Nahua Indians in NE Honduras, the Ciudad Blanca, and Ce Acatl's Place of Death Tlalapalan

The Connections of the Nahua Indians of Northeastern Honduras, the Ciudad Blanca, and Ce Acalt’s Place of Death Tlalapalan (The Place of Red Earth in Nahua)

By Wendy Griffin (2013)

The area between the Rio Platano and the Rio Paulaya is thought to be where the Ciudad Blanca is, and this is about the right distance for Hernan Cortes’s description of Huehuetlapalan a few days journey to the east from Trujillo. According to various written colonial sources from the 16^th century noted in the Wikipedia article on Ce Acalt, Ce Acalt Topolitzin Quetzalcoatl, died in Tlalapalan which is a Nahua word. Huehue means great or the important one  in Nahua like  Hernan Cortes was called the Huehue of Doña Marina his Nahuatl interpreter, similar to the phrase el mero mero in Honduran Spanish, the really important one.  A Ladino guide in the Rio Platano Biosphere also said that Quetzalcoatl was buried in the Ciudad Blanca with a crystal skull on his tomb.  This is definitely not taught in Honduran schools, so this is likely to be a story handed down from generation to generation. Most of the former Nahua speakers in Honduras have become Christian and speak Spanish and so are called Ladinos.

According to a leader of the Nahua Indians of Jamasquire, Olancho outside of Catacamas, there used to be a trail that connected the Ciudad Blanca to the Catacamas area  and that the Ciudad Blanca was built by the ancestors of the Nahua Indians of Olancho. Part way along this path, there was a secret place in a cave called la Laguna de Mescal (the Lagoon of Mescal,  a plant used to make rope by Mesoamerican Indians, but not the Pech or other rainforest Indians).   Next to the water in the Lagoon, they would do human sacrifice. I said that they sacrificed the Pech, based on Pech legends, but he said No, they sacrificed a Nahua Indian. In fact in reviewing the Wikipedia articles on Señorio de Cuscatlalan and mitología pipil, in fact it was common among Pipil Nahua speakers to sacrifice a young (before age 12) Pipil child beside water on the 25 of April in a secret ceremony for the beginning of the rainy season and on 2 November at the end of rainy season. The practice of a sacrifice beside water on 25 April was also the only royal ceremony among the Aztecs of Tenochitlan, (now Mexico City) in the Valley of Mexico. Ceremonies that included sacrifice beside water in caves were also noted in the Temple to the Goddess of the Terrestial Waters (?Texiguat/La Sirena in Honduras)  in Teotihuacan, Mexico, in the cave of Quimistan (originally Quiatlan-the place of the Rain God Quia of the Nicaroas), Santa Barbara, and among the Chortis of Quetzaltepeque, Chiquimula, Guatemala (both Quetzaltepeque-mountain of the Quetzal and Chiquimula, the place of the songbird with a beautiful song that lives in the tropical cloud forest up in the mountains, known in Spanish as Jilquero), by a mountain pool in Esquipulas in Guatemala, which borders on the Chorti area and by the Lencas in the Lake Yojoa/Taulabe (originally taulepa-the house of the jaguar, or mountain lion) area.   This habit of sacrificing a Nahua child may be the reason the Rah mother sacrificed the child of a mixed Rah-Miskito origin, according to the well known legend in the Mosquitia.

There were other ceremonies when the Pipils sacrificed men they took in battle, which could have included  the Pech in the Ciudad Blanca or Trujillo areas, and then had long dances  but that was not the case for this rain ceremony.  Hernan Cortes left orders in the Trujillo area to his cousin who remained to be lieutenant to stop the sacrifices, which leads us to believe that they did happen in the Trujillo area. In the 1800’s, the Indians of the Agalta Valley were referring to their gods as “duendes”, a word in Honduran Spanish usually associated with the cipotío (little one from Xipe Small in Nahua) the son of a moon goddess (La llorona-the crying one) with the morning star, thereby cheating on her husband the sun, and she is both cursed to wander the land as a wandering spirit (Ciguanaba or Siguanaba—spirit of a woman in Nahua)  and her son remains forever a child ten years old, el cipotío among the Lencas, the Chortis of Honduras and the Pipils of El Salvador and “duende” among Ladinos in Honduras. However, “duende” refers to a whole host of nature gods in Honduras among the Garifunas, the Miskitos, the Bay Islanders, the Pech, and sometimes Ladinos. There is a rock of the “duende” in Trujillo which is up on a hill and flat on top, so that it would in fact be adequate as an altar for human sacrifice.  The Honduran anthropologist Lazaro Flores believes the myths of the cipotío in Honduras is related to the Aztec and Nahua speaker god of young corn, Xipe Totec. Lifesize statues of him have been found in the Agalta Valley near San Esteban and in the Ciudad Blanca area. The myth of the Siguanaba still has that Nahua name in some areas like Comayagua, but in other areas of Honduras she is known as La Sucia, because she is usually seen washing clothes in a stream at night. This means the men who see her have been out all night, and thus seeing the Sucia is supposed to help men stay home at night.  Both Ladinos and Garifunas have reported seeing or being rocked in a hammock by La Sucia (the Dirty one) in the Guadelupe and Betulia areas.

 In the Ciudad blanca area there is an important ruin known as La Llorona and there is also a pool (poza) of the Sirena (? Texiguat or Siguaté/ Goddess of Terrestial waters) up on a hill in Betulia, a community  on the beach at the mouth of a river to the west of Trujillo and west of  the country seat of Santa Fe. Numerous archeological pieces in the Rufino Galan museum are also from Betulia, and people find pieces of North Coast Appliqué on both sides of the river there, usually handles and feet of three legged incense burners. The Pech when they did religious ceremonies did not burn incense and did not make offerings to the Gods in clay containers, but rather in guacales, the gourd bowls.  

The pool of the Sirena west of Trujillo and the site of the la Llorona  in Culmi, Olancho also beside water may be related with 3 lifesize feminine green statues reported by Hernan Cortes in the Trujillo area, in the Olancho and on a hill  in the Bay Islands. Among the Aztecs, the goddess of the Terresterial Waters (who among the builders of Teotihuacan was also responsible for fish, and as the sister of the Raingod Tlaloc helps signal when it is time to bring the rain and was shown in the form of a world tree going from under the ground, through the earth and into the sky according to a photo in David Dominici’s book The Aztecs), was called Princess Green or She who wears the Green Skirt, so she could be the goddess of these green statues (possibly the same as Siguaté (a Nahua town in Olancho near Catacamas) or Texiguat (an Indian town in El Paraiso Department, also probably descendants of Nahuas, which does a guancasco with Liure. Traditiona says one is Chorotega and the other is Lenca. ) and la Sirena in Honduras). Among the Pipils of El Salvador, Quetzalcoatl had a wife and she and Quetzalcoatl were the most important gods of the Pipils.  Maybe instead of his wife or in addition to his wife, also important was his lover (la otra) the moon goddess (la llorona) who is the mother of the young corn (cipótio). The cipotío  in Honduras eats ashes, such as among the Maya Chorti, which is perhaps like the god of young corn (Xipe Totec) being nourished by ashes when the farmer sets fire to his field to clear it. Life size clay statues of Xipe Totec and clay cups with a face of Tlaloc, often the Tojil Plumbate style of glaze, were considered hallmarks of Pipil-Tolteca archaeological sites by the author of Los Pipil-Toltecas de Guatemala and are found in the San Esteban area of the Valley of Agalta, Olancho and in the Ciudad Blanca area in Culmi, Olancho.

 In Teotihuacan, the goddess of Terrestial Waters was shown as a world tree, which in modern times is usually shown as a cross. The Day of the Cross 3 may is an important day of celebration among the Maya Chorti who do a chilateo and a ceremony of the Great Cross in the mountains, and among the Lencas, because it is usually the first day of rain in Western Honduras. Ceremonies with crosses are also done in caves by the Maya chorti according to Honduran ethnohistorian Eliseo  Fajardo, and the Maya Chorti say there is a tunnel under the Acropolis of copan Ruinas that goes to a cave by the Copan River.

Green Stone Statues and Axes, Gold, Rubber, Jaguar skin and the invasion of Honduras by Aztec Emperor Moctezuma I

 While the 3 large statues of the green stone goddess were destroyed by the Spanish, many small green stone goddesses carved in the form of a lady with an axe bottom are found in the Trujillo area, in the Culmi area near the Ciudad Blanca, and in the Nicaroa and Chorotega areas in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. One source of green stone that was used was from the archeological site called Tulito on the Rio Paulaya, which was quite large, and was apparently quite successful in its day. This green stone was also ground very smooth  for axe heads. These green stone axe heads are known as thunder stones all over Honduras. My Pech friend Doña Juana said her grandmother went out after lightening hit a tree and indeed found a thunder stone axe head at the base of the tree which she said proved that is how they come about. The green stone axe heads are in the San Pedro Sula Museum and have also been reported along the Patuca River, reported by MOPAWI director Osvaldo Munguia.

According to Fray Torquemada, who collected historical traditions of the Nicarao and the Chorotegas in the colonial period in his books Monarquia Indiana,  one of the reasons Moctezuma I attacked Honduras was to get it to pay tribute in green stones, as well as green feathers, gold, resins like rubber and liquidambar, etc.  The Indians of Agalteca, Yoro told Tulane anthropology student Roberto Rivera that Moctezuma came to Honduras to attack it, which I doubt they read in a colonial era book, but rather it was a story handed down to them from their ancestors. This was an earlier Aztec ruler, before Moctezuma II whom Hernan Cortes met in Tenochitlan.

The Pochtecas, the Aztec merchant class, were suspected to be spies for the Aztec government, and when they arrived in Guatemala, the Cakchiquels and the Quiches did not receive them, but the Pipils on the Guatemalan Pacific Coast in Escuintla did receive them which angered the Mayas, and was one of the arguments to help Pedro Alvarado attack Acatan (the place of tule, or the place of the people from Tulan or the place of the followers of Ce Acalt.).  In Gotz Von Houwald, Mayagna, Jaime Incer the translator put the path of the Pochteca through the Matagalpa section of Nicaragua, instead of through the areas of the Chorotegas and the Nicaraos who I think would be more likely to want to buy things produced in Mexico than the Matagalpas.  The Pochteca’s trading partners in Costa Rica were definitely  in the Chorotega and Nicarao area where the purple dye from seashells that only exist there were. So the Aztec Pochteca were definitely active in trading in Central America and specifically in the Honduran Nicaragua border area before the Spanish came. There are Nahua words in Sumu languages reports Gotz von Houwald. The Spanish of the Pech uses more Nahua words than does the Spanish of the Maya Chorti, but the Pech do not use these Nahua words in Pech for these things. Old place names in Nahua like Ulanco for Olancho  or other languages like Puskira for the town now called Las Marias in Spanish and Canasta in Pech along the Rio Platano in the Mosqutia were used by Doña Juana’s grandmother when she was young, but Doña Juana’s family has replaced some of them like Kuk Uyah (la tierra grande) for Olancho. Ulanco may have refered specifically to the valley of Olancho.  The mountains above Puskira had Nahua names in the time of Conzemius, but are now called by English names like Baltimore. The Pech name for the whole Rio Platano, Waraská, now only refers to a small tributary. The place of Kao Kamasa (the white house in Pech) is translated as Casa Blanca on the 1933 Jesus Aguilar Paz map. The Pech myth of Kao Kamasa and the death  and burial place of the Pech hero Patakako  (Our person who does things) may not refer to the same ruin as the Ladino myth of Ciudad Blanca which was first reported with that name in 1927 by Eduard Conzemius, or the Nahua legend of Tlalapalan as the death place of Ce Acatl. The Pech word “patatahua” which seems to refer to the enemies of the Pech  is translated as Pata Our and Tahua our ancestors. The subtitle of Lazaro Flores’s book of Pech myths was as “The Guardians of the Patatahua”, but when Theodore Morde went to the Ciudad Blanca area in 1939, the non-Nahua speaking Indians he talked to knew that there were Indians buried in these ruins and did not want to disturb them, for problems of ghosts and evil spirits associated with these places.

Although the Pipil calendar in El Salvador celebrated the end of the rainy season on 2 November, the day of the dead among ladino Honduras, and the next day after the Maya chortis celebrate tzikin all night long, in Eastern Honduras the rain is affected by hurricane season which does not end until 1 December. In spite of having been founded by Franciscans, and having a Franciscan convent in Catacamas, the saint in whose honor the Indians of Catacamas did a Guancasco with the Pech of Culmi was “Our Lord of the Waters” in early December after the end of Hurricane season. I don’t think the Catholic church even has a saint called the “Nuestro Señor de los Aguas” (Our Lord of the Waters). Another big archaeological site in the Ciudad Blanca area, noted in Chris Stewart’s book Jungleland is Las Crucitas (the little crosses).  In addition to its name linking it to ceremonies with crosses, and its location beside water, there are caves up above it, and white stone roads going from the center of town which has house and temple mounds and a wall to the river. These type of white stones to the river were also reported in Santiago Pimienta, Cortes where the Cerro Palenque archaeological site is  south of San Pedro Sula and would have been helpful in the rainy season.

Besides marking the beginning of planting season (24-25 April and 3 May), and the end of rainy season (2 November and in Dec. after hurricane season  in December “lord of the waters” or the Immaculate Conception), also important were the longest day of the year, usually celebrated together with St. John the Baptist Day (23 June), and beginning of the calendar in January celebrated as the fair of Dulce Nombre de jesus de los Payas  in Culmi, Olancho, and the beginning of the sacred 240 day calendar which is 2 February celebrated as the Day of the Virgin of Candelaria (2 Feb) and as an all night vigil for the the Day of the Virgin of Suyapa  (3 Feb) in Honduras. At the end of 12 day cycle to read the weather known as “cabañuelas” from 1 to 12 January,  is the celebration of the Black Christ of Esquipulas 14 to 15 January. As Esquipul was the patron saint of diviners, the decision to celebrate that day with huge pilgrimages, either to the main shrine in Guatemala or  15 smaller shrines in Honduras, including El Carbon Olancho and Gualala, Santa Barbara, may have originally influenced the decision of people from towns associated with Nahua speakers like Catacamas and San Esteban (Tonjagua) to participate in Guancascos with villages celebrating those dates. Games or dances or ceremonies associated with the sacrifice of ducks or turkeys continued to  be part of these celebrations until recently.

One aspect of the houses of the hilltop forts like Tenampua or Cerro Palenque is that houses have a kind of lime or stucco floor, which is not present in Classic period houses anywhere in Honduras. In San Martin in Trujillo when the Garifuna try to put in a smooth dirt floor they can not, because the stucco floor of a pre-Columbian building  can not be dug through. So there were similar kinds of Indians living in the Trujillo, Ulua Valley and Comayagua valley in the Post Classic period (900-1500 AD). People find obsidian teeth in the Trujillo area, including I have found one on the beach.  These teeth were set in mahoghany swords on the top side and on the bottom side in a row. This type of Aztec sword club is known as “macana” in Honduran colonial documents and are mentioned a lot in relation to Olancho. In Honduran Spanish the words macanear (to hit hard repeatedly) and macanazo (a bad hurt or beating, such as that received from a macana) still are common words related to this Nahua word. Macanas were also known in Guatemala and El Salvador.  Some obsidian cores have been found in the Trujillo area and both the macana teeth and the core can be seen in the Rufino Galan Museum. 

A few people in the Santa Fe county in the 2001 census identified themselves as Pech and Tolupan, probably being told that these were the modern terms for Paya and Jicaques, but possibly these people were descendants of Mesoamerican Payas and Jicaques who have remained hidden in the mountains of Santa Fe until now. In the silver mining of town of Sabana Grande south of Tegucigalpa, Honduran anthropologist was surprised that a woman there said she was Paya. Sabana Grande was partially settled by the Indians who ran away from Comayagüela (little Comayagua) after Independence in Honduras. In 1988 census which asked do you speak any of these languages, people who said they spoke Jicaque, showed up in all 18 departments of Honduras, totally not related to the distribution of Tolupanes, but which could reflect either the distribution of the descendants of previously unconquered Indians or the former Nahua speakers. Over 1,000 Nahua based words have been discovered in Honduras Spanish reported to Spanish linguist Antasio Herranz. Many other Honduran languages like Lenca or Matagalpa, no where near that number of words are known. 

  Comayagua would also look like it is in the Toquegua language, and Anny Chapman argues it is not a Lenca word. There was an actual village called Toquegua along the Ulua river at the time of  1537 Encomeindas of San Pedro Sula after the conquest of Naco, Santa Barbara and the defeated of Cocimba at Cerro Palenque in Santiago Pimienta, Cortes. The atrocities of Pedro Alvarado the Conquistador who led the Spanish to defeat Northwestern Honduras were enough to have the Spanish government start a legal case against him known as a “residencia” and after his death, his goods were confiscated by the crown as punishment for his evil deeds against the Honduran and Guatemalan Indians, the same with the Spanish conquistador who was the encomiendero of Quimistan, Santa Barbara.

An early governor in Trujillo attempted to sell as slaves all the Indians of Naco, Santa Barbara which had estimated at 10,000 Indians to the Spanish in Santo Domingo and Cuba, and while he did not manage to sell all of them, the losses were in the thousands to Indian slavery, Honduras’s biggest export until the 1540 discovery of gold mines.  That early governor and his freinds took almost 2,000 Indian slaves with him from Trujillo when they left.  Trujillo/lower Aguan area was at the time of Conquest was reported as more thickly populated than Central Mexico. At the end of Indian slavery in 1545, the Spanish government requested a report on how many  Honduran Indian slaves were still left alive in Santo Domingo and Cuba. Out of many boatloads of slaves, thousands of them, only 11 were left alive in 1545—and the Spanish government did not return them home to Honduras.

Until 1645 when Trujillo was abandoned by the Spanish, the Indians under Spanish control were usually under 645 people total.  Surprisingly the Indians of Agalteca Yoro in the mid-Aguan Valley a few kilometers from Olanchito were one of the few Indian villages that remained under Spanish control and paid tribute until Trujillo was abandoned. Usually Tolupan Indians ran away from the Spanish immediately and lived hunting and fishing in the mountains and eating wild plantains, such as guineos sambos that grew wild and thick along the rivers.

The fact that Agalteca remained under Spanish control and paid tribute, adds to the idea that it may have originally been a Mesoamerican Indian village and not Tolupan. Mesoamerican Indians who depend on corn and beans that is harvested only twice a year, are less likely to run away and wonder in the mountains because what would they eat?  Also Mesoamerican Indians were more likely to be used to paying tribute in the form of  taxes or forced labor. The legal word for tribute collector in Honduran colonial documents is calpisque, the Nahua word for tax or tribute collector. The fact that Antonio Vallejo puts Hernan Cortes’s 1536 letter describing Aztec  tribute collection and forced labor management, directly before the Pedro Alvarado’s 1537 dividing up Western Honduras into encomienda or villages required to pay force labor and tribute to the Spanish encomendero, in his 1911 book on Honduran laws that should guide land surveyors shows that he felt that the Spanish in fact copied much of the Aztec (and in Central America Pipil-Toltec) models of managing labor, administration of villages, and collecting tribute to set up the encomienda system.

One of Agalteca, Yoro’s products which it sent to Spain included cochinella, the red dye made of insects in the nopal cactus.   This is much more likely to be a product produced by Nahua speakers who knew how to use cochinella to dye cotton cloth, than of the Tolupan Indians who were still wearing bark cloth clothes into the 1910’s in Yoro before the banana companies became active in Yoro.

In 1645 when the Spanish abandoned Trujillo until 1789 they took with them all the Indians in the Aguan valley and Trujillo area and the Bay Islands area that they could grab. They sent them to live in the Santo Tomas area of Guatemala to join the other Toquegua Indians there to guard the fort and the coast where most died or ran away due to it being an unhealthy localtion due to malaria and yellow fever and dengue, all diseases brought by the Spanish.  Many of the Indians  of Agalteca, Yoro ran away and so did the Indians of Utila when the Spanish came to try to grab them and send them forceably to Santo Tomas. Utila’s original name was also in Nahua. 

The Spanish said in the 1700’s that the Indians of Utila and Agalteca had dispersed due to pirate attacks, but it was not true. They were hiding from the Spanish, the same reason they abandoned the coast, so the Spanish would not grab them and try to force them to work for them far away from their homes. The Spanish continued raids grabbing Indians throughout the colonial period, and into the 1860’s, and sending them far away, including 795 Payas  which they grabbed out of the mountains of Olancho at one time in the 1600’s that  they sent en masse to the El Corpus Mine in Choluteca on the Coast, very, very hot to work.  Not surprisingly soon thereafter there was a strike and riot (motin) in the El Corpus mine severe enough to require clemency and pardon from the King of Spain himself which was granted.

Other indications that the Acaltecas were Mesoamerican Indians is that the mulattos of Olanchito said that the Indians of Agalteca, Yoro played a long hollowed out log with an H carved in the top, a musical instrument known in Honduras as Toncontin (like the name of Tegucigalpa’s airport and the name of a type of tree), or tunkul. This drum was known by the Aztecs and by the Mayas of Guatemalas such as the Quiche. It was also known to the Tawahka Indians who called it “drum” (la misma palabra que tambor en ingles). The Miskito drum called “drum” is different from the Tawahka instrument of that name. No one in Honduras currently makes this kind of drum.

There is a large Mesoamerican style ruin on the road between Olanchito and Saba that might be the pre-Columbian ruin of Agalteca. It is now a plantain farm controlled by Agrarian Reform cooperative.  Mesoamerican ruins have also been reported outside of la Ceiba, on undeveloped land owned by the Azcona family relatives of the late Honduran president Azcona Hoyo , who say they want to turn it into a camp ground, but IHAH wants to open it to the public as an example of the pre-Columbian heritage of the North Coast. Corn grinding stones, nicely finished Mesoamerican style metates, as opposed to the river rocks used by the Tolupan Indians, have been found while  doing construction in Tela, such as at the Marbella Resort in Triumfo de la Cruz.  Metates and a typical ceramic of the Trujillo, Agalta Valley and Ciudad Blanca area “North Coast Applique” is also found between  La Ceiba and Trujillo by farmers planting plantains or walking in the Cuero y Salado park. Hernan Cortes reported a trade route along the coast from Veracruz Mexico along the coast of Yucatan, past Belize, past Nito on the Rio Dulce in Guatemala, past Naco in northwestern Honduras, on to the Bay islands and Trujillo and along the Coast to the Desaguero, or the mouth of the Rio San Juan in Nicaragua and into Costa Rica and Panama.

The Garifunas who used to travel between Trujillo and Belize by canoe report that it would take three weeks round trip.  Obviously you need a place to stay, called “posadas” in Honduran Spanish on the beach while you out doing long distance travel by canoe along the coast.  When Cortes asked about the canoe trip from Veracruz to Honduras (because he wanted to get to the gold fields of Olancho which he had heard about before he came), the Indians showed him a cloth with a map marking all the “posadas” or places to stop and told him when and where all the fairs were to sell and buy, but they complained the arrival of the Spanish had messed up the fair system of buying and selling.  The big fairs in formerly Pipil-Toltec towns like Esquipulas, Guatemala and the fair of San Miguel in El Salvador continued to draw Central Americans who wanted to buy or sell until the early 20^th century and the smaller fairs of  the Black Christ of Esquilas in 15 different places in Honduras continued to sites of pilgrimage (romeria) and trade until the the 1960’s in Honduras.  So it would make sense that there were Mesoamerican sites along the North Coast of Honduras to provide “posadas” as people traveled by canoes.

There are reports of canoes and bows and arrows in Atlantida and Yoro throughout the colonial period in Honduras, and the Tolupan Indians have words for them, but do not make them now or them. One possibility is that having run away into the mountains and use principally blowpipes to hunt, they lost the ability to use these crafts, but another possibility is that it was another ethnic group who had the canoes, such as Nahua speaking Indians, and that these Indians have now ladinized and that part of the “jicaques” of Yoro, the previously unconquered and unchristian Indians of Yoro, some were Mesoamericans like perhaps Nahua speakers. This idea is supported by the fact that many of the gods’ names collected by Anne Chapman among the Tolupan Indians were Nahua god names such as “Teot” (god in Nahua) was the chief god  of the Tolupanes and “Toman” for the next level of gods is also a God’s name among the Nicaraos of Nicaragua.   

This idea is also supported by the archaeology including ballcourts in Western Yoro, and temple mounds, and the god of wind statute that is in the San Pedro Sula Museum but found in Yoro. There were many place in Yoro and Atlantida on the far side of the Ulua River that had nahua place names when pedro Alvarado gave out encomeindas, including in the mountains. Van Haagen, a Heye Foundation researcher for the Museum of the American Indian, reported Chorotega like ruins in the mountains of Yoro near the current Jicaque villages in the 1940’s.      Archeaologist Chris Begley has also reported finding a ballcourt in Olancho. All the ruins known as Agalteca in Honduras had ballcourts, apparently in Postclassic and non-Mayan contexts.

Padre Manuel Subirana also said the Indians in his missions in Yoro in the 1860’s also spoke the same language as the Indians of Ilamatepeque, Santa Barbara and that he got interpreters from Ilamatepeque to translate in the missions. Many languages have been reported for Ilamatepeque, which is on the Ulua river. The name is clearly Nahua, and associated with the Nicaraos who migrated from Cholula. Most of the nearby area spoke Care, thought to be a subdialect of  the Lenca language. For example, in the town of Tencoa, they spoke Care, but in Malchaloa they spoke the Mexican language (Nahua or nahuatl). However,, the Indians of Ilamatepeque said that they did not understand priests who spoke Care, that they spoke another language called Jucap. Jucap was also spoken in Gualala, Santa Barbara (Guala as in Gualaco, Olancho and Gualala, Santa Barbara means like the beginning of a river)  and the old name of Nueva Celilac was Julcap.   Nahua was used as a trade language in Central America, and was often the language of communication between the Spanish and the Indians. The word for translator in colonial Honduras was often “nahuatlato” a person who speaks Nahua and another language. Either the people of Ilamatepeque were bilingual or the Jicaques of Yoro were bilingual or both were.