And yet, for every Nahuatl speaker who writes defiant poems, there is another who lives in poverty so oppressive that poetry is out of the question: for every person who is able to give a paper in Nahuatl at an international conference, there is another whose only hope is to leave home and try to start over somewhere else. He may move to a large town in Mexico, where at one time the Mexica founded a trading post at a merchant crossroads that later became a city. Or she may choose to go north, to the land of her remote ancestors, the forebears of Shield Flower and Itzcoatl, who came from the
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