Intaglios found<> Creatiion Story
Alfredo's Aztlan
A 73-year-old man with no formal training says he has found the lost homeland of the Aztecs in the mountains around Blythe. Amid the scoffing, there are smart people who think he may be right.
December 24, 2006|Ann Japenga | Ann Japenga is a Palm Springs journalist and essayist who writes about California deserts and the West. Her work also appears in the book "The New Desert Reader."
On a two-lane highway along the Colorado River near Blythe, a vehicle bearing the Figueroa family merges into a stream of RVs and sand buggies. The 73-year-old patriarch, Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, tips the passenger seat back so he can keep an eye on the surrounding mountains: the Big Marias and Little Marias, the Mules, McCoys and Palens. His daughter, Patricia, is at the wheel; I share cookies in the back seat with Figueroa's wife, Demesia.
When Figueroa spots something he wants to show me--a rift, a knob, a shadow on the mountains--he bounces straight up and calls out: "Oh stop . . . you see that guy's face? The eye and the mouth? That's the same guy I showed you on the codices. He's got the beak of a hawk. You get it now? You think it's clear?"
