This chapter reads presentations of maternal loss and infanticide in colonial and contemporary texts to demonstrate how kinship and structures of feeling can expand a potential Latinx archive beyond the borders and timeframes of the US nation-state. It looks to La Llorona, a ghost of Latin American and Latinx legend, to bring two bodies of texts and temporal moments into contact: (1) Chicanx works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that look to the colonial past, and (2) early modern codices and colonial documents that reach towards an uncertain future. This chapter does not suggest that these two periods meet seamlessly. Instead, it shows how present-day texts and authors who engage La Llorona’s past wrestle with the historical specificity of Mesoamerican codices and colonial documents that present their own timelines and hopes for the future. Ultimately, this chapter contends that La Llorona’s past demands attention to historical loss and discontinuity. La Llorona helps reveal the productive possibilities of a Latinx archive that emphasizes affiliation rather than origins, one best based on resonance and irresolution.

Aztec rulers, Mexica and others, used their authority to develop, expand, and defend the Excan tlatoloyan and other confederations in or near the Basin of Mexico. That region contained about sixty political units, each called an altepetl. The largest, most militarily and economically powerful was Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital city. The most common translations, city-state or kingdom, capture something essential. They had urban cores, and they were each ruled by supreme rulers, the tlatoani. As important as the altepetl was, localities that constituted them, known as tlaxilacalli or calpolli, smaller units that in many ways constituted communities unto themselves, were also important. Violence was a key part of Aztec political culture and state and confederation building in the late Postclassic period. War practices relied upon structure and discipline, weaponry, the pursuit of captives, and the vanquishing of enemies who produced material wealth in the form of everyday and luxury items paid as tribute to the imperial powers. Whether through elite marriages or wars, inter-altepetl relations took place within a context in which the Excan tlatoloyan sought aggressively to enlarge its domain of control by becoming an expansive confederation that can be considered a hegemonic empire.