Poet, Mystic, Warrior, Visionary: Reimagining the Life and Art of an Aztec Ruler Lost in Myth

The only Aztec warrior, king, and poet we know by name, Nezahualcóyotl (1402–1472), emblematic Nahuatl philosopher and jurist, a combination of King David’s daring and King Solomon’s wisdom, who died exactly fifty years before Hernán Cortés’ violent taking of the imperial city of Tenochtitlan, might be said to be a Rorschach test.

We have at our disposal a range of historical assessments of him from Spanish chroniclers, some of whom were of mestizo ancestry, from Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, author of Codex Ixtlilxóchitl (1580–1584), and Hernando Alvarado de Tezozomoc, author of Crónica Mexicana (1598), to the authors of Romances de los señores de la Nueva España, a sixteenth-century collection of Nahuatl songs compiled by Juan Bautista Pomar, as well as Diego Durán, Toribio de Benavente “Motolinía,” Juan de Torquemada, Diego Muñoz Camargo, Bernardino de Sahagún, and others.

The composite picture that emerges is of a visionary ruler, religious reformer, poet, mystic, and urban planner of extraordinary reach. Yet all these accounts are based on hearsay: in none is Nezahualcóyotl’s own voice available, since neither originals from his own hand nor any accounts from his contemporaries survive. In other words, he is almost entirely fictional.

Nezahualcóyotl’s Texcoco—spelled Tetzcoco in Nahuatl—was a city-state northeast of the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlán. It was founded in the twelfth century on the shores of Lake Texcoco, the largest of the five lakes in the Valley of Mexico. To this day, Texcoco is often described as the Athens of the New World.

Nezahualcóyotl’s four-decade-plus reign, from 1429 to his death, is the equivalent of its “age of enlightenment.” The chroniclers and missionaries I mentioned describe him as a proto-monotheist, a steadfast opponent of human sacrifice, and a champion of education, morality, and critical thought.

Given his path, some even perceive him as a variation of Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh in Egypt whose monotheistic Atenism preceded the Abrahamic religion of the Israelites. And, in his melancholia, some look at him as a type of Hamlet, Shakespeare’s “Prince of Denmark,” who is defined by self-doubt. Either way, Nezahualcóyotl is an enigma.

All of this, of course, has only contributed to the powerful mythological figure that is Nezahualcóyotl in modern Mexico. There is an entire city-state, Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, adjacent to the east side of the nation’s capital, named after him. His likeness is ubiquitous in statues, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other paraphernalia.

Curiously, unlike other pre-Hispanic icons (Malintzin, Cuitláhuac, Cuauhtémoc, et al.), he wasn’t fully Mexica, whom contemporary Mexicans claim as their progenitors. Nezahualcóyotl’s name at birth was Acolmiztli. The ancestry of his father, Ixtlilxóchitl Ome Tochtli, is traced to the Acolhua of Texcoco; in contrast, his mother, Matlalcihuatzin, was the sister of Chimalpopoca, king of Tenochtitlan, the largest and most dominant city-state in the Valley of Mexico and the cradle of Aztec civilization.

Nezahualcóyotl’s odyssey is extraordinary. After witnessing the assassination of his father by the Tepanec, who were led by Tezozomoc, he was forced from Texcoco into exile in Huexotzinco, at which time he adopted the name Nezahualcóyotl, meaning “hungry coyote.” He invested his energy in becoming educated and building allegiances with various monarchs. He returned to Texcoco in 1422 and eventually reclaimed his father’s throne with the help of the Huexotzincans.

In his quest, he created a broad coalition of city-states in order to defeat the Tepanec. He helped dismantle the Tepanec kingdom by fostering what came to be known as the Triple Alliance, made of three powers: Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan. His partner in Tenochtitlan was King Motecuhzoma the Elder, a relative of the Aztec emperor who would later face Cortés.

Did Nezahualcóyotl actually promote policies against polytheism during his regime? Was he anti-slavery? The Acolhua, the people of Texcoco, were known to enslave some of their captives, as well as to eat them: like the Aztecs, they were cannibalistic.

Is it true that Nezahualcóyotl established a rigid penal system? Did he rape Azcalxóchitzin, the wife of one of his soldiers, and then send that soldier to war in order to have him killed?

What was his attitude toward queerness, what for some indigenous communities has come to be known as “two-spirit?” Is it true, as Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo reports observing under Hernán Cortés, that some young indigenous males went about in female clothes? Was Nezahualcóyotl ambivalent about these practices?

Might he really have condemned religious rituals connected with human sacrifice? Was his interest in the Nahuatl language authentic? Or are all these facets just strategic “readings” by the newly arrived Spaniards, who were desperate to justify their massive colonial reconfiguration of Tenochtitlan and its surroundings by finding an Aztec ancestor whose beliefs appeared to support their own goals and practices?

Even Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl and Hernando Alvarado de Tezozomoc, who were descendants of crucial Aztec figures and thus might have tried to be somewhat more objective, seem manipulative in their depictions of Nezahualcóyotl.

Nezahualcóyotl’s songs appear to have been written not by him and perhaps not even by assigned members of his court. They manifested themselves as oral tradition, after which they were transcribed. Authorship, therefore, is complicated. In his book Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World (1992), Aztec scholar Miguel León-Portilla argues in favor of a meticulous procedure to identify Nezahualcóyotl’s poetry. First, he says, one needs to establish “the person to whom the song is attributed”—in this case, Nezahualcóyotl. Then,

one has to find in other independent testimonies reliable information about his or her existence. Related to this is the possibility of adducing testimonies asserting the fame of the same individual as a composer of songs. The third procedure is a search for eventual independent renditions of one or more of the songs attributed to the same person.

Yet this method doesn’t prove that Nezahualcóyotl was a poet himself; it just suggests a connection.

Be that as it may, the songs of Nezahualcóyotl’s that have survived are—as with the Bible, Homer, and other oral traditions—a collective endeavor. They raise questions about the mystery of life, engage in dialogue with divine beings, ponder the importance of power, and celebrate the cyclical rhythm of nature.

The centrality of Nezahualcóyotl’s poetry in Nahuatl culture cannot be overstated. In Codex Ixtlilxóchitl, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl writes (in Jongsoo Lee’s translation):

In the songs that the king Nezahualcóyotl composed, he clearly said some sentences, in the way of prophecies, which have been fulfilled and seen in our times. These songs are entitled Xompancuícatl, which means “song of spring” and they were sung at the feasts and banquets of the premiere of their large palaces. One song begins like this: Tlacxoconcaquican hani Nezahualcoyotzin, etc., which, translated to our vernacular Spanish according to their own and true sense, means: “listen to what the king Nezahualcoyotzin says in his lamentations on the calamities and persecutions that his kingdom and territories will suffer.”

These are indeed lamentations. With a rich well of biographical information, Nezahualcóyotl’s poems are ardent expressions of grief and anguish, some more aesthetically complex than others. They are reminiscent of the biblical moaning of such prophets as Jeremiah and Isaiah.

The Texcocan king positions himself as a religious guide, admonishing his people to remain truthful to themselves, not to deviate from the righteous path, to prepare for natural disasters, to be equipped—physically and psychologically—for war, and to learn from mistakes. He sees himself as a prophet capable of uplifting his kingdom in times of trouble. And surely the catastrophes that befell the Aztecs during his reign are minimal compared to what awaited them.

But perhaps it is exactly these complexities—Tlatoani Nezahualcóyotl’s persona (in Nahuatl, tlatoani means “king”)—that cast such a spell on scholars, and they are certainly what makes him appealing to me. When I was growing up in the Mexico of the 1960s (in my childhood, I spent time in Texcoco), Nezahualcóyotl was seen as an antidote to European colonialism, since apparently the poet-king foresaw the collapse of the Aztec empire, articulating it to the Texcocan people.

The twenty-two retellings contained in this volume are based on the Nahuatl songs credited to Nezahualcóyotl and featured in Cantares Mexicanos, a sixteenth-century manuscript collection containing ninety-one compositions, which was previously translated from Nahuatl into English by John Bierhorst (1985). For my retellings, I also sought renditions of Nezahualcóyotl’s poetry by Samuel G. Brinton, Ángel María Garibay Kintana, and León-Portilla.

My discovery of Nahuatl started with Garibay’s Llave del náhuatl, which led me to his Historia de la literatura náhuatl. I briefly met León-Portilla in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in the mid-1980s—he inspired me to delve into Nahuatl civilization. It goes without saying that my own Nezahualcóyotl is no less imaginary than—and, hopefully, as imaginative as—those early iterations.

In “The Place of Knowledge,” Nezahualcóyotl recounts his own perilous pilgrimage as a warrior, a ruler, and a dreamer. “Salutations to Motecuhzoma the Elder” is an acknowledgment of his debt to the Aztec emperor as the latter’s death neared in 1469. Motecuhzoma the Elder was famous for his leadership in times of natural disasters—frosts, droughts, swarms of locusts.

He instigated the Flower War (or “Xochiyaoyotl” in Nahuatl)—fought periodically between the Triple Alliance and antagonistic tribes such as the Mixtec, Ahuilizapan, Cuetlachtlan, and Cosamaloapan—in large part to increase human sacrifices, which he believed would placate the angry gods. He is seen as a hero-god by the Pueblo people in the southwestern United States.

Nezahualcóyotl, the myth, has become an essential component in the construction of modern Mexican identity, which has little to do with Nahuatl language and culture or with the people who speak and practice them. The Nahua—the indigenous people of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica—have been excluded from the project, the identity, and the ideology of the Mexican nation since its inception.

But there are certain details of Nezahualcóyotl’s life that we do know to be true. Nezahualcóyotl aspired to protect the Nahuatl language, as is clear in “3,702 Words.” He understood water to be an expression of the contradictions in life. He was involved in the theft of Azcalxóchitzin, the wife of poet Cuacuauhtzin. Like King David’s summoning of Bathsheba, Nezahualcóyotl’s affair brought him shame and ultimate condemnation from his own Council of Wise Men.

In “Lord of the With and the By,” he offered his theological vision of divinity. His poem “Xochiyaoyotl” is an apology for war in the tradition of Sun Tzu, the Chinese strategist and philosopher of the Eastern Zhou period. And in “Journey to the Underworld,” Nezahualcóyotl readied his people for his demise as he contemplated his passage through Mictlan, the Aztec netherworld.

For me, the word retelling is synonymous with recreation. With few exceptions, Nezahualcóyotl speaks directly to the people of Texcoco, frequently using the present tense and referring to himself in the third person.

To achieve this, I use a chorus-like voice that repeats lines meant to be attributed to the people as a collective. When pertinent, I juxtapose classical and modern Nahuatl. The use of recognizably Spanish terms in strategic places is deliberate, reversing the polarity of cultural appropriation.

It may interest the modern reader to know that a freshwater fish of the Poeciliidae family, called in Latin Xiphophorus nezahualcóyotl, swims the northwestern side of the Pánuco River basin. An emblem of self-reliance, it is said to bring catastrophe to those seeking to catch it.

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Lamentations of Nezahualcóyotl by Ilan Stavans is available via Restless Books.