24.5 tons, out of which has been carved a disk with an 11’5” diameter. The disc comprises a series of concentric circles containing an unidentifiable face in the middle surrounded by images of human hearts, glyphs representing previous suns, or worlds, and signs for the twenty days of the Aztec ritual calendar beginning with Cipactli (Alligator) and ending with Xochitl (Flower).1 Around the outer edge of the Sun Stone are two xihcoatls (fire serpents), tails meeting at top, faces confronting each other at bottom (figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1. Piedra del Sol (Sun Stone), Museo Nacional de Antropología. Photo by El Comandante.
These images have long absorbed researchers, though in the years immediately following its rediscovery scholars primarily debated how the Sun Stone was used and for whom it was created. The past century of scholarship, as Khristaan Villela, Mary Ellen Miller, and Matthew Robb explain, has dwelt mostly on iconography and ideology, with scholars parsing the meaning of the stone’s many glyphs and learning to sit with the impossibility of knowing for certain who or what is at the stone’s center. According to Villela, Miller, and Robb, this shift of attention from use to ideology is due to the assumed transparency of Mesoamerican calendars. Ross Hassig, however, in Time, History, and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico, argues that Aztec temporality is both more and less complicated than scholars have previously thought.
The Aztecs, like all Mesoamerican cultures, maintained two calendars: a 260-day ritual calendar (the tonalpohualli) and a 365-day solar one (the xihuitl). The Sun Stone contains glyphs associated with the former, though the two calendars were imbricated. Hassig describes the Aztec calendar as “composed of multiple, interlocking cycles of days, building into still larger cycles, until the culmination of 52 years, which itself repeated endlessly” (159). The fifty-two-year cycle was called a xiuhmolpilli and could be bound into the huehuetiliztli, or double calendar round, forming, according to Hassig, the temporal building block of Aztec historiography, which had a definite cyclical cast (8). Hassig, however, warns against granting cyclicity too much importance, arguing that there is ample evidence that the Aztecs operated with linear historical understanding and manipulated time for political gain.
The Sun Stone thus embodies a beautiful set of contradictions. It gestures toward a calendar of whose use and significance no one can be entirely sure, bearing images nobody fully understands, projecting competing notions of time. Its materiality, its impenetrability, and its politicization of time correlate in this chapter to my reading of corporeality in the work of Dagoberto Gilb, a late twentieth/early twenty-first-century US author. Across the whole of his oeuvre Gilb, as I will argue, uses the human body to narrate a durational sense of time. As the Sun Stone gestures toward the opposition of indigenous to colonial time, Gilb’s temporal elasticity forces readers away from narrative time toward the time of the body that refuses to be known. The corporeal time Gilb enacts with his writing is a lingering, such as I describe in the introduction to this book, that is on par with the erratic cyclicity of the Sun Stone.
By drawing this parallel, I do not mean to invoke a mystic indigeneity that stands in contrast to the European temporality informing colonial politics. Time was just as political, and frankly just as colonial, for the Aztecs as it was for the Spanish. To call Aztec time cyclical is to call attention to the fact that, unlike the Mayan long-count calendar, the Aztec calendar lingers in the xiuhmolpilli. It repeats instead of progressing. To call that cyclicity erratic is to call attention to the ample documentary and monumental evidence suggesting that Aztecs understood themselves as political actors not beholden to the ideology of their calendar. Time was flexible for them, in other words, and not nearly as fatalistic as it may initially appear.
There are many things scholars do not understand about Aztec timekeeping, such as when the Aztec day began, or how the Aztecs understood hours, for example. Because the Aztecs appear to have used no clocks, sundials, or other timekeeping devices, their time, observes Hassig, “was task focused, inherently contextual, and thus necessarily elastic” (36). He grants, moreover, that many archival sources pertaining to the calendar contradict each other (35). A certain amount of temporal pliability is to be expected, then, in studies of any Mesoamerican culture, but the Aztecs appear to have directly and purposefully manipulated time.
The archives describe, as one would expect, the moving of important events such as military or trading expeditions to more providential days, but birthdays and other fixed occurrences were often changed as well, suggesting, as Hassig argues, that ordinary Aztecs saw the divinatory powers of the calendar as avoidable (36). Aztec leaders went beyond changing their relationship to the calendar; they manipulated time itself by, as Hassig describes, occasionally double counting days (38) and moving the New Fire ceremony, which marked the end of one xiuhmolpilli and the beginning of another (39). The Sun Stone itself stands as monumental evidence of one of the Aztecs’ most significant temporal changes: the stone indicates the existence of a fifth sun, or world, in contradistinction to the four suns accepted beyond the Valley of Mexico, a change that Hassig suggests was made to both assert Aztec political authority and explain the fact that the world did not end when the tonalpohualli suggested it should have (65). These deliberate alterations suggest that the calendar controlled neither Aztec belief nor action, and, moreover, that they understood time as a political tool.
Calendars are inherently political. As Hassig argues, “political concerns create the calendar, manipulate it, and use it for practical purposes” (71). It is a commonplace to set Aztec cycles against the Mayan long-count, but the Aztecs bound their calendar rounds and enumerated events in chronicles that indicate linear notions of time. This suggests, as Hassig asserts, that the calendar did not necessarily condition Aztec belief so much as it served political purposes in helping to regulate tributes across the empire (123). Hassig argues further that contemporary notions of Aztec time are a legacy of Spanish friars who, concerned about the ways Aztec ritual overlapped with Catholic, placed outsized emphasis on its cyclicity at the expense of its linearity. “Modern theoretical biases have reinforced this inheritance from the colonial perspective,” Hassig concludes (162).
Despite the colonial emphasis on Aztec cyclicity, I maintain that the Sun Stone presents a resistant lingering by rendering time as a fungible site of political resistance and aggression. The Aztecs engaged in both: they used their calendar to control their outlying tributaries, and indigenous timekeeping persisted well into the colonial period, with many early records indicating European and native dates (Hassig 140). The Sun Stone paves my way into Gilb as an impenetrable object that defamiliarizes and denaturalizes time. The Sun Stone makes the visceral, colonial politics of time fleetingly visible, much like Pancho Villa’s death mask in one of Gilb’s early short stories.
In his story “The Death Mask of Pancho Villa” (1993), an unnamed narrator is roused from bed in the middle of the night by his friend Gabe. The narrator, who has not seen Gabe for a while, is surprised by Gabe’s visit and wonders at the mysterious stranger Gabe has with him. Román Ortíz, Gabe explains, possesses one of three existing death masks of Pancho Villa, whose memorabilia the narrator collects.2 Ortíz plans to take the mask to Moscow, where the journalist John Reed, who wrote Insurgent Mexico (1914) about his four months traveling with Villa, is buried. Gabe wants the narrator to come see the mask, but the narrator, who must work the next day, declines. Before leaving, Gabe and Ortíz drink some beers and smoke a joint with the narrator, who, at the end of the story, is left wondering why Gabe really came to see him and why he, the narrator, refused to play along.
Like much of Gilb’s fiction, “The Death Mask of Pancho Villa” is short on plot; it has no clear conflict and no resolution, circulating instead around questions concerning the relationship between the human body and historical narrative. The painfully self-conscious narrator wonders about his vulnerable, aging body in relation to Villa’s mask and the history it symbolizes, while the story itself posits the corporeal trace of the mask against the textual trace of Reed’s history. “Death Mask” asks us
