Apoala

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A great tree rises from the bank of a river in a green highland valley, and from its trunk the lords and ladies of the earth come out into the world one at a time. This is not a figure of speech about a people’s beginning. In the painted book the Ñuu Savi kept of themselves it is the literal source of nobility: to be a lord of the Mixteca was to be able to trace the body back to this tree, on this bank, in this valley. The valley is called by two names at once, and the doubling is the first thing to understand about it. In the language of the Nuu Savi, the People of the Rain, it is Yuta Tnoho — the river the lords came from, the river of the lineages. In the Nahuatl that came south with the Aztec tribute-empire and stayed on the maps, it is Apoala, a name usually read as “water that carries off” or “water that destroys.” Today, on an INEGI map of the state of Oaxaca, it is a municipal seat of some eight hundred people: Santiago Apoala, in the Nochixtlán District of the Mixteca Alta, where the river still runs, the cave is still there, and the great waterfall still falls.

The valley and the book

Apoala sits in a limestone bowl in the Oaxacan highlands, ringed by cliffs, at about 1,970 meters — roughly 6,460 feet — above the sea. The municipality of Santiago Apoala covers a little under fifty-eight square kilometers; the 2005 census counted about 815 residents, most of them Mixtec farmers of the maize-and-wheat terraces on the valley floor. Its geographic coordinates fall near 17°39′ north, 97°08′ west, in the folded country north of Nochixtlán and a long mountain drive north of the city of Oaxaca. The river that gives the valley its Mixtec name, the Yutatnoho, runs clear over the rock and drops, at the valley’s edge, over two escarpments: the Cascada de Apoala and, below the town, the fall the people call Cola de Serpiente — the Serpent’s Tail — each more than fifty meters high, feeding turquoise pools among the springs. There is a cave. There is a mountaintop above. A river, a cave, a waterfall, a mountain, and a tree: the ordinary furniture of a beautiful place, and, read another way, the whole apparatus of a genesis.

That second reading is not a modern imposition on the landscape. It is written down, from within, in the peoples’ own record. The keystone document is a pre-conquest screenfold — an accordion of gessoed deerskin painted on both faces — that European libraries cataloged for four centuries under the name of a foreign city: the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I, the “Vienna Codex,” dated on stylistic grounds to the fourteenth century and held today at the Austrian National Library, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, in Vienna. Fifty-two pages, some thirteen and a half meters unfolded, it is one of the deepest indigenous documentary records surviving from the Americas. And it is, in large part, a book about this valley. On its opening pages the Mixtec scribe lays out the founding of the world at Yuta Tnoho, so that the scholars Maarten Jansen and Aurora Pérez Jiménez have argued the manuscript should carry the name of its own subject: the Codex Yuta Tnoho, the book of Apoala.

A page of the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I (Codex Yuta Tnoho), the pre-conquest Mixtec screenfold whose opening pages set the founding of the world at Apoala. Unknown Ñuu Savi scribe; photographic reproduction, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Reading a codex is not the same as reading a caption, and this matters for everything that follows. A Mixtec painted page is a score of names, dates in the sacred count, places drawn as glyphs, and figures in ordered relation — a thing performed aloud by someone who knew the story, not a sentence that reads itself off the skin. Much of what is said about the Apoala pages is therefore interpretation, and honest scholarship marks it as such. But the identification of the place is about as secure as codex-reading gets. The cluster of signs that opens the manuscript — a band of Heaven, a river shown as a stream held in a hand offering feathers, a cave, a waterfall, and a tree from which human figures are born — is read by the specialists, in studies such as Christopher Pool and Barry Kidder’s page-by-page commentary on the codex, as the toponymic portrait of this exact valley, the place the Nuu Savi still walk to. The book names where it begins, and where it begins is Apoala. The Vienna manuscript is not alone in this. Another of the great Mixtec screenfolds, the Codex Zouche-Nuttall — painted before the conquest and now in London — sets out on one of its pages a compact schematic map of the same valley, its topography rendered as glyphs: the river, the cave read as a serpent’s deep mouth, the fall of water, and the branching tree of birth. Two independent painted books, made by two hands in the same tradition, agree on the same valley as the place the lineages start.

The valley is attested a second way, and a third. The second is the colonial Dominican record, which reached the same tradition from the outside and a long lifetime later. Fray Antonio de los Reyes, in the Arte en lengua mixteca he published at Teposcolula in 1593, set down that the great houses of the Mixteca held their lords to have descended from trees at Yuta Tnoho; Fray Francisco de Burgoa, writing in the 1670s, preserved a version of the same origin tradition. These are late reports, filtered through missionary ears and missionary purposes, of a living memory that the codex holds from within — useful precisely as a cross-check on the painted book, and to be read with the friars’ interests kept in view. The third attestation is the plainest of all, and the one neither codex nor chronicle can offer. Apoala is still there. The Mixtec are still there. The river, the cave, and the falls are where the book says they are.

The tree, the lord, and the source of nobility

What happens at Yuta Tnoho, in the world the codex holds open, is the ordering of everything. Before the valley there is the primordial couple, Lord 1 Deer and Lady 1 Deer, whose names are the same day in the sacred count doubled — the pair from whom the divine generations descend. Their son is the figure around whom the founding turns: Lord 9 Wind, whose given name the Nuu Savi render Koo Sau, the Rain Serpent, the Plumed Serpent — Nine Wind, the culture-hero who came down out of the sky. In prose the parallel is exact and worth naming as a parallel and nothing more: Nine Wind holds the office that central Mexico gave to Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, the wind aspect of the Feathered Serpent — the same role told in two languages, not the same god. He is the one who sets the first world in order, and his residence is drawn in the codex as a place on a mountaintop near the valley that the readings gloss as “the Place where Heaven was.”

Then comes the tree. On the bank of the sacred river, in this valley, a great mother tree stands, and from its trunk the first lords and ladies of the Ñuu Savi are born — stepping out of the wood one after another, the founders of the royal houses that would rule the Mixteca. Whether the tree is best understood as a ceiba or a pochote is a question internal to the tradition and to its readers, and the codex does not settle it; what is not in question, inside the frame, is what the tree is for. Among the First Lords who come from it the codex names Lord 7 Flower as a leader of the group. These are not a people’s ancestors in a vague and collective sense. They are the specific, named, dated founders of specific dynasties, and their descent from the tree is a title. To be noble in this world was to carry Apoala in the body.

That is the distinctive teaching of the place, and it is worth stating without softening. Apoala is less the birthplace of a people than the source of legitimacy itself. Other Mesoamerican origins put a people’s beginning at a cave, or a lake, or seven caves in the north; the Mixtec put the beginning of rank at a tree beside a named river in a valley one can still drive to. The dynasties of the great Mixtec towns — the lineage of Tilantongo, Ñuu Tnoo, the throne the codices follow most closely — traced their right to rule to this trunk. When a Mixtec lord’s genealogy was recited from a painted book, it ran back, generation by generation, to Yuta Tnoho and to the tree. The valley was the root system of a whole political order, and the order was sacred: it belonged to the world of the ñuhu, the sacred beings, whose name the Nuu Savi still use for the powers that inhabit the land, the rain, the dead, and the growing maize. The People of the Rain are named for that rain — for Dzahui, the rain itself made a person — and the rain, the serpent, and the sky all meet at the founding in the person of Nine Wind. Apoala is where the sacred order and the social order are shown to be one thing, planted in the same ground.

The river at Santiago Apoala — the Yutatnoho, the “river the lords came from” — running through the origin valley in the Mixteca Alta. ArbyBB, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

None of this is offered as archaeology. The valley’s foundation date is unknown, and the codex’s opening pages narrate a genesis, not a chronicle; where the mythic account meets the documented past — the horizon of the Mixtec city-states, the reach of Monte Albán’s era across the highlands — is a matter historians hold carefully apart from the tradition’s own telling. Two truths sit side by side here without collapsing into each other. The documented Apoala is a highland farming municipality with coordinates and a census. The Apoala of the Codex Yuta Tnoho is the place the world was set in order and the lords were born from a tree. The people who painted the book, and the people who still farm the valley, are the same people, and they have never needed the two accounts to be reconciled.

Persecution, exile, and return

The tradition of Apoala came through two conquests and the fire that came with the second. The Aztec tribute-empire pressed into the Mixteca first, and it is from that direction that the Nahuatl name Apoala rode onto the maps and stayed. Then, after 1521, came Spain, and with the Dominican friars came the effort to end the very world they were also, inadvertently, recording. The same missionary record that preserved the tree-of-origin tradition belonged to a campaign that treated the screenfolds and the sacred beings as things to be burned — the extirpation of what the colonizers filed under “idolatry,” a persecution most fully documented later in the Zapotec sierra of Villa Alta but pressed across Oaxaca. That frame — idolatry, superstition, devil-worship — is a historiographic problem to name and refuse, not a description to adopt. What it labeled as idols and errors was the literate self-record of an urban civilization narrating its own genesis. The fuller account of that conquest and that burning belongs with the story of the Mixtec people as a whole; here the load-bearing fact is narrower and stranger. The book of Apoala came down to us only because it was carried out of the country it maps.

The Codex Yuta Tnoho exists at all by an accident of exile. It left Mexico early — one tradition ties it to the first shipments of curiosities sent across the Atlantic in Cortés’s wake, meant as a gift for Charles V — and then passed from hand to hand and court to court through Renaissance Europe: Seville, Portugal, Rome, Weimar, and at last Vienna, its ownership and its very name changing so many times that librarians eventually counted more than a dozen former designations. It came to rest in a Habsburg library, and so for centuries the Mixtec book of the Mixtec valley of origin bore the name of an Austrian capital. This is why the renaming that Jansen and Pérez Jiménez proposed carries the weight it does. To call the manuscript the Codex Yuta Tnoho is not a cataloguing convenience. It is an act of return — reading the book as the Nuu Savi’s own record of their own valley, rather than as a jewel of somebody’s imperial collection.

Apoala itself, meanwhile, went on being Apoala. The valley became a Catholic town — Santiago Apoala, under the patronage of the apostle James, like so many Oaxacan pueblos re-named at the font — without ceasing to be Yuta Tnoho. The Mixtec language is spoken there; the word ñuhu is a living word; the river and the falls and the cave carry their old meanings for the people who live among them, whatever a visitor sees. And in recent decades the valley has taken on one more life. Santiago Apoala has become an ecotourism destination, a “hidden” canyon of turquoise pools and limestone cliffs reached on day trips out of Oaxaca City; hikers walk the trail down to the Cola de Serpiente falls and out to the cave, guided by a community that runs cabins and tours on the valley floor. That turn brings income and it brings a familiar pressure: the commercialization of a landscape that is, for the people who own it, the place the lords came from. The valley of origin now negotiates its own beauty as a product, which is a modern problem laid over a very old one — the problem of who gets to say what a sacred place is.

The tree is not standing; no single trunk beside the river is pointed out as the tree, and the tradition does not require one, because the tree in the book was never only a plant. What stands is the valley, and the record — the painted book in Vienna reading itself back toward the river it came from, the friars’ late notes, the census in Nochixtlán, the falls dropping their fifty meters into the pools. The Mixtec kept, in a language of names and days and places, an account of where nobility itself was born, and they put it at a real bend of a real river in the highlands. One can go there. The water is still called the river the lords came from.

See also the Mixtec people, whose codices this valley opens; Nine Wind, the culture-hero who orders the world at Yuta Tnoho; Dzahui, the rain the Nuu Savi are named for; and Tilantongo, the dynastic throne whose line runs back to the tree.

→ Related: Nine Wind · Dzahui · The Mixtec · The Zapotec · The Mixe · Tilantongo · Monte Alban · Mitla · Cocijo · Pitao Cozobi · Coqui Bezelao