By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO, Calif. —I am definitely getting used to the idea of calling myself a San Diego State University student.  I tell people about my graduate studies in history there with pride—so much so that I am looking unblinkingly at the dreaded Sept. 18 deadline, known otherwise as the "last day to add or drop classes."   

On the other hand,  I don't think I'll ever be comfortable calling myself an "Aztec," and that is not simply because 40 years ago when I was graduated from UCLA, I was a "Bruin."  My uneasiness stems from the two ways one can look at an institution of higher learning identifying itself with an ancient civilization.  

Six years ago, San Diego State debated whether its various depictions of Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, were racist.  In accordance with the "red man Indian" stereotype, he had a red face. At football games, the "Monty" mascot ran around wildly—all very demeaning for a man who ruled over a city of some 200,000 and whose empire may have controlled millions of people.

So after debates involving alumni, faculty and students the SDSU administration decided to change the university's logo and eliminate the red face. "Monty" became "Montezuma," and instead of being a mascot, he was to become the university's goodwill ambassador.  But alumni denounced this as so much unwanted "political correctness" and the conch-blowing mascot returned to help the Aztec sports teams vanquish their opponents. 

Various campus buildings are named after aspects of Aztec culture—the most recent being the new health services complex which was named Calpulli Center. Back in the days when Mexico City was known as Tenochtitlán, it was divided into four quadrants or calpulli, each of which had a measure of self-governance.  A large assembly area in the Aztec Center  is Montezuma Hall, where students often bring interesting speakers.  The university itself is said to sit atop Montezuma Mesa.

So what's the problem? You won't find this in any of the university's brochures, but one major aspect of Montezuma's Empire was the intimidation and control of the population by mass human sacrifice. Proficient warriors, the Aztecs forced vassal states to pay tributes to them in agriculture goods, crafts, precious stones and humans to be sacrificed on the altar of their god Huitzilopochtli. Aztecs also sacrificed the less fortunate in their own society. 

I couldn't help but think of the train station and gas chambers of the Auschwitz-Birkenau  concentration camps while reading descriptions of the Aztec's Huitzilopochtli cult in La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City, a work by Jonathan Kandell that is so respected it is required reading in the history course I am taking about colonial Mexico. 

Both autosacrifice—that is, the cutting of oneself to offer one's blood—and involuntary sacrifice were practiced by various Mesoamerican people's in the belief that human blood would appease the gods, who controlled such terrifying aspects of nature as hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes. The bodies of human sacrifice victims later were divided and eaten—cannibalism being then an accepted practice.

When brothers Montezuma I  (the king) and Tlacaelel (his prime minister) came to power approximately a century before the reign of Montezuma II (the figure with whom SDSU identifies), they elaborated a ritual of mass murder that, coupled with their people's military might, enabled them to terrify other city-states into submission. The ritual was well institutionalized by the time of Montezuma II, who did nothing to moderate it.

The Aztec's god, Huitzilopochtli, was described as a sun god in need of a constant diet of human hearts in order to fuel its way across the heavens.  If the sun did not receive enough hearts, its course across the heavens could be stopped and the world destroyed.  Accordingly, it was nothing less than patriotic duty for the Aztecs and their vassal states to offer human lives for sacrifice.   If you're squeamish, you may want to skip Kandell's description of the sacrificial procedure:

In the already ritualized ceremony, a victim was led up the steps of the pyramid.  Reaching the platform at the summit, the prisoner was toppled onto his back on a large ceremonial stone set in front of Huitzilopochtli's statue. Four priests with long, blood-encrusted hair, wearing blood-soiled black robes, each held a leg or an arm, and a fifth priest secured the victim's neck with a rope. Then Motechuzoma (an alternative spelling for Montezuma) raised a heavy obsidian knife above his head, quickly rammed it into the victim's thorax, reached a hand into the gaping wound and wrenched the heart loose. The organ, still beating, was held aloft by the king and its blood was sprinkled in the air, in the general direction of the noontime sun, to fuel its course across the heavens.   The heart was then jammed into the open mouth of Huitzilopochtli's statue, nourishing the god.  The lifeless body of the Chalca (a defeated enemy people) warrior was removed, and another prisoner took his place on the ceremonial stone slab.  Motecuhzoma and Tlacaelel took turns dispatching the first few victims.  The remainder were executed by the chief priests, relieving each other when fatigue set in.

These sacrifices were not just occasional aberrations of a society otherwise noted and admired for its marvelously engineered pyramids, orderly market places, high level of astronomy, and beautiful crafts.  Tlacaelel, living well into his 90s, served as prime minister to a succession of kings.  In 1487, after a new temple for Huitzilopochtli was completed, the ceremony of human sacrifices took four full, blood-soaked days, with the estimates of the number of sacrifice victims ranging from 20,000 to 80,000. Today, some people scoff that so many people could be so efficiently murdered, but we know that some people today also scoff about the 11 million victims of the Holocaust, 6 million of them Jews. Mass murder in any age is all too easy.

It would be easy to simply shrug off the mass murders of the Aztecs as something that happened a long time ago, and to make jokes that this is all symbolically represented at San Diego State, as at all other universities, by the students being the sacrificial victims, the executioners being the professors, the method of execution being one's "grades," and the malevolent emperor and prime minister being high-ranking members of the university administration.

However, I wonder if some time in the very distant future, another university, far removed from the terror, and admiring the high-level of German "civilization," won't someday decide to take "the Nazis" as its nickname, have a mascot goose-step around a football field, and perhaps even award "Adolfs" to important alumni.

Clearly, I am raising here an uncomfortable set of questions about how appropriate it is for a university aspiring to greatness to associate itself with the Aztec empire. It is not only academic  inertia that militates against considering any change in the university's identification, there is also the problem of the feelings that such an inquiry might inadvertently hurt.  

I believe it is entirely appropriate for San Diego State University, located in an area once part of New Spain and later of Mexico, to strongly identify with that heritage. SDSU should find a way to continue to honor California's Mexican roots.  But let us reexamine the strong identification with the rulers of the Aztec culture, lest we disrespect the memories of their many Mesoamerican victims. 

If a function of a university truly is to ask difficult questions, ought not SDSU pose those questions about itself?