about the trade route of this obsidian, coming up from the El Salvadoran mine in Izalco (Place of Obsidean in Nahua) where the Nahuaizalco Indians still live, and then going up to Naco in Western Honduras. Griffin believes that Naco is the real City of the Monkey God. It could be named for the god of Nahua myths Nahuehue (great Na), the son of the sismite (a tall hairy human-ape type creature similar to Bigfoot or the Sasquatch) and a woman who grew up to be the Captain of the four Rain, Thunder and Lightning Gods, the God of the Center, who helped blow up the mountain of sustenance and helped the people get corn inside. Then he taught the people to grow corn in the milpa.  So in Nahua the place of Na would be Naco.  Like the Olancho Valley, modern archaeologists think there was a base population of Lencas, but waves of Nahua influence in Naco, a big port in Central American-Mexican trade in the Post Classic period (900-1500 AD). Doña Marina, Cortés's Nahuatl interpreter had no problem speaking with the Indians of Naco.

Then the obsidian trade continued to the Trujillo area with perhaps a stop in the Bay Islands. Doña Marina or La Malinche, Hernán Cortes’s Nahuatl interpreter said the Indians of the Trujillo area spoke Nahuatl like the people of Cholula, a valley south of Mexico City, with only a few variations. Cortes´s companions in the conquest like Gomara and Bernal de Diaz Castillo said the Indians there dressed like those of Nicaragua, probably referring to the Nicaraos who were Nahua speakers who had immigrated to Nicaragua from some villages in the Cholula valley.  

  

So as Griffin was reflecting on how the Nahua speakers tried to monopolize the obsidian trade, she thought, “I know who that statue is in the City of the Jaguar. It is the Celestial Black Tiger of the enemies of the Pech Indians.  They have found the Nahua speaking Nicaroa’s god Esquipul, the Panther who devours human hearts.  I had thought that would be one of the Gods of the White City area, and I published this in 1991.  And now only 26 years later, the archaeologists have found him.”

Griffin’s 30 Year Interest in the White City area of Honduras

Although Griffin’s in-depth book on Northeastern Honduras was never published, there are copies in Spanish and in English in some US university libraries, as noted in WorldCat.com.  The University of Pittsburgh, where Griffin got her Master’s degree in International Development Education,  has a collection of both her published books and unpublished manuscripts.

Her research about the White City was first published in a book of Pech Indian myths, co-authored with Honduran anthropologist Lázaro Flores, called “Dioses, Heroes, y Hombres en el Universo Mitico Pech” (Gods, Heros, and Men in the Pech Mythical Universe), published by the Central American University of El Salvador in 1991.  Her best known work about the White City, besides working on the Wikipedia article on Ciudad Blanca, is a video on Youtube.com called Search for Ciudad Blanca Part I – IV. This was made in the period 2000-2004 with an American explorer Ted Maschal, better known as Ted Danger. The filming was done by Discovery Channal cameraman Tony Barrado. During this time she wrote a series of newspaper articles about the White City in the Honduran English language newspaper Honduras This Week, one of  which is quoted in the Wikipedia article. The identification of the Nahua speaker god Esquipul as the probable god who are required sacrifices of which neighboring the Pech Indians were the victims of, was also in her 2009 book Los Pech de Honduras.

Griffin became interested in trying to find out if, by analyzing Pech myths, we could identify  the Gods to whom the Pech were sacrificed.  This would possibly identify who were the builders of the White City and other large ruins in the area, like National Geographic’s discovered site, now called The City of the Jaguar.

One interesting God of the Pech’s enemies the Pech identified as the Celestial Black Tiger.  In Honduran Spanish, jaguars are usually called Yellow Tigers, while Panthers are called Black Tigers. The Puma is called a Red Tiger and the Ocelot a little Tiger (tigrillo).   According to Western biologists also, jaguars and panthers are the same species, just different colors. The Río Plátano Biosphere where the White City is thought to be located was part of a conservation project called “The Path of the Panther”.

Why Did She Think to Check if There was a Nahua God who Matched the Enemy of the Pech?

There were Nahua place names in the Río Plátano Biosphere. One of the cities that has inspired the White City myth was called Huehuetlapalan (The Ancient Land of Red Earth in Nahuatl), according to Hernan Cortés which was located about 50 leagues east of Trujillo, which would put it in the White City area. This city had a name Xucotaco in another language which has not yet been identified.   The Pech reported that their ancestors had to hunt in groups or be captured, sacrified and eaten. There is a new Chorotega-Spanish dictionary published in Costa Rica. There are no Chorotega place names in the Río Platano Biosphere. Previous archaeologists like Herbert Spinden had theorized these ruins were Chorotega (means people from Cholula in Mangue). The mountains on either side of the Río Platano were still called by Nahua place names in the 1920's when Conzemius worked there, and a river that helps form  the Río Platano, Río Chilmeca, also seems to be in Nahua.

The whole área east of Trujillo to the Nicaraguan border was called Taguzgalpa (place or house where gold was melted in Nahua) throughout the colonial period. The –gal in Tegucigalpa (Honduras’s capital, also the house where gold was melted) , Jutigalpa (place of a lot of Jute, a type of edible snail whose shells are often found in suspected Nahua sites in NE Honduras-the capital of Olancho), and Taguzgalpa is thought to be the Nahua Word –cal or house like in the word “calpulli”, but changed to a “g” as was common in the Nicaroa dialect of Nahua.

Specifically one of the myths of the Pech hero Patakako (he who does or creates in Pech) goes to heaven to try to identify if there is really another group’s Patakako in heaven. His heart is taken out of his chest while sleeping by the Black Celestial Tiger. Fortunately the Grandmother in Heaven (maybe Ilama, the Nicarao Creator Goddess of the original pair of Grandmother and Grandfather)  gives him a coatimundi (pizote) heart and he is as good as new. So, part of the stories of the White City is that it was a place where other Indian groups were sacrificed to the Gods.  

The National Geographic site City of the Jaguar does have a series of stone altars appropriate for human sacrifice in front of a central pyramid, notes Doug Preston. They also found stone bowl with a bound male captive figure on it. The style of the carving-- the hollow eyes, triangle head, hinted at arms are similar to the green stone goddess figures of the Trujillo area which were traded with the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua and Costa Rica.  The Hondurans believe this style stone bowl found at other White City culture sites was used to hold the heart of the sacrificial victim after the human sacrifice, as noted in an article in La Tribuna.  

So one of the Gods Griffin looked for was a Nahua speaker god who would be the equivalent of what the Pech called The Celestial Black Tiger.  In 1990 she was staying in Tegucigalpa with another student at the University of Pittsburgh Louise Donnell who had a Fulbright scholarship in Honduras at that time. She was using the library of  Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH) to do the analysis of the Pech myths to see what elements of the myths were supported by history or archaeology.

In an Index of Nicaraguan Mythology she found the god she was looking for. Among the Nahua speaking Nicarao Indians of Nicaragua they had a god called Esquipul, whose name meant The Black Tiger who Devours Human Hearts. He was associated with the constellation of Ursa Major (the Great Bear in Latin), which the Nahuas felt had the shape of a Black Celestial Panther.  He is believed to be the Central American equivalent of the Aztec God Teztcalipochli (Smoking Mirror).

Esquipul’s presence in Central America is reflected in the place name of Esquipulas, Guatemala. According to the Historic Geographer Dr. William Davidson in his new book on Black Christs of Esquipulas, the Spanish added the –as to make the pronunciation easier. According to the official Esquipulas, Guatemala website, the town was founded by Toltecs. The identification as Toltecs of the Indians near Esquipulas was made by the Mexican troops of Conquistador Pedro Alvarado whose soldiers said these Indians were brethern of the Toltecs.

In that corner where Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador meet, Nahua place names are common in the valleys, while Maya-Chorti place names are found mostly in the mountains.  The relationship of the area where Esquipulus and Copan Ruins are to the White city area of Northeastern Honduras will be explored later in this article while considering the Post-Classic Confederation of Toltecs and Maya-Chortis called Payaquí (among Nahuas or among Yaquí) or Hueyatlato (the big one-el mayor), which Spanish conquistadors reported still existed at the time of the Conquest. 

Other Nicarao gods from that Index were reflected in the place names of towns in Northwestern Honduras. For example, Quimistan, Santa Barbara was according to Cortés's letters originally Quiatlan, the place of the Nicarao rain god Quia. Ilamatepeque (Hill of Ilama in Nahua), Santa Barbara seems to be named for the Nicarao creator goddess whom they called Ilama (Grandmother). The ruin of the contact period town Naco, the head of a province also called Naco,  is in a valley on the border between the department of  Santa Barbara and the department of Cortés, where San Pedro Sula is. 

The Olancho town Esquipulas del Norte was not directly named for Esquipul the Nicarao god. Originally the town and surrounding  county was called Azacualpa (the place of the temple of the patron god of the Aztec Pochteca long distance merchants in Nahuatl according to the late Dr. Nutini of the University of Pittsburgh) and changed its name to Esquipulas del Norte in honor of its patron saint the Black Christ of Esquipulas. The county of Azacualpa, Olancho was not conquered by the Spanish in the colonial period, and in the 1935 Monograph on Olancho, Azacualpa county still continued to be majority indigenous. The bordering countries of Jano and Guata have members of the modern Nahoa Indian Federation of Olancho.  The colonial era  relationship for Central American Indians between Esquipul the Nicaroa Precolumbian God who was associated with the color black and the Toltecs of the Payaquí confederation, and  the later great popularity of the Black Christs of Esquipulas in Honduras and Nicaragua  is something that can only be guessed at. 

Many of the places where the Black Christ of Esquipulas is worshipped had Nahua place names.  Griffin's article on Ceremonies in Honduras related to Calendars on her Spanish blog www.crisisderechoshumanoshonduras2015.blogspot.com looks at among other groups, how Hondurans in towns with Nahua names, including Ladinos, Lencas and Maya Chortis,  have kept up ceremonies on the signficant dates indicated by the solar calendar used by the Nahua speaking Pipiles of El Salvador. Instead of human sacrifice, turkeys, ducks, or chickens are often sacrificied, sometimes as parts of games, on these signficant dates. 

Until the archaeological investigation on the ground of the City of the Jaguar, done by Colorado State University Professor Dr. Chris Fisher and Oscar Neil Cruz, a Mexican archaeologist employed by the Honduran government’s Institute of Anthropology and History, in 2015, this idea that the Pech had been sacrificied to the Nahua speaker god Esquipul remained a theory, based on legends.

 But after reading Preston’s book and working on an article that included analyzing the obsidian trade route in Central America, Griffin realized,”They found him. They did not find a Jaguar head. They found the god of the Pech’s enemies who lived in the White City area--Esquipul, the Nicaroa Nahua speaking Indian’s god who was called “The Panther who Devours Human Hearts”.

Where are the Indians of the City of the Jaguar Now?

When in 1991 Griffin published with Lazaro Flores about her theory that there had been Nahua Indians in the Pech area who were responsible for sacrificing and eating the Pech Indians, there were no modern descendants of Nahua speakers identified in Honduras. But in 1996 her theory was partially corroborated when Dr. Lázaro Flores and his students from the National Teaching University (UPN) began working with the Nahua Indians of Olancho. 

The main body of these Indians lived in a series of villages north of Catacamas, Olancho (originally Ulanco--the place of a lot of rubber in Nahua) such as Jamasquire and  Siguaté (Probably the Teotihuacán Goddess of Terrestial Waters in Honduran Nahua, the woman of the Pool,  called La Sirena (the mermaid) in Honduran Spanish).  Their identity as Nahoa Indians was confirmed by a colonial era land title to one of the cofradías of the Catholic mission town of Catacamas. A number of place names going North from Catacamas towards the Pech area of Culmí are in Nahua like Malacate (a round spindle whirl), Petaste (the local name for the vegetable chayote), and Aguacate (Avocado). 

Some Olancho Indians chose to live altogether under Spanish control in the big town of Catacamas to defend themselves from Miskito Indians during the colonial period. Others remained free in the Valley of Agalta, in the area between Trujillo and the Paulaya River, and in the Moskitia itself. The hundreds of Indians of Catacamas refused to participate in "repartimiento", forced labor for the Spanish, because they said they needed to remain in their village to protect it from Miskito Indian attacks. The 9 cofradias, a religious organization responsible for organizing the Patron Saint Festivals,  of Catacamas were among the richest in Honduras with thousands of acres of land and thousands of head of cattle.

According to Dr. Robert Carnack in his book The Legacy of Mesoamerica he says at the time of Conquest the Olancho valley, which Catacamas is part of, was inhabited by Lencas with Nahua overlords, as was the nearby Agalta Valley (place of a lot of Carrizo or wild cane in Nahua) where San Esteban (originally Tonjagua), El Carbón (modern Pech town, but with White City type ruins),and Conquire (-quire may be a variation of the Lenca word –quira for stream) are. William Duncan Strong reported a pre-Columbian fort up on a hill at Conquire and Hondurans reported in the 1920’s a Toltec style observatory near San Esteban.  A life size clay statue of Xipe Totec has also reportedly been found in the San Esteban area.

Legends of Xipe Totec, the god of young corn among the Aztecs,  continue in Honduran Spanish as “el cipotillo” (cipote, child in Nahua, -illo little in Spanish). Similiar ceramics and trade in green stone are found in the Agalta Valley and the Trujillo area. These monochrome ceramics with elaborate lugs on the side and elongated tripod feet found in these áreas are also found in the White City area,while the source of the green stone is on the edge of the White City area at an archaeological site called Tulito (little Tula perhaps, in Honduran Spanish). This archaeological site was found by Europeans, with Honduran archaeologists and anthropologists traveling down the Rio Paulaya trying to find the Honduran White City, known as the Sir Walter Raliegh expedition.

Jamasquire, Olancho is famous because it had an “oferatorio” where there was a cache of status goods left for the Gods, similar to what was found in the National Geographic site of City of the Jaguar.  It has the advantage that the Indians still live there. This offering cache was identified by American archaeologist Doris Zemurray Stone and, according to the Jamasquire Indians who are still upset about it, the archaeological goods in the cache were taken away by the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH) which is responsible for archaeological sites and museums in Honduras. So the statement in Preston’s book that none of the cache sites of these Indians has been professionally excavated does not seem to be true. 

While Herbert Spinden did not excavate the cache site he found along the Rio Platano in the White City in the 1920's, he did photograph it. The photograph can be seen in the Handbook of South American Indians Vol. IV article in William Duncan Strong's article on Honduran Archaeology written in the 1940's.  The main type of elements noted in the City of Jaguar like large stone three legged metates with carvings on them, believed to be used as seats, and sites with multiple mounds which seemed to form plazas, were noted for Northeastern Honduras in this 1940's article and in Eduard Conzemius's 1930's book on the Miskitos and Sumus which is in the Carnegie Library in English. 

The other Indians who are recognized in the modern Nahoa Indian of Olancho Federation live in Gualaco (guala-the beginning of a river in Lenca, co place of in Nahua), Guata (twin in Nahua and Honduran Spanish), and Jano (place names around here are in Matagalpa).

Agalteca Indians and others of the Aguan Valley

During the colonial period, some Indians in the Trujillo and Aguan (place of many waters in Nahua) Valley chose to stay under Spanish control in Indian towns “pueblos de indios”, while others ran away to areas controlled by free Indians to the west (called Jicaques by the Spanish) and east of Trujillo (called Payas by the Spanish). A combination of slave raids which sold the Indians to the mines in Santo Domingo and Cuba, European diseases, and flight left only a few hundred encomienda Indians in the Trujillo and Aguan Valley area by the 1640's.

After several successful pirate attacks in the 1640’s the Spanish left the Bay Islands, Trujillo and most of the Aguan Valley, taking the encomienda Indians they could capture to the North Coast of Guatemala where they were assigned to watch the fort at Santo Tomas. Most of them died there due to tropical diseases found in the area.  But the Agalteca Indians (people from the place of a lot of tule or Carrizo (acatl) in Nahua) on the Aguan River managed to escape being captured by the Spanish  and are still there today.  They have been studied by the president of the Honduran university in Olanchito, the UNAH-VA, only 7 miles from Agalteca, Yoro. The switch of the "c" in Acalt (reed, a general word for the plants tule, carrizo, or junco) to "g" in Agalta and Agalteca is a documented feature of the Nicaroa dialect of Nahua. Doña Marina, Cortés's Nahuatl interpreter, called these Indians in Santa Barbara and in the Aguan Valley Acaltecas. 

The Agalteca Indians of the Aguan Valley also tell tales of the pre-Columbian period, such as Moctezuma, the Aztec Indian Emperor, came personally to try to attack the Indians of Northeastern Honduras and make them pay tribute to the Aztecs. This story about the Aztec attempt to subjugate Honduras is also found in the colonial era historian Fray Torquemada’s book "Monarquia Indiana" (Indian Monarchy). The Agalteca Indians say the beginning of the end of the glory of the Agalteca Indians was when someone killed Moctezuma in Yaruca, a village outside of La Ceiba. There were 4 towns in Honduras called Agalteca, and most have Mesoamerican ballcourts in the Post Classic period and in non-Mayan parts of Honduras. The City of the Jaguar in the White City area also appears to have a Mesoamerican ballcourt. All Aztec Emperors were called Moctezuma and the one who came to Honduras was not the one that Cortés met. 

The Indians in the Trujillo area and  Aguan Valley were reported to have Nahua names, Nahua gods, and Nahua Indian social structure with a true lord (el verdadero señor), a head priest (papa), nobles (principales), common people (macehuales according to Cortés, a Nahua word), and slaves. The towns in the Trujillo area, whose control extended far into Olancho to Telica, were organized into two states called Papayeca and Chapagua. These two states were allied with each other, with Papayeca being the head of the Alliance. The state was organized into pueblos cabeceras (capitals), and pueblos sujetos (subject towns). Papayeca had 10 towns and Chapagua had 8 towns.  In colonial Spanish documents the Nahua word for outlying villages, parajes, is often translated as “valleys” (valles), rather than the current terms of “aldeas” (villages) and “caseríos” (hamlets).

There were colonial era reports of Nahuatl speakers (the same language as the Aztecs) in the area around the nearby port of Trujillo. For example, Hernan Cortes mentions a local chief whose name was “Mazatl” which was deer in Nahuatl.  Some of the local towns had names in Nahuatl like Ce Coatl (one snake in Nahuatl) and Chapagua (champagua-damp house or house by the water in Nahuatl). The head priest in the Trujillo area was called by the Spanish “Papa” which according to Michael Coe means the head priest of Quetzalcoatl in his round temple in his form of God of the Wind. The capital of this state centered around Trujillo and the Aguan River valley was called Papayeca which seems to refer to its location as the site of the temple of the “Papa”. In the area east of Trujillo, known as the province of Taguzgalpa (the place where gold was melted in Nahua), “Mexicanos” (Nahuatl speakers) were reported in colonial records. 

William Duncan Strong noted many similarities between the archaeology of the Trujillo area and that of the Bay Islands.  He warned that that there was a good chance that the archaeology of this area and the adjacent North Coast might be very influenced by the immigration of Mexican Indians. He also warned that it was not sure that in areas where the Spanish reported Payas, that these were in fact inhabitted by the modern speakers of Pech, a Macro-Chibchan language.

 He and Doris Z. Stone felt that a similiar problem also existed with Jicaque to the west of Trujillo that not all the Indians in that area, now the departments of Yoro and Atlantida, were in fact, the modern rainforest style semi-nomadic Indians Tolupanes who spoke Tol.  The finding of large sites with temples, plazas, a ballcourt, statues of the Aztec god of the Wind, and colonial era place names in Nahua to the east of the Ulua river like Culhuacán, also a place name associated with Toltecs in the Valley of Mexico,and Sulaco,  in western Yoro, seems to have born out this belief that the Spanish used Jicaque and Paya as general,perhaps provincial, names. The possible link between Paya and the province of Payaquí (among Nahuas) is explained further in this article.  

As part of their oral history, the Pech Indians claim that they are not the makers of the different stone animals that are found in their area. These were made by their enemies who were allies of the evil spirits of great storms.  This could include Quia or Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl, and a female Nahua speaker god who was shown in green stone in the Trujillo, Olancho, and Bay Islands area. This goddess seems to have been known as Texiguat or Siguaté in Nahua in Honduras, both place names which mean the woman of the pool or the pool of the woman.  In the Trujillo area this name has been translated to Spanish for a place called "La  Poza de la Sirena" (The Pool of the Mermaid). Quetzalcoatl heads, usually part of a stone corn grinding stone (metate), are common in the Trujillo area and in the White City area.  See the video Search for Ciudad Blanca in Youtube.  Both Texiguat, El Paraiso and Siguaté, Olancho still have people who identify themselves as Indians living there.

 In Honduran Spanish this goddess is known as La Sirena who is responsible for both fish and fresh water.  She seems to be related among Honduran Nahua speakers, who seem to be part of the Teotihuacan Diaspora after its defeat, as the Central  American equivalent of the Goddess of Terrestial Waters shown on a mural in a temple in a cave in the center of Teotihuacan, northeast of México City. The Aztecs called her The Lady of the Jade Skirt or Princess Green, so large and small green stone carvings of her would be appropriate.

Archaeology of Similar Sites to White City Known in Northeastern Honduras

The best known archaeological sites in the Lower Aguan and Trujillo area include an Indian fortified town with temples and plazas with walls and ditches around it in the Río Claro area. Canadian archaeologist Paul Healy thought that it was the capital of these allied Nahua speaker cities Papayeca. Nearby are the Cuyamel Caves which were used as burial caves in both the Pre-classic and Post-Classic periods. The archaeology of the area is even more known by the collection in the Rufino Galan Museum in Trujillo, which the deceased owner said he would go out to sites to where archaeologcical pieces are found after it rains, and see what new pieces the rains have shown up.

Much of the archaeological artifacts show similarities to those found in the Agalta Valley and in the White City area. See Griffin’s video Search for Ciudad Blanca on Youtube.com to see in situ some of the archaeology of the White City area,including the stone metate legs with carvings, stone bowls appropriate for holding human hearts, and petroglyphs. The version at the University of Pittsburgh and a few other universities like Tulane has a special bonus track at the end which shows White City archaeological pieces in private Honduran collections. These include clay and stone masks, which are also in the IHAH Museum at the Fort of Santa Barbara in Trujillo. Conzemius reports these masks and all these other features in White City area and other Moskitia archaeological sites in his book on Miskitos and Sumus. It was recognized even in the 1930's that these sites were not by the current Indians living there, such as the Miskitos. For example, the Sumus, which the modern Tawahkas are part of, said the petroglyphs were not made by them, but by evil spirits or devils.  The Pech myths also call in Spanish the makers of the carved stone objects or White stone cities in their área “evil spirits”.   

Some stone White City area archaeological pieces,such as a large stone metate and a stone bowl from the Río Platano,  are even in the Harvard Peabody Museum, collected by American archaeologist Herbert Spinden in the 1920's.  Other archaeological pieces from the White City area are at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History brought back by William Duncan Strong and in the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian from collections brought by Theodore Morde (mostly ceramics) and other explorers (includes stone animals and stone metates) sent by the Heye Foundation. So the claim of the National Geographic team that the area was totally unknown archaeologically is not true.

I have personally known three Honduran archaeologists and two American archaeologists who  have worked in different parts of the White City area.  The site the National Geographic team found was not registered on the IHAH list of known archaeological sites and had not been reported as explored by Western explorers. The Miskito Indians of MASTA in a formal letter on their website said they did know about this site. As a sacred site, most of the modern Indians in the area (Pech, Miskito, and Tawahka) have just left the archaeological pieces in the ground, and mostly go into the area accidently while hunting.

The Mysterious Rah

Besides the Indians reported by colonial era Spanish as living in Taguzgalpa—the Miskitos, the Tawahkas (Sumus), the Payas,  the “Mexicanos” (Nahua speakers), and various Lenca groups (Colo, Ulua), there seems to have been a people truly overlooked by history. The Miskito Indians call them the Rah. Griffin first heard of them when she worked as advisor to some Miskito students working to publish a bilingual (Spanish-Miskito) Miskito story book called in Miskito “Miskut Kiamka Nisanka Kiska Nani” and in Spanish “Cuentos de la Gente de Miskut” (Tales of the People of Miskut).  One of the stories is “The story of the Rah”. This book is in the University of Pittsburgh library. It was recently republished by a USAID project Eduacción with different illustrations and is on the Internet. Scott Wood Ronas, a Miskito teacher, recently published a book of the oral history of the Moskitia with more information on Rah. It is called “La Moskitia Desde Adentro”(The Moskitia from the Inside). 

According to the story of the Rah, the Rah lived near the Miskito community of Ahuas on the Rio Patuca, which is north of the beginning of White City type ruins. There was a mixed Rah-Miskito marriage and they had a baby. The Rah in-laws were looking after the baby. Unfortunately when the couple came back, the Rah in-laws served the baby in soup.  The couple ran away to the Miskito King and told him of the vile murder of the mixed Rah-Miskito baby at the hands of the Rah. The Miskito King thought this was the last straw and ordered the Rah community to be killed by putting the vine Ut lawan (all the people in Miskito) in the only source of drinking water for the Rah community. Except for the mixed Miskito-Rah couple, all the Rah of that community died.

Where the Rah town was is now called Raiti Tara (Big Cementary in Miskito) on the Patuca River below Ahuas.  The person who told that story for the Miskiwat story book was Erasmo Ordoñes from Ahuas, one of the descendants of that mixed Rah-Miskito couple that escaped. One of the translators for this book Orfa Jackson of Brus Laguna also said her family is descended from that mixed Rah-Miskito couple. Scott Wood Ronas in his book notes that there were other known Rah communities, such as in the valley of Auka, and these Rah have now all mixed with local Miskito families.

Wood Ronas goes on to say that the Rah previously extended to the Aguan Valley. From there they used to attack the colonial Spanish in Trujillo.  Conzemius reported large ruins with temples and plazas with walls around the city in this area between the Paulaya River and the Aguan River such as near Bonito Oriental, now a Ladino community, and near Ciriboya, now a Garífuna village. He also quoted Ferdinand Columbus, Christopher Columbus’s son, as saying the Indians who lived between the Aguan River and Point Gracias a Dios where the Coco River meets the sea on the current Honduras-Nicaraguan border were known to eat people.  

The Miskitos and the Rah fought horrible battles and eventually the Miskitos were able to extend all the way to the Aguan Valley.  After the Garifunas arrived in Trujillo in 1797, and began to move eastward, both the Miskitos and the Rah retreated to communities east of the Paulaya River.  The 19^th century was also still a time of terrible epidemics in Honduras, so with a reduced population, these groups retreated to consolidate in surer territory with the Garifunas between them and the newly returned Spanish of Trujillo.  So the claim of the Miskitos, as related to their letter on MASTA’s website to the City of the Jaguar or Ciudad Blanca ruins, is that it was related to one of the ethnic groups they were descended from, one of the ethnic groups who had formed part of the Kingdom of the Miskito Coast before it passed to control of the Honduran government in 1860, and the site was sacred to Indians in the Moskitia who had been taking care of it for centuries, so the archaeological pieces should not be removed from the Moskitia, does have some validity according to their oral history.   

The Miskitos remember the Rah as very warlike. If a Miskito Indian spent a night in a Rah village, he needed to tell stories of glory in war. If the Rah liked his stories, he was alright. If he did not have stories like this to tell, the Rah might eat him. The Miskitos also remember if a Miskito spent a night in a Rah village and a dog had died, the Miskito had to stay up all night and participate in the wake of the dog. If he did not, he would be eaten. 

These types of stories of Indians who ate other Indians do not only exist in Pech and Miskito lore.  The Spanish for a short time in the 1530’s managed to operate a gold mine in an area of placer gold on the Rio Plátano with the local Indians. The Spanish complained that at this mine there was a problem of one group of Indians attacking the other and trying to eat them. The Indians of the Moskitia were able to join forces with the Indians in rebellion in other parts of Honduras in the late 1530’s and early 1540’s, and throw the Spanish out of the Rio Plátano, the Sico River where the Spanish had had a mine at Tayaco, and the Rio Patuca, where they had also opened a mine called Yare in the Tawahka area, never to return for the rest of the colonial period.   The book with information on early Spanish mining operations in NE Honduras is “Minería Aurífera, Esclavos Africanos, y Relaciones Interetnicas en Honduras el Siglo XVI”, based on early colonial period records found on in the Archives of the Indies in Seville, Spain. The Garifuna town Bataya near the mouth of the Rio Platano is supposedly named for a Battle (batalla in Spanish) between the Spanish and the Payas, and the Payas won, according to local Garífunas. 

The Spanish had also opened early gold placer mines at Tayaco (probably on the Río Sico) and at Xeo (now probably Feo, located south of Santa Rosa de Aguan) in the area between Trujillo and the Paulaya River which they were forced to abandon by these Indian rebellions. This part of Honduras  did not become effectively part of Honduras again until the building of United Fruit's Truxillo Railroad at the beginning of the 20th century which extended from Trujillo as far as the Paulaya River and then down the west bank of the Paulaya into Olancho. The whole story of who was displaced by this railroad, especially who lived in the interior of the Department of Colon, has not yet been recovered.  An intriguing Garífuna tale of Ladinos near Francia (inland from Santa Rosa de Aguan)  who still raised domesticated deer in the late 20th century, something Nahuas were supposedly able to do, is an example of what we don’t know about who remained in this área during the colonial period.   

Also when Cortés left the Trujillo area in the 1520’s one of his orders to his Lieutenant, his cousin, was to stop the sacrifices in the Trujillo area. In Colon and in Olancho, the Spanish complained of the many Indians (el muchedumbre de indios), and the warlike nature of the local Indians (belicosidad).

The Rah were described by Orfa Jackson as having long straight abundant hair with cinnamon colored skin. Scott Wood Ronas said the bones at Raiti Tara have been studied and they are taller than the average Miskito, who are taller than the local Pech and Tawahkas, because of mixing with Africans.  Surprisingly when Scott Wood talked to the son of a mixed Rah-Miskito marriage, this man remembered his Rah father as having “tez claro” (light skin), and “pelo rubio” (blonde hair).  The Mexican Indians also described Hernan Cortes as “tez claro” and “pelo rubio”, so this could refer to brown hair. The Pech Indians complain that the Nahua Indians of Olancho are light skinned, so that they wonder if they are Indians. 

Particularly intriguing is that both the Toltec King Quetzalcoatl who according to Mexican legends may have died in the White City area and a Miskito hero "Old Drift Man" who taught the Miskitos what they knew about sorcery, are reported as white men. The Toltec King Quetzalcoatl grew a full beard to hide his face, as shown in the stone carving in the Search for Ciudad Blanca video.  According to Conzemius, the Miskitos at the beginning of the 20th century still knew how to build a boat of reeds and filled in with clay, which might be what was referred to by Mexican myths as a boat of snakes.  In the US, the most well known makers of these tule wáter reed boats were the California Indians.

A version of this boat of wáter reeds was made famous by the Ra and Kon Tiki expeditions of Thor Hyerdahl. Another cultural hero of the Miskitos is "Morning Star" who conquered all of the Moskitia and taught the Miskitos to pay tribute, as noted in Scott Wood's book. Even the name of the Miskitos come from a chief Miskut who came far from the North with his people and settled first in Brus Laguna (maybe the site of the pottery Morde brought back) and then to Sandy Bay on the Nicaraguan side of the border. This story is both in my Miskito student's book of Miskito legends and in Scott Wood's book. The pre-Columbian pottery Theodore Morde brought back to the Museum of the American Indian might be from the site of this early settlement of the Chief Miskut, whose people came to expand to be the Miskito Indians of the Honduran and Nicaraguan Moskitia.

Miskitos do know the majority of the Ladino myths inheritted from the Pipil Nahua speakers like La Sucia/Siguanaba (The Dirty One/Spirit of a woman in Nahua), La Sirena/Siguaté (The Mermaid/Woman or Goddess of the Pool), and the Sisimite (the tall man ape, like Bigfoot) with Miskito words for them.  See the Wikipedia in Spanish article on Pipil Mythology, Mitología Pipil for these stories which are found across Central America and have Aztec equivalents. 

I had thought that probably Rah was the name the Miskitos gave to the Nahua speakers in the Moskitia. Even the issue of waking a dog would not be unusual in a Nahua speaking culture, because the Nahua believed one’s dog led its owner to the Paradaise of the Rain God after his death. But you don’t want the dog to escort you too soon.  According to Conzemius, the Miskitos previously shared this belief.

The main fly in the ointment with this theory is that Scott Wood was able to find in the unpublished manuscript of a German anthropologist who worked in Honduras for many years, four words in the Rah language. They do not appear to be in Nahua, nor in Chorotega. I have wondered if the Rah could have been a Chichimeca (Dog People) group who left Central Mexico  in the pre-Columbian period for Central America, as the Nahuas did and the Chorotega (Mangue speakers) did. Besides defeat in war as a reason for immigrating, it is believed it did not rain for several years in the 1200's in Mexico, forcing the Mexicans to move to a wetter climate in search of food. The 1200's was a time of general climate change in the world, for example the Danish Vikings had to quit farming grapes in Greenland (it had been called Vinland), because it got too cold to grow grapes in Greenland. 

A very far out theory proposed by Miskito Erasmo Ordoñes in his Miskito grammar book published together with Scott Wood's book is that the word used by others to call the Miskitos "Waikna" means "Vikings". The colonial Spanish did note in the area of Gracias a Dios, the homeland of the Miskitos as a separate group where chief Miskut finally settled, a people they called Gualas who were the mixture of Indians and shipwrecked Europeans. Maybe this shipwreck was longer ago than they imagined.  The article by Theodore Morde about The City of the Monkey God in Spanish in Honduras included a myth about a blonde Chorotega princess who became the Margarita bird. Although everything Theodore Morde wrote about and published about his trip is suspect, as noted in Preston’s book,  Morde was not the only one reporting there had previously been blonde Indians in the área.

I am intrigued by the possibility that the God Wampai Morde described in this article might be the origin of the name of the Guampu River and the Miskito place name Wampusirpe (little Guampu). So far, Pech and Miskito Friends have not found a meaning for Guampu. The Miskito language has no “ai” sound, so they might have changed it to a “u” sound. La Tribuna published another Ladino White City  myth, that there had been a White City on the Guampu, where in fact many of the larger known ruins are located. These White City Indians captured a Tawahka woman. A Tawahka shaman cursed the town. It began to have repeated bad luck. These White Cities Indians left that town on the Guampu and moved further North.  Stories of Indian towns being abandoned because of Catholic priest’s curses and later bad luck have been reported in El Salvador and in Honduras, so it is a possibility.

The Payas 

 One of the things that has most hindered the identification of Indians in Northern Honduras and the Bay Islands where there seems to have been significant Nahua presence is the way the colonial Spanish identified the Indians.  The problem began right at the beginning. When Christopher Columbus ran into a Mayan merchant from the Bay Islands (His name was Yumbe which means One Path in Mayan, so he is not Chibchan as Doug Preston supposes) on the way to the Trujillo area, he asked about the local Indians. Somehow the Indian understood the question and showed to the West of Trujillo the Indians were called Mayas. To this day they are called Mayas by foreigners, even though they call themselves other things like Chortis, Yokotan, etc.

The Mystery of the Taya Indians,  the Pech Indians, and the Valley of Agalta

The Indians east of Trujillo according to Yumbe were called Payas or Tayas, the manuscript is not clear. What got remembered was Payas. And so all the Indians east of Trujillo to the Río Coco and the border of Nicaragua and in the Bay Islands were reported in Spanish colonial documents are Payas, which is reflected in Linda Newson’s maps in the book The Cost of Conquest.  This was not the case of the English who noted a Coast of the Miskitos in Northeastern Honduras, even before  the famous shipwreck in the 1640’s when African Blacks mixed in with the native population at Cape Gracias a Dios. 

There were in Olancho in the southern part of the Agalta Valley formed by the Sico River (place of small edible snail shells in Nahua) some Indians who were known as Tayas to the Nahua speakers. All of the villages of the Tayas, the Nahua speakers gave the name of Tayaco (place of the Tayas). These passed into Olancho author writings like that of José Sarmiento as the “Tayacones” Indians—the Indians who lived in places called Tayaco. The Province of the Tayacones, as well as Papayeca and Chapagua and all the other Contact period indigenous provinces or small states of Honduras and El Salvador are shown on Wikipedia map of  Central America which accompanies the article of the Historia de El Salvador in Spanish Wikipedia.

The Pech Indians of El Carbon report in their oral history for the period between the founding of the Spanish mission at San Esteban/Tonjagua in 1808 and them  being given the land of  El Carbon by Spanish missionary Manuel Subirana in 1860 that they lived in 5 different places in the southern Agalta valley all called Tayaco. The Pech town that Conzemius visited on the Paulaya River which he called Payal (Place of many Payas in Spanish).  A Pech village on the Sico River was known as Santa Maria Tayaco to the Pech. Neither Paya nor Taya means anything in Pech and the Pech don't know why so many Pech villages were called Tayaco. I don’t know if the Pech and the former Tayacon Indians liked to live in the same kinds of places, and so the harried Pech, trying to escape both the Spanish and the Miskitos, founded villages in places called Tayaco, or if the Nahua speakers of the Agalta and Sico Valleys called the Pech Tayas,and all the Pech villages Tayaco (Place of Taya Indians). When the Olancho Nahua speakers quit speaking Nahua, maybe in the late 1800’s, they might have  switched to calling the Pech villages Payal in Spanish instead of Tayaco in Nahua. 

Or Tayas could have lived in the lower Agalta Valley while the Pech lived near the mouth of the Sico River,but the Tayas might have been captured by the Spanish to work in the goldfields on the Río Guayape in Olancho. In the 1560's the Spanish reported 32,000 "bateas" or wooden gold mining bowls being used on the Guayape River (the Guayape and the Guallambre join to form the Patuca River)  of which only 1,500 were African slaves and very few were Spanish. The depopulation of other areas of Olancho could have been considerable. After these gold fields on the Guayape no longer produced as well, the Spanish continued to make forced labor raids,taking hundreds of Indians as forced labor at a time, for the gold mine at El Corpus, Choluteca. The Miskitos also made colonial era slave raids or raids to require paying tribute to them. There is still a "Desembarcadero" (place to disembark from canoes) in Catacamas, and both Ladino people in Catacamas and the Tawahkas say the Tawahkas continued to reach Catacamas to trade into the 1950's by canoe. 

Where were the Pech living at the time the White City was Occupied?

The Pech myths indicate that at the time of Spanish contact they were living near the Coast near the mouths of Río Tinto (Columbus’s Río de la Posesión, the English’s Black River, in Garifuna La Criba) and maybe on the Rio Plátano (Waraská in Pech). The place of Pech origin is on the Río Platano. The mountain which separates the Platano from the Tinto is called Chok Korpan (Chok.Mountain, Korpan, name of a palm from which the Pech produced salt in Pech) by the Pech and Baldimor by the Miskitos. According to the Pech legends, the mountain was formed by the death of the giant Takaskró (some say he was a sisimite) who had stolen a Pech woman and her husand's brother managed to kill Takaskró with the help of some bats in a cacao grove.

Historians reading the story of Columbus capturing the Mayan merchant from the Bay Islands note that he was used as a translator with the local people along the Coast until he got to Río Tinto where he could not speak to the people. So the current thought is, that was because these Indians at the mouth of the Río Tinto were Pech.  In the stories of the creation of the Pech and the growing up of the Pech hero Patakako, lobsters is one of the foods mentioned, supporting the Pech's claim that they reached to the sea before Miskito expansion cut off their access to the sea. 

Where the Pech hero Patakako disappeared on the Waraská River, but is still watching over the Pech is called "Kao Kamasa" (White House in Pech). This is one of the origins of the White City legend, but not the only one. "Kaha Kamasa" (White Town in Pech, not in Miskito as noted in Doug Preston's book and National Geographic article) is the modern Honduran govenment's designation of three cities found by LIDAR in the White City area of the Río Platano Biosphere Reserve, of which City of the Jaguar is the smallest.  Preston's book notes that thousands of people could have lived in the  19 settlements that make up the City of the Jaguar which includes terraced agriculture. In comparison, as is typical of hunting societies, traditional Pech villages often had under 125 people, so as to not overhunt the area where they lived. Pech living in Culmí before the road was put in, remember the Pech clearing lots of only 100 feet by 100 feet, for their small agricultural plots, where the majority of crops are root crops, like yuca. There is no indication that they ever lived in large cities practicing intensive agriculture.

Río Tinto splits into the Paulaya and Sico Rivers and extends into Olancho. The two rivers are separated by the Sierra de Agalta, and the Pech Indians currently live on both sides of the Sierra de Agalta. The mountain pass to go from the Culmí area of the Pech near the beginning of the White City type sites, to the El Carbon and Agalta valley sites is Malacate Pass over Malacate mountain. Malacates are spindles whirls used to spin cotton in Nahua. The Pech, like most of the other Indians of Northern Honduras, apparantly moved down the river valleys to escape the Spanish on the Coast in the colonial period. 

Culmí comes from the Pech word Kormí, which is a type of tree that grows beside the Aguaquire River. Nahua does not have r’s, and in Honduran Nahua o’s in Nahuatl in Mexico are often changed to u’s, like olli, hule (rubber), and tolli, tule (a water reed used to make sleeping mats called petates). 

Most of the other place names in the Culmí area are not Pech like Aguaquire (now the Ladino village of Zopilote) and Pisijire. It seems in the colonial period, the Spanish made slaving raids into the Culmí area and took away the original Indians who lived there. The Pech, retreating from the Coast down the Sico river, may have gone down the Paulaya River, but more likely over the Malacate Pass, where they found a nice valley, which was the beginning of Vallecito and other Pech villages in Culmí, founded in the colonial period. It takes about 14 hours on foot to reach Vallecito in Culmi from El Carbón above the Agalta Valley, but there were still Pech that made the trip by foot in the 1980’s.

The Pech Indian legends and oral history do not report themselves in the Trujillo area, in the Lower Aguan area, in the area between the Aguan River and the Paulaya River, nor in the Bay Islands area, nor east of the Patuca River, all places where the Spanish reported Payas. Pech place names are not found in those places, while there are Pech names for example Baldimor Mountain in the Río Platano Biosphere (in Pech Chok Korpan and in Nahua Chachaguata or twin mountain, according to Eduard Conzemius.The other twin of that mountain in Nahua is now called Pico Dama (Grandfather) in Miskito).  

The only other place with Pech place names are the rivers in the Sierra de Agalta around El Carbón such as Río Aso Sewa (Yellow Water in Pech) and River Ojo de Agua (The Pech word for river is Azo Wa, which translates into Spanish as ojo de agua or Eye of Water in English). The lack of overlap of the Indians the colonial Spanish called Indians Payas and oral history of the current speakers of Pech seems to show that the Spanish were using the word for Paya for a different  ethnic group than the Pech or generally for the Indians east of Trujillo and some of the place names for that area seem to be in Nahua. 

The situation is less clear for the use of the word "Poyer" by the English. "Poyer Hill" was located to the west of  the mouth of the Río Plantain (now Sierra Paya), while "Poyer Hills" was the English name of the Sierra de Agalta.  These seem to have been mixed areas in the colonial period with Pech in the mountains with Nahua speakers in the Valleys.

 The Pech report in their legends travelling as far south as above Catacamas and above the old town of San Jorge de Olancho near Boquerón for hunting and for collecting trees to make bark cloth. An older Pech word for the Valley of Olancho is "Ulanco" (Nahua for place of a lot rubber).  The Black Celestial Tiger escaping from the mountain of Boquerón was in the Pech's opinion the reason the Spanish colonial town  of San Jorge de Olancho was wiped out by a landslide in the 1600's . Some of the mulattos who escaped this disaster went on to found Olanchito (little Olancho) in the Aguan Valley near Agalteca, Yoro which is how that Olancho related name got there.  

According to a study by Dr. William Davidson, there is a high overlap between where the Spanish report Payas and a pottery known as North Coast Appliqué which is found in the Trujillo area, in the Valle of Agalta, the White City area, and according to Roberto Rivera also from Trujillo going towards La Ceiba. The North Coast Appliqué ceramic pieces Strong shows in the Handbook of South American Indians were often found in streams as offerings, probably to the Sirena (Goddess of Fish and Terrestial Waters). The decoration on this ware is incised punctate, often in the form of s’s and dots, which Honduran archaeologists think represent foam and waves.  This foam and wave motif is also on Fine Orange ware and more common ware from Cholula, Mexico. Incised punctate motifs are also common in the Nicoya Pennisula of Costa Rica where the Nicarao and  Chorotegas ended up. The Pech also made offerings to the Sirena, but they put the drinks of yuca, corn, and cacao in gourd bowls, not ceramic pots.

 The most common ceramic pieces I have seen in Trujillo, the Valley of Agalta, and the White City área are handles or lug (asas) and elongated feet (patas). The feet are usually hollow, sometimes with a clay ball inside so that they would ring if they shook them. Doris Z. Stone felt that these elongated feet vessels,the incised puntate ware, and the large metates was part of a Lower Central American tradition.   According to Honduran archaeologist Emilio Aguilar, the feet are hollow to handle the heat, because they were probably used as incense burners.  

I think the fine Orange ware like Sula Fine Orange and the incised punctate ware often with S's and dots might be local versions of the Fine Orange ware of Central Mexico and might represent Post Classic Nicaroas. What little was known of the Nicarao and Chorotega archaeological sites in Nicaragua in the 1940's seemed to indicate that they adopted many aspects of the pre-existing cultures in the area, although there was expected to be some specific Mexican influences. The fact that most of the archaeological pieces found in the cache in City of the Jaguar by National Geographic include what Doris Z. Stone in her 1940's article in the Handbook of South American Indians considered part of a general Southern Central American cultural pattern, does not seem to  preclude the possibility that the Jaguar head could represent the Nicarao God Esquipul, based on what little is known of Nicarao sites in Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

The Archaeology of the "Paya" Area Does not Match Modern Pech Culture

While the Spanish reported the Indians in the Olancho Valley burning incense and the Indians of the Trujillo area, the Pech Indians do not use any incense other than the natural aroma of burning pine during their ceremonies, which they continued to do until the 1950’s,as Griffin noted in her 2009 book on the Pech Indians," Los Pech de Honduras". So these incense burners with elongated feet would probably not be theirs.  There is an example of one of the typical shorter feet of this monochrome ware  in the White City area in the video Search for Ciudad Blanca on Youtube.

The Pech are also principally yuca (manioc) growing Indians. They did not have gods related to corn growing, although they do have a myth of how they got corn from a hunter they call Seatuska (The father of in Pech,  Zea maíz is the scientific name for corn from a different Indian language)  who travelled to an island of women where they grew corn. They would not have made the many large and small stone metates found in the White City. They did not even adopt eating and making tortillas until the 1950’s when some Ladinos married into the Pech tribe, although they had made nixtamalized tamales (suyajá in Pech) and corn drinks like pozol and corn beer (chichi in Spanish, otiá in Pech) before that. Almost all Pech crafts, including their arrow heads, and their houses were made of perishable materials and would leave very little in the way of ruins.

The Pech were not a heirarchical society, not even having a Pech word for chief. The head of the Pech was a religious authority and shaman known as the Watá. When attacked, the typical Pech strategy was to run away into the forest and hide in caves, instead of go to the massive indigenous forts found in the Aguan, Agalta, and White City area.  The Pech myths mention specifically avoiding valleys because that is where they would be attacked and disappear, like 7 of the original 9 Pech brothers.  

One additional clue that the term Paya was actually being used for the Nahua speakers is a Ladino man in San Pedro Sula said that his grandmother was a “Payita” (little Paya) from Gualaco (currently one of the towns part of the Nahua federation) who married a mulatto.  The Pech of Culmí would sometimes go to the Patuca River east of Culmí, but rarely. The Indians who identified themselves as “Payas” on the Patuca to Theodore Morde and another American author Keenagh in the 1930’s and 1940’s may not have been Pech, but descendants of the builders of the White City. The colonial Spanish also identified "Jicaques de la nación paya" (free Indians of the Paya nation) in the department of El Paraiso where the Guallambre begins before it joins the Guayape to form the Patuca River. 

As Doug Preston notes, most of these former Nahua speaking Indians who have lost their language and religion, are now identified as Ladinos in Honduras. A few Indian towns like Texiguat (Pool of the Woman, named for the Goddess of Terrestial Waters, in Nahua), El Paraíso, and Concepción, Triunfo, Choluteca (from Cholulateca-people from Cholula in Nahua) in Southern Honduras are trying to be recognized again as Indians.  

Concepción is interesting because it has an underground cave that was used as a religious site, which was typical of Central American Nahuas, and the builders of Teotihuacán. In an El Heraldo interview, a representative of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History said that the types of artifacts found in the White City area are also found in Southern Honduras in the department of Choluteca, particularly the large metate legs with the greek key design. An example of one of these is in the video on Youtube, Search for Ciudad Blanca. Doug Preston mentions in his book the possible relationship with other designs on the carvings at the City of the Monkey God to "celestial bands" found at the arqueological ruin of Chichen Itza in Yucatan, in Mexico, a Mayan site still inhabited in the PostClassic period (900-1500 AD) with suspected signficant Toltec influence, and may also have been known Tula or Tulan, the place of a lot of tule wáter redes. The recently discovered ruins at the City of Jaguar in the White City area are tentatively thought to also be from the Post Classic period. 

A Story of the Nahuas of Olancho about Who Built the White City

The Nahuas of Jamasquire say that their ancestors built the White City. Their ancestors used to travel between the Valley of Olancho and the White City area, and in between there was a secret cave with a lagoon inside which was called La Laguna de Mescal (the Lagoon of the Mescal plant, used to make twine and rope). That is where they did the human sacrifices of a Nahua child. The Nahua speaking Pipiles of El Salvador did a human sacrifice of a Pipil child twice a year at the beginning and the end of the rainy season.

The people of  the county of Catacamas, of which Jamasquire and Siguaté are villages, still celebrate the end of the rainy season. Even though it was a mission town for Franciscans, the patron saint of Catacamas for whom they do a fair is Nuestro Señor de las Aguas (Our Lord of the Waters), on December second, the end of hurricane season in the Caribbean.  I don’t know that the Catholic church even has a Saint called our Lord of the Waters. Tohil Plumbate cups with Tlaloc (The Aztec rain god) faces have been found in the Culmi area White City type sites. These and the life size statues of Xipe Totec are considered the hallmarks of Pipil-Toltec Nahua speaker sites in El Salvador.   The Nahuas of Olancho say they were led there by Axil Tapaltzin. Topoltzin or Tapaltzin is the Nahua title of honor, similiar to "Our Lord".  

A Toltec /Tulteca leader Axil is mentioned in the colonial era book "Recopilación Florida" (The Flowered Recopilación) by Spanish colonial historian Fuentes Guzman who starts his book with the stories of Toltec leaders in Central America and then the Spanish arriving to Acalteca (Agalteca), Santa Barbara, now the town of Santa Barbara. He is thought to have had access to a Pipil codex or picture history book, that has since been lost, as well as recopiling oral history from the Maya Quiché and the descendants of Spanish conquistadors. 

Honduran White City On The Route of Aztec Long Distance Trade Routes

If you travel down the Patuca River to the Guallambre, and then to the end of the Guallambre, you are close to where you can pick up the Choluteca River to reach Concepción on the Coast in Choluteca . Near Concepción is the archaeological site at Calpules (from calpulli, an administrative unit based on clans, a neighborhood, in Nahua), Triunfo, Choluteca.  If you go past Azagualpa (the site of a temple of the patron god of the Aztec Pochteca according to Dr. Nutini) on the Guallambre, you can also reach the Pochteca (the merchant class in charge of long distance travel among the Aztecs  in Nahuatl) River which separates Honduras from Nicaragua.

So the White City sites were in a good position to be in touch with other Nicarao (Cholulateca) and Pipil (from pipiltin or pipilli, the leaders in Nahua, maybe referring to them as being the leaders in multiethnic states) Indians in Central America. We know the Post Classic trade route continued down to the Nicoya Pennisula in Costa Rica, because that is where the Aztecs got their purple dye from a mollusk only found there. That would explain why there are green stone axe like goddesses in the Trujillo area and in that part of Costa Rica. The source of the green stone is on the edge of the White City area on the Río Paulaya and there is an archaeological ruin there Tulito (little Tula?) of considerable size and terraced agriculture, like the City of the Jaguar. 

 Hernán Cortés also reported a trade route that went from Veracruz in Mexico, down to Naco in Northwestern Honduras, to the Bay Islands, Trujillo, and then continued down the Caribbean Coast of Central America to Costa Rica and Panama. Along the Miskito Coast, Conzemius reported the Indians frequently found Green Stone axe heads which they called thunderstones, and which they associated with different powers, and with wáter. Gold dust from the White City area was one of the products going down to the goldsmiths in lower Central America, and also probably north to the Mexican gold smiths. Slaves and stone carvings may also have been travelling back and forth on this route to the Caribbean Coast of lower Central America.

The trade route also went North. Tropical birds like green parrots (loras) and scarlet macaws which are native to the Moskitia in general were taken by Aztec Pochtecas to Mexico and then up to the Pueblo Indians in New México.  New Mexico tourquoise made into a mask has been found in an archaeological site in Northwestern Honduras.  Griffin has worked on a whole list of local products in the Honduran White City area that Nahua traders traded with the other Pipiles and with the Aztecs in México. 

The tribute payment of the Mexican town of Xoconosco, the área where the Nicarao and the Chorotega had lived before migrating to Central America,  seems to have particularly been made up of things not available locally, but available in Northeastern Honduras like green stone beads (source at Tulito, an archaeological ruin on the Paulaya River), gold, green feathers, and petate mats full of cacao. The Nahua areas of Honduras often reported growing cacao in the contact era, and at the City of the Jaguar the National Geographic thought they saw some cacao plants. Cacao does grow wild in the Culmí, Río Paulaya area beside the White City area, at altitudes higher than it is normally found, maybe indicative of cultivated cacao gone wild.

 The Mystery of Payaquí (Among Yaquis or Among Nahuas) or Hueyatlato (el Mayor, the Big One in Nahua) and the Toltec King Ce Acatl’s  relationship to the White City.

There might even have been a higher level of state or confederation.  In the Post-Classic period, the Toltec king Ce Acatl Topoltzin Quetzalcoatl  (Our Lord One Tule or Carrizo Reed Snake-Quetzal in Nahua) left México by canoe with some of his followers. He went down the Montagua river to the Maya Chorti area. There among the Maya Chorti in the corner of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras where the old state of Copan had been, he reportedly started a Confederation called Payaquí (Among Yaquis or Among Nahuas) or Hueyatlato (el Mayor, the Big One in Nahua). According to Judith Maxwell, Spanish colonial documents often refer to Nahuas in colonial period as Yaquís.

 Currently Yaquís are a tribe near the US-Mexico border who speak a language related to Central American Nahua and Aztec Nahuatl. They are famous among Americans for the books of Carlos Casteñeda talking to a Yaquí shaman Don Juan. Maybe Nahua and Yaquí had not yet split or maybe some of the bilingual Chichimeca Yaquís also immigrated with the Nahuas to Central America. The relation of Yaquís in Honduras make it more likely that the archaeological site Naco in Arizona might be related to Naco (Place of the Monkey God or son of the sisimite Na) in Northwestern Honduras. Arizona is also a place name in Honduras.  The story of the sisimite continues up into other speakers of Uto-Aztecas languages in the US, including the more northerly Shoshone. Tule, the Nahua word for the reed used to make petate mats, is known as tule in American English (acatl in Nahua) and is the origin of the expression "out in the tullies", meaning far away from civilization. The making of these tule mats continues from the California coast into Washington state. The carrizo flute is also known in these areas. Carrizo is also “acatl” in Nahua. See the Honduran arts, crafts, and toys collection at the Burke Museum online to see a carrizo flute.

From founding Payaquí, the Toltec King Ce Actl is thought to have gone on to found the great Salvadoran Pipil kingdom Cuscatlan. The Spanish Wikipedia article on the Señorío de Cuscatlan and on Ce Acatl Topoltzin Quetzalcoatl are very good. But according to Mexican legends where the Toltec King Ce Acatl died or turned into foam or into a hummingbird, was Huetlapalan (The Ancient Place of Red Earth in Nahua), the city Cortés said was east of Trujillo about 50 leagues away, the capital of a province whose wealth and whose population rivalled that of México. This city which still existed at the time of contact  is one of the origins of the Honduran White City myth.   According to a Honduran Ladino, the White City is where Quetzalcoatl is buried, with a crystal skull on his tomb.

The modern White City myth is a conglomeration of several different Spanish, Pech, and Nahua legends about cities in the White City area of the Río Platanto Biosphere. They may not all apply to the same ruin.  The City of the Jaguar excavated by the National Geographic -IHAH team seems to be part of the general White City culture, but does not appear to be the city the Pech called Kao Kamasa in Pech which is on a different river.  However, it could be one of the cities of the Spanish myths or Nahua myths of the White City. It is likely to have been part of the Pre-Columbian state which the Pech Kao Kamasa city belonged to.  Although the site was tentatively dated to the Post Classic Period, it could have been inhabitted into the contact period and perhaps formed part of the provinces of Taguzgalpa, Huetlapalan, or Payaquí.

When Hernán Cortés was in Trujillo, one of the captains of his rival in Nicaragua, Captain Rojas entered the Valley of Olancho in Honduras from Nicaragua. Yet he said he had to cross through the province of Payaquí (among Nahuas) or Hueyatlato (el mayor, the big one) in order to get there. One theory would be that after being attacked in the Copan Ruinas area (the Post Classic site in El Bosque, Copan Ruinas had up to 100 projectile points per room showing the 100 year stay there had ended violently), the capital of Payaquí moved to somewhere between the Valley of Olancho and Lake Managua (the name of a rain god according the Honduran Lencas).   

However, another possibility exists that Payaquí or Hueyatlato continued up until the time of contact and was a confederation of all mixed Nahua speakers-other Indians provinces at least in Honduras and maybe in much of Central America.   Some evidence that supports this theory is a tradition that the Maya Chorti leader Copan Galel at the time of conquest received tribute from the provinces of Naco, Comayagua, Cerquín, Olancho, and Trujillo, all areas with reports of “mexicanos” (Nahuatl speakers) and Nahua place names, but often now more famous for other ethnic groups that formed the base of the population in Payaquí (Among Nahuas).  So maybe because the Indians of the Trujillo area, the Bay Islands, the Valley of Agalta, The White City area,  and significant part of the Moskitia were part of Payaquí, that is why they were called Payas. 

When Cortés was in Trujillo, the Bay Islander Indians came to Trujillo to see if the Indians there would help them repel an attack by other Spaniards. Olancho Indians also came to Trujillo while Cortés was there asking for help to repel the attack of the Spanish coming from Nicaragua. Later in the 1500's several different times all the Indian provinces which paid tribute to Copan Galel rose up together and tried to throw the Spanish out.  They managed to keep the Spanish out of at least one third of the current country of Honduras. So there does seem to be some historic base for thinking that these areas could have been part of a larger confederation Hueyatlato (el mayor--the big one, the overall one) or Payaqui (among Nahuas). The Spanish translations of Hueyatlato and Payaquí are found in colonial era documents.

While some later historians have doubted the existence of Payaquí at all,  one of the documents which reports Captain Rojas crossing Payaquí to get to the Olancho Valley is an eyewitness account from the very beginning of the Spanish Conquest.  Diego Palacios, the auidor or colonial government oficial who first reported Copan Ruinas, mentions it in that área, but the main reference for Western Honduras is a colonial era book written in Guatemala called Isogue.

The languages mentioned in the Copan Ruinas área and surrounding área in the early colonial period are “Apay” and “Agualilac”. “Apay” is thought to be Maya-Chortí,even though the Word “Apay” has no meaning in modern Chortí. There is considerable controvery about “Aguililac” with Daniel Brinton thinking it was a dialect of Pipil (Nahua) mixed with Maya Chortí. Lyle Campbell was not convinced by this identification,but modern writers about the Maya Chortí área in Spanish seem to find merit with this identification. Both Apay and Aguililac were reported for Western El Salvador, where the Nahua speaking Pipils overran in the Post Classic (900-1500 AD) most of the southern part of the  former Copan state of the Maya-Chortis that existed in the Classic (300-900 AD). Agüalilac was also reported for the Honduran departement of Ocotepeque, located between El Salvador and the town of Copan Ruinas. I have no idea why Douglas Preston thought that the inhabitants of Copan Ruinas in the pre-classic period were Chibchan speakers.  The linguistic family to which the little known Lenca language belonged to is still a totally open question among linguists.

Because Payaquí was both a Nahua and Chorti Maya confederation, that might explain why, according to US archaeologist Chris Begley, there are both Nahua and Maya elements in the the ruins of the White City area. Yet he felt that there was some base culture that was already in the area below those elements determined by the leaders (pipiltin) of the community, such as orientation, gods, altars, building styles,. He felt some local culture had continued at these sites. Given that these were slaving societies, that would not be surprising. When Pech say that they are the guardians of the Patatahua (our ancestors) and so don't go into the White City, it may be they are remembering the Pech who became slaves and eventually died there.  

In the Moskitia there is an oral tradition that although a state of war and enmity often existed among the ethnic groups which lived in the Moskitia, sometimes there were truces during which these groups would trade.  This would match what Cortés was told when he was shown the cloth map of the trade route from Veracruz to Costa Rica along the Caribbean Coast. He was shown how the map showed when the fairs were for travelling merchants, and the places for the  merchants to stay (posadas). The person who showed the map complained that the arrival of the Spanish had interfered with this long term trade  and their routes.

Central American Indian Trade Adjusted to the Spanish Colonial Period

However, there are signs that parts of the trade continued throughout the colonial period. According to an archaeological dig in Tikamaya, Cortés in Northwestern Honduras, the obsidian trade, bringing up obsidian from sources in El Salvador, continued to function throughout the colonial period.  In Danlí, El Paraiso near the Nicaraguan border at the base of the Guallambre river, the Spanish said the contraband from the Coast down the Patuca to the Guallambre was brought by Indians who spoke “la voz Azteca” (the Aztec language, Nahuatl). The Catacamas, Olancho Indians on the Guayape River, which joins the Guallambre to form the Patuca in Eastern Honduras, told William Wells about the Indians at the mouth of the Ulua (water of rubber in Nahua) River in Northwestern Honduras that they spoke “la voz Azteca” (the Aztec language Nahuatl), which they apparently knew because they were in contact with them. Honduras had a significant contraband problem throughout the colonial period, much of it carried on by free Indians in canoes, and sometimes with free mulatto trade partners.

The feather trade in Olancho was still alive when Wells was there in 1855 with Catacamas Indians still wearing feather cloaks like those Cortés and others reported in Moctezuma’s court.  When I worked for the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center I heard the Pueblo Indians were trying to figure out a way to get tropical macaw and parrot feathers they used for their ceremonies without resorting to illegally importing the birds which came in, as many other things do, across our Mexican Southwestern US border. Given the presence of 80% of South American drugs in the Honduran Moskitia heading on their way to the US, which forms a significant part of Doug Preston’s narrative in his Lost City of the Monkey God book, it seems the Honduran White City’s trade route remains active today. 

Part of this trade route was kept alive by large regional fairs which Central Americans would travel great distances on foot to get to. One of these were the fairs associated with the Black Christ of Esquipulas, celebrated the 15th of Janaury, in Esquipulas, Guatemala who was also visited for Holy Week. The others were held in San Miguel, El Salvador. Wells reported meeting people from Olancho in the mid-1850’s walking to the regional fair in San Miguel, El Salvador with a fighting cock to sell.  The Lencas of Guajiquiro would walk to Esquipulas to buy a special wedding dress for thier bride, still a difficult trip even today.  Living Lencas and Maya Chortis remember having travelled on foot or on mule to Esquipulas or to San Miguel or both during their life times specificially at the time of the fair. Travelling merchants are still a part of smaller Honduran patrón saint’s fairs.

These fairs in Honduras are also usually the scene of traditional dances. Two of these dances—El Guancasco between Mejicapa and Gracias, Lempira among the Lenca and Nahua descendants, and La Huasteca (La Huasteca is The Coastal Region of Mexico where the Malinche was from which had been being fought over bbetween Mayas and Nahuas or a person from there) among the Maya Chortí include the character of Hernán Cortés’s Nahuatl translator Doña Marina or La Malinche in Honduras, even though she visited neither región while in Honduras.  

Some people in Honduras also consider that the crying spirit known as La Llorona, who became pregnant by a Spanish person, becomes mad with grief, kills her children, and then goes to other people’s houses looking for her children, is actually the spirit of La Malinche, Cortés’s lover and then he left her to marry a woman from Spain. One of the White City área ruins is called La Llorona. See the Spanish Wikipedia article on La Llorona, part of Pipil and Aztec Mythology, for other interpretations of this myth.  In Honduras this is not a fairy tale of long ago.I have met Ladinos who personally have had encounters with La Llorona and a Salvadoran recommended the remedy of Rosemary, holy wáter,and other plants which finally got La Llorona to leave him and his children alone.

The Mejicapa Indians were Mexican Indians from the Spanish conquistadors’ encomiendas in Mexico who had served the Spanish conquistadors during the conquest of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, and then were settled permanantly in Central America next to important Spanish settlements. Besides Mejicapa in Lempira, Honduras, next to the early capital of the Audencia de los Confines in Central America in Gracias, there was also a Mejicapa, next to Comayagua, the colonial capital of the province of Honduras. This Mejicapa was destroyed down to the ground in the wars related to the Central American Federation falling apart and the prison on Comayagua is now there. In Usulatán, El Salvador, a third Mejicapa was also founded.  

These Indians came to serve as translators for the Spanish and some think that part of the extensive Nahua influence in Honduran Spanish is due to their influence as translators.  However, it is likely that Nahua was the lingua franca of trade in Honduras, and perhaps other parts of Central America, even before the Spanish conquest and the arrival of these Náhuatl speakers.