Tulane University

The New Orleans Hispanic Heritage Foundation and the Mexican Cultural Institute in New Orleans will be hosting a presentation titled A Brief History of the Aztecs by Tulane University Ph.D. student and archaeologist Diego Matadamas Gomora on January 12, 2019.

Diego Matadamas Gomora is a Ph.D. student at Tulane University. He is interested in the art and ritual life of the Aztecs. He earned his bachelor’s degree in archaeology at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico City.

The Aztecs are one of the most famous pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico. They founded the city of Tenochtitlan in AD 1325 on a small island in the middle of a lake and became the most powerful empire in Mesoamerica. They left a large corpus of archaeological remains that show the development of their society. For their part, the European priests and conquerors who arrived in the city in AD 1519 were surprised by the beauty and complexity of the Aztec religion. For this reason they wrote numerous chronicles and with the natives produced valuable pictorial manuscripts.

This talk will explore this fascinating society to see the evolution of the Aztecs from their origins as hunter-gatherers until the creation of the great empire that dominated a vast territory. We will see that archaeology becomes the primary discipline to discover the traces left by the Aztecs and to prove that the power, political control, rituals, and richness were sometimes much more amazing than the Europeans described.

In 2018 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico established the Mexican Cultural Institute in New Orleans. The primary objective of the Mexican Cultural Institute is to promote the image of Mexico by supporting cultural expressions in its broadest and fullest sense, including multidisciplinary forms like visual arts, music, performing arts, film, literature and gastronomy. The mission of the Cultural Institutes is to be protagonists of the cultural scene in their different host cities.