W. Michael Mathes

To Save a City: The Desague of Mexico-Huehuetoca, 1607

The Mexica people, nomads forced southward by the bellicose Chichimecas of the north in the early fourteenth century, received revelation from their principal deity, Huitzilopochtli, which would terminate their wanderings. Appearing in dreams to the priest Cuauhtloquetzqui, Huitzilopochtli stated that on the spot where the heart of his slain nephew, Copil, was thrown, there would grow a great nopal cactus where an eagle would make his nest and dry his wings in the morning sun. This site he further stated would be named Tenochtitlan, place of the nopal, and there the people were to build a great city from which they would become the masters of the surrounding regions. The announcement of this revelation was made by Cuauhtloquetzqui, and, locating the great nopal on an island in the center of the Lake of Texcoco, a temple to Huitzilopochtli was constructed on the site in the year 1325.

Peregrinations of the Baja California Mission Registers

Unique sources of historical, demographic, toponymic, and linguistic information, the mission registers (baptisms, matrimonial inquiries, marriages, burials, and census) of Baja California have been used in varying degrees to good effect by Carl Sauer, Peveril Meigs, Sherburne Cook, Homer Aschmann, and Pablo L. Martinez, among others. What is, alas, not so unique, but true of many parochial archives in Mexico, is the fact that until quite recently they were often left exposed to the elements, rodents, insects, and looters. Gerhard attempted to make an inventory of the known surviving registers in 1952-1953, when he found some of them totally unguarded and uncared-for. This work was followed by Woodrow Borah in the 1970s, and since 1971 Mathes has brought this calendar upto-date, and has obtained or personally produced microfilm of the entire corpus, including certain folios which have since disappeared. Here we shall summarize the tortuous history of the dispersal of these documents.

The Mythological Geography of California: Origins, Development, Confirmation and Disappearance

Heir to Greek and Roman culture, the revelations of Holy Scripture and the great commentaries upon it written by Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and lesser theologians and philosophers of the Middle Ages, the cultured European of the fifteenth century was content that the corpus of his knowledge was complete, and that within it was all that was necessary for a full understanding of the universe. Nevertheless, this satisfaction was greatly upset by the explorations of Christopher Columbus and his followers during the final decade of the century. The European discovery of extensive lands populated with theretofore unknown peoples, with a flora and fauna totally distinct from that of Europe, was, in all senses, a New World. In that this New World had not been incorporated into the extensive and well-defined knowledge of Western civilization, it was, therefore, open to any and all concepts conceivable to the imagination; everything was possible, even the very improbable.