ATDTDA (33) - p. 922-4 - Aztlan

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Just when Frank's inspired by Ewball to get back on the trail of justice-seeking, Wren turns up to divert him again.  He's caught between Stray-West-violence-justice and Wren-East-intellectualism-warmth.   The Traverse boys seem to struggle between these two poles.  For now, after a slight cat-fight with Stray, Wren wins.

Wren's been working at the site of ancient ruins at Casas Grandes:

Some pix of the site:

https://www.desertusa.com/mag00/aug/stories/paquime.html

She tells Frank et al that she's been "studying the mysterious ruins thought to have been built by refugees fleeing from the mythical homeland of Aztlan up north."

There's apparently no consensus of where Aztlan was, and whether the Anasazi civilization was connected to it.  For anyone who wants to dig this deep, here's an article that gives evidence for the view that Aztlan was an actual, not mythic homeland.

http://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/1-CompleteSet/MES-84-Aztlan.pdf

In the 1960s-70s, the Chicano rights movement politicized Aztlan, to make the point that Mexicans were not immigrants, but original inhabitants.

An article about  Aztlan as a cultural phenomenon:

 http://www.bluecorncomics.com/aztlan.htm

"For many Mexican Americans, this ethnic-genesis myth centers on Aztlan, the ancestral homeland of the great Aztec empire that ruled central Mexico before the Spanish conquest of 1519. Invoked by the Aztecs to justify their territorial claims, seized on by gold-hungry conquistadors as a road map to rumored riches, and embraced centuries later by the fledgling Chicano movement as proof of its people's right to be in the United States, Aztlan has worn many masks. Like an underground hot spring, its influence has coursed through Southwestern culture on both sides of the border for more than a millennium."

Then there's this approximation of Aztlan, which had Lou Dobbs frothing at the mouth:

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/264-an-absolut-mexico/

Thanks to Pynchon-wiki for this:
tetas de muñeca: doll-tits.
pinga de titere: puppet-pecker.

Laura