Child of the Flower-Song People

A girl stared at the stars sprinkling the hammock of sky. Like many other nights she listened to the whisperings of the ancient Aztecs in the wind.

She heard their xochicuicatl, their flower-song. She listened as the elders repeated tales their grandfathers had told. Tales their grandfathers’ grandfathers had told: how sacred streams and mountains protect them, how the Nahua lost their land to Cortés, the conqueror, and to the Spaniards who followed him. She was Luz Jiménez, child of the flower-song people, the powerful Aztecs, who called themselves Nahua-* who lost their land, but who did not disappear.

In Milpa Alta, a village slung between two mountains, Luz’s father harvested maguey and corn. She watched closely as her mother taught her how to grind corn in a metate, how to twist yarn with her toes, how to weave on a loom. Luz was curious about everything which mushrooms were good to eat and which would make you sick, which popote could be brooms, which herbs medicine.

She hummed as she worked, words glowing and swirling in her head in the Aztec language, Nahuatl.

This was life for the Nahua, and Luz soaked it all in. Evenings by the fire, Luz listened eagerly to stories about the Mountain Boy, Tepozton, the son of a god how he never missed when he shot quail and turkey for the people to eat how he hung bells on a steeple no one could reach, and how he outwitted a man-eating giant! And how Malintzin, betrayer of the Aztecs, was swept to the top of a mountain, where she cries in the wind at night, pulling her long black hair.

Luz wove all these old stories into her heart. Through them she tasted bitter sorrow how the Nahua suffered and sweet joy how her people survived. Luz was a child of the flower-song people.

Mornings on the way to market, Luz and her mother passed a teacher’s house, students bent over reading. Luz carried an empty place inside. She yearned to know what was written on the papers. A secret longing began to bud in her heart. The secret fluttered lightly like wings in her chest. She would study hard. She would learn what the squiggles meant. She would learn to read!

But Luz, like the other native people, was a forgotten shadow to those who governed. There was no public school for them.

Then suddenly, the government offered free schooling no, required it-to turn the native children into modern ones, like the descendants of the Spanish who ruled the country, who thought only their ways were right and proper.

Mornings, Luz learned from Spanish schoolbooks. Afternoons, she studied dressmaking, drawing, and baking bread, not the corn tortillas of her people. Luz excelled and won many prizes, and her voice sparkled as she told Nahua stories in secret to other children. If the students spoke Nahuatl instead of Spanish, the teachers punished them. They had to give up their Nahua clothes, wear modern ones like in the cities. The budding flower in Luz’s heart might have withered. But it did not.

These new rules were changing the Nahua, but Luz was different. She longed to blossom, carrying the beautiful traditions of her people with her. Luz found strength in remembering how old Teuhtli, not wanting to let his daughter go, turned her and the young man she loved into mountains Iztaccihuatl, Sleeping Lady, and Popocatépetl, Smoking Mountain. How the mountains protected the people and brought precious rain. Luz was a child of the flower-song people. She wanted to protect the Nahua ways.

Her body tingling, Luz spilled her secret to very few, “I want to be a teacher when I grow up.” Her secret yearning was beginning to bloom, imagining teaching future generations.

But at thirteen, her dreams whirled away in a storm…The Mexican Revolution came to Milpa Alta. Soldiers stole their food.

They burned her precious home and school to rubble. Her father, like nearly all of the men, was shot and killed. Luz and her mother and sisters fled to Mexico City at night, stars lighting the way. Others followed. Luz said, “Not a soul was left…

In the large, unfamiliar city clogged with too many sounds, smells, and people, the widows and girls struggled to make a living. They sold homemade atole, tamales, or handicrafts.

But Luz, with growing strength, opened up to something much different for a Nahua.

She found a job posing for artists drawn to her strong features her sturdy body, her large dark eyes. As she posed, she taught them the gifts she had learned from her beginnings grinding corn in a metate, twisting yarn with her toes, weaving on a loom.

Luz was a natural model and teacher. She understood what the artists needed without being told.

Artists until then had painted the Spanish heritage of Mexico the light-skinned Europeans and their religious beliefs but these artists of the twentieth century honored the native people who had been colonized by the Spanish, stripped of their language and culture, shamed and mistreated. Luz represented her people well through her indigenous features, her skills, and being true to her roots.

Luz became the most well-known model in all of Mexico for artists like Diego Rivera, Fernando Leal, Tina Modotti, Jean Charlot, and others. Painters painted. Photographers clicked. Sculptors carved.

The world recognized the beauty and strength of the native people after five hundred years of being in shadows. Through Luz, the world came to know “the spirit of Mexico.”