Dialectical Anthropology 25: 123–149, 2000. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 123 Carnival and Contestation in the Aztec Marketplace SCOTT R. HUTSON Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley (E-mail: hutson@sscl.berkeley.edu) Received 27 February 2000; accepted 7 June 2000 Introduction The twin cities of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, and Tlatelolco, both of which shared an island in the middle of lake Texcoco, dumbfounded the first Spaniards to approach them in 1519. “Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on one side, on the land, there were great cities, and in the lake, ever so many more, and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the causeway there were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the great city of Mexico.” 1 In his second letter to King Charles V of Spain, Conquistador Hernán Cortés wrote “To give your majesty a full account of all the strange and marvelous things to be found in this great city of Tenochtitlan would demand much time and many skilled writers, and I shall be able to describe but a hundredth part of all the many things which are worthy of description.” 2 One of those many things was the great marketplace of Tlatelolco, where, according to Cortés, “Every kind of merchandise such as may be met with in every land is for sale.” Twice as big as the square of Salamanca, the Tlatelolco marketplace “astounded” Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of Cortés’ foot-soldiers. 3 Previous scholars have used ethnohistoric accounts of the markets at Tlatelolco and elsewhere to construct models of the Aztec economic system. 4 Others have looked beyond the economic functions of the market and focused on what the documents reveal about other aspects of Aztec society. 5 It has long been noted that people were doing more than just buying and selling in the markets. D. V. Kurtz documented a wide variety of political, legal, and religious activities which took place in the market and argued, among other things, that the market “provided a central place in which political authorities may communicate to the population a variety of state values and goals.” 6 However, many of the activities that common Aztecs indulged in at the market, such as gossip, socializing, and strolling, 7 did not directly support