Aztec or Mexica

It is not that one of them is wrong

You will often be told that «Aztec» is a mistake and that the correct word is «Mexica». The truth is more interesting: both words are correct, and they name different moments in the life of the same people.

Aztec is, strictly speaking, the demonym of the inhabitants of Aztlán, the place they left. Mexica is the name they took afterwards, already on the road.

The change is painted

Plate IV of the Codex Boturini shows the scene, and the phrase survives in Nahuatl:

«In axcan aocmo amotoca yn amazteca ye ammexica» — «From now on you are no longer to call yourselves Aztec, but Mexica».

Torquemada tells it at greater length, and adds that along with the new name they were marked on the face and the ears, and given a bow, arrows and a net. Alvarado Tezozómoc gives his own version of the same order: «You shall no longer be called Aztecs, you are mexitin».

Why change a name

Whatever weight one gives the episode, the gesture is coherent: changing the name goes with the act of leaving a place for good. It is the necessary break with what is being left behind.

Whoever leaves Aztlán stops being of Aztlán. What arrived at the island and founded Tenochtitlan was no longer what had set out.

And a fourth account that denies all of it

Cristóbal del Castillo does not describe a change of name: he describes two different peoples. In his telling, the Mexica were the fishermen of the Aztecs, who despised them, and Huitzilopochtli led them out of Aztlán in flight from their former masters.

There is no people renaming itself there: there is one escaping another. The two versions cannot both stand, and this site does not choose between them: it publishes both and says who tells each.

Which word this site uses

Mexica for what happens from Tenochtitlan onward, which is most of what is told here, and Aztec for the departure from Aztlán and wherever the sources use it.

In English «Aztec» dominates by a wide margin, and the dance community in the United States says Danza Azteca. That is not a concession: given the distinction above, calling the count that came out of Aztlán the Aztec calendar is exactly as accurate as calling the one kept in Tenochtitlan the Mexica calendar.