Hand Spinning and Cotton in the Aztec Empire, as Revealed by the Codex Mendoza

 

By

Susan Marie Strawn

 

Growing and hand spinning cotton provided one road to survival for commoners in the Aztec Empire. The Codex Mendoza, one of a handful of Aztec books spared during the Spanish conquest of Mexico, records the daily lives of the Aztec people in exquisite detail. Commissioned by a Spanish ruler in the 1540s, the Codex Mendoza was written with pictorial symbols by Aztec scribes. Spanish priests appended Latin and Spanish translations on the original seventy-two leaves. Oxford University’s Bodleian Library holds the Codex Mendoza, and in 1992 the University of California at Los Angeles printed a facsimile edition and translated Spanish captions into English. While other scholars have concentrated on Aztec costume, my search of the facsimile specific to textile production revealed the dramatic story of hand spinning and cotton. Aztec nobility, whose rank entitled them to wear cotton clothing, lived in the Mexico City region, too high for cotton cultivation. The nobility conquered outlying commoners, who lived at elevations low enough to grow cotton. Commoners paid staggering volumes of cotton handspun as tribute to their conquerors. Women spun the cotton, and the Codex Mendoza records explicit instructions for raising little girls to become frenetic spinners who would continue to pay cotton handspun garments as tribute to Aztec nobility. For these conquered people, hand spinning and cotton could spell survival. The colorful history of the Codex Mendoza itself includes pirates, French geographers, and the destruction of the first facsimile edition during the London Blitz of World War II.

 

Susan Strawn is a second-year graduate student in doctoral studies at Iowa State University. Her program emphasizes historic and ethnographic textiles, with special interests in textile artisans, handcrafted textiles, and fair trade organizations. Before returning to graduate school, she was the staff artist for Interweave Press where she illustrated textiles, textile techniques, and herbs for Interweave books and Piecework, Handwoven, Spin-Off, Interweave Knits, and The Herb Companion magazines. She has written articles about handcrafted textiles for Piecework, Spin-Off, and Interweave Knits.