Xochiquetzal: The Eternal Flower Goddess

At the center of the Aztec paradise stood a flowering tree the gods were forbidden to break. The goddess who broke it was Xochiquetzal — patron of weavers, lovers, midwives, and the spirits of women who died in childbirth. Her name in Nahuatl means "e;precious flower"e; or "e;flower-feather,"e; and her cult ran through the household and the craft workshop more than the imperial temple. The featherworkers of Tlatelolco invoked her at the start of a daughter's training. Midwives called on her at the umbilical-cord ceremony for newborn girls. Every eight years the Mexica state staged a fast festival at which her impersonator sat at the visual center of a costumed reenactment of the gods at the flowering paradise of Tamoanchan. Five centuries after the Spanish conquest dismantled the apparatus that supported her, she keeps reappearing — in midwifery and weaving in Nahua-speaking communities, in marigold offerings on Day of the Dead, in Chicana feminist scholarship, in contemporary Mexican and Chicano art. This book gathers her from the codices, the colonial chronicles, the archaeology, and the living present, and tracks who she was, what was made of her, and what she has become.