I have really strong doubts about Tlakaelel, real name Francisco Jimenez, ever since I first saw a flyer of his where he promised to teach Latino students about the "real Aztec tradition of Atlantis."
A Toltec elder? They've been gone for 800 years. And his claiming to be an expert at Aztec and Mayan traditions while doing ceremony at Teotihuacan...those are four very separate and different civilizations, including the long gone Toltecs.
The way he looks and dressed should be a tip off. He has a beard like Gandalf, so he's obviously mixedblood. In the US he'd still be thought of as NDN, but not in Mexico, where they make a distinction between Indians and mestizos. He typically wears a long Roman-like toga, which is obviously nothing like the Aztecs wore. And he runs a calpulli, which is often misportrayed as a temple. The actual Aztec calpullis were local councils, either village or neighborhood organizations set up to run local govt and fairly mundane things like trash collection and aid to the poor.
He also buys into the Castaneda nonsense.
http://www.artforthemasses.us/castacon/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2015Found this link that I think describes him best. He is not a spiritual leader in Mexico. Most Nahuas are Catholics. What he is instead is a spiritual leader of a pan Indian mix of claimed Aztec, Mayan, Lakota, and other beliefs for a small political movement of Mexicans in the US.
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http://stone-bridge.blogspot.com/2007/08/tlakaelel-at-hueco-tanks.htmlTlakaelel is important in the Mexica movement, an indigenist religious revival movement which began in Mexico City in the 1960s. It is organized, if that is the word, into highly independent local groups called kalpullis.
Partly traditional, but tending towards syncretism, this movement tapped into Chicano identity issues in the American southwest, where the
kalpullis have adopted a lot of US Native American religious ceremonies and beliefs. Over the years Tlakaelel, whose real name is Francisco Jimenez, has evolved a sort of
pan-Indian ideology which has a Nahuatl mythological core, but a lot of ceremonial practices gotten from North American Indians. A few years before her death, my wife Kay Sutherland, an anthropologist whose specialties included Native American rock art and meso-American religions, had concluded that a lot of elements of southwest rock art represented a fusion of Meso-American and native pre-Puebloan concepts. Through a complex series of events, this led some kalpulli members in El Paso to seek out her assistance in getting the Texas parks system to give their kalpulli the same status to conduct religious ceremonies at Hueco Tanks State Park as some US Native American groups had.
So she spent some time interviewing Tlakaelel, who is revered as an elder by most US kalpulli groups, and she took him to important rock art sites like Hueco Tanks. She came to feel that the kalpulli understanding of these sites was certainly as valid as that of the official Native American groups. Now, the parks department wanted only groups with historical cultural continuity with Hueco Tanks. Their concept of cultural continuity was simplistic, but hey, these people are highly politicized bureaucrats, and simplistic is all they know. Kay gave it a shot, but their basic prejudice (literally) was that
these people are Mexicans reinventing themselves as Indians, a viewpoint completely at odds with Kay's anthropological training, not to mention her Jungian personal views of religion.
Anyway, Kay was sympathetic to the kalpulli, and presented a perhaps overly sophisticated argument to the parks people that all religions reinvent themselves all the time, and moreover that there was in fact a greater continuity of myth between the religious symbols found at Hueco Tanks and the contemporary belief system of the kalpulli than with the contemporary belief systems of some of the allowed groups. But no dice.
The kalpulli lost.
