Household and Family Structure in Early Colonial Tepetlaoztoc: An Analysis of the Códice de Santa María Asunción

Resumen

The Códice de Santa María Asunción, together with the closely related Codex Vergara, constitute the most detailed and extensive house record of náhuatl speaking communities in the Valle y of Mexico in early post-conquest times. Although organized somewhat differently, both códices contain three distinct registers of information: a census by household (tlacatlacuiloli); a description of each household's landholdings, which includes perimeter measurement, general shape, and soil type (milcocoli); a second register of the same lands which records the quantity of land in each parcel depicted (tlahuelmantli). Both documents have been known to scholars for more than a century, but only recently has systematic analysis been undertaken on the economic and social implication of their contents. This paper is concerned with an analysis of household composition in the Códice de Santa María Asunción, the more ample of the two census-cadastral documents.