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FoolInTheDesert t1_j63f1xu wrote

Reply to comment by offu in Dozens of pre-Hispanic Zapotec tombs found in San Pedro Nexicho in Mexico by MeatballDom

A lot of that is modern politics in the USA. The Aztecs are used as a totem by political orgs or groups with an agenda to try and unify a diverse group of Spanish speaking immigrants under a common fake ancestry to unify them and use them as a power base. I literally took public school classes where 'Mexican American Studies' teachers were using books that claimed Arizona was the ancestral home of the Aztecs, and if you are Mexican or Chicano the Aztecs are your ancestors, so you didn't really cross the border the border crossed you.

The Aztecs have been fetishized and turned into a totem that is used to organize people who immigrated from south of the border in the USA.

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offu t1_j63fewr wrote

The Aztec homeland may have been in Arizona. Although current consensus it was still northern Mexico, but they did come from the north near the border.

That is why the Hopi of Arizona speak a language similar to the Nahuatl of the Aztec empire. link

“Authorities on the history of the language group have usually placed the Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland in the border region between the United States and Mexico, namely the upland regions of Arizona and New Mexico and the adjacent areas of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, roughly corresponding to the Sonoran Desert and the western part of the Chihuahuan Desert. It would have been spoken by Mesolithic foragers in Aridoamerica, about 5,000 years ago.”

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FoolInTheDesert t1_j63g5k6 wrote

The language is not similar, it's just in the same tree. There is a common linguistic ancestor that they all share but that goes back THOUSANDS of years. Imagine a Spaniard claiming to be pure Roman because of the Latin influence on Spanish and just ignoring the rest of their history? Same thing except add a few thousand years! Additionally most archeologist in the field think that the Aztecs were a group of mercenaries that probably took their language from the tribe they married into or were hired into, took their religion and culture from and after 100 years or so left or were kicked out and then went on to form their own city-state and the rest is history. Point being, the language of the Aztecs is not necessarily the language of their own ancestors and even if it were, it's an ancestor that was not Aztec! It's like saying I am from Africa because all humans are from Africa. Or that all Americans are obviously from England because they speak English. It's silly. The Aztecs emerged from a dominant culture that they borrowed their language and religion from.

Edit: To sum it up: There is ZERO evidence of an Aztec 'homeland' in Arizona. Period. It takes blind faith to believe a story like this and it's insulting to the indigenous peoples whom we do have thousands and thousands of years of archeological evidence for having inhabited these areas in Northern Mexico and Arizona. They share common linguistic ancestors that spread throughout an incredible large geographic area but these people are not and never were Aztec. Stop the madness.

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