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The documents

Document

Flower and song

In xóchitl in cuícatl — Nahuatl poetry

What it covers

What the Nahuatl phrase in xóchitl in cuícatl named, where the surviving poems were collected, and how they were composed and sung.

The full entry is in Spanish, and here is why

What you have read above is this project's own summary of flower and song. The full entry — the part that rests on the sixteenth-century sources — has not been translated, and that is a decision rather than an omission.

We chose not to touch the primary text. Those sections quote Sahagún, Durán and the codices in their own words, often in sixteenth-century Castilian. A quotation carried across stops being a quotation: it loses the register, the ambiguity and the exact wording someone might want to check against a facsimile.

In Spanish the entry carries:

Read the full entry in the original Spanish → Nahuatl names and terms are identical in both versions.

How to cite this page

Alma Mexica, «Flower and song», The documents. Revised 2026-09-17. https://almamexica.org/en/document/flor-y-canto/