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This introduction consists of a brief overview of the people, cultures, and history of Mesoamerica, to give readers context and background for understanding precolonial Mesoamerican thought. It provides accounts of the languages, myths, and intellectual culture of the ancient Olmecs, one of the foundational early cultures of Mesoamerica, as well as of still extant groups such as the Maya, Aztecs, Mixtecs, and Zapotecs.
Applied to Mesoamerican history and worldviews, revisionist mythmaking functions as an innovative, transformational practice that queers normative stories in various ways. The various ways include: retelling a well-known mythic story from different points of view, rewriting the story by altering the plot and revising the story itself and writing new stories. While Mesoamerican-inspired revisionist mythmaking often focuses on individual and collective identity related issues, at its most innovative, these recursive uses of "Mesoamerica" produce new ontologies, epistemologies, aesthetics, metaphysics, and ethics. This chapter examines these philosophical contributions as they occur within three complex, recurring Mesoamerican-inflected themes: Aztlan, mestizaje, and cosmic mythic figures. Referencing Aztlan and an indigenous "Azteca" identity, Chicano nationalists redefined mestizaje in positive ways, reclaiming their indigenous ancestry while downplaying or entirely ignoring their European-Spanish roots. The cosmologies of the Maya, Toltecs, Olmecs, and other pre-Conquest Mesoamerican peoples were peopled by rich, complicated divinities who defy easy categorization.
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