​The Incredibly True, Or Not!, Adventures of the Ancient Aztec Children

Pedro Velasquez’s gripping 1851 Illustrated Memoir of an Expedition into Central America chronicles the enterprising Hammond expedition that absconded with a pair of native children after discovering Iximaya, a fabled city hidden in deep in the jungles of untouched Central America.  These, however, were not just any children, but the two last living members of a pureblood priestly caste: Bartola and Maximo, “The Aztec Children.” Diminutive in stature, the siblings were well beloved by the notoriously cultish and war-like Iximayans and lived out of the public eye for many of their years deep in the recesses of the royal palace that Valasquez compared to ancient Assyrian architecture.  Once “rescued” by the Hammond expedition, the first white people to step foot in Iximaya, the siblings became two of the most sought after freak show performers of the nineteenth century—“ the most extraordinary phenomenon!”

However, Bartola and Maximo were not Aztecs; and neither Pedro Velasquez nor Iximaya actually existed.  Their life story pamphlet was actually a doctored up version of American lawyer and explorer John Lloyd Stephens’ travelogue, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841), a text that revitalized interest in Mayan antiquity during the nineteenth century. The wild romance of the “Aztec Children” was nothing more than freak show fabrication.  Bartola and Maximo’s actual origins are unknown, but they were most likely born in San Salvador, although conflicting reports cite Mexico as their home.  Most likely, they were both born with microcephaly, a neurodevelopmental disorder that impaired physical and cognitive development, earning them the nicknames the “Aztec Children” and “Aztec Lilliputians.”  An opportunistic showman Ramon Silva (or Selva) brokered a deal with Bartola and Maximo’s parents in which they would receive a sum of money and the children would be provided schooling in North America.  A consummate crook, Silva never made it the U.S.A., finding himself detained in jail and the children unattended.  After changing a few sets of hands, Bartola and Maximo first appeared with their impresario J. Morris in Boston, MA in the early 1850s.  After catching the attention of Horace Greeley and President Millard Fillmore, they travelled to London in 1853 to meet Queen Victoria and other of Europe’s aristocratic luminaries.  For the next fifty years, they were continuously exhibited in London, Europe, and the US.  They even briefly worked with P.T. Barnum, one of the most famous nineteenth-century showmen, which testified to just how popular the “Aztecs” were. 

Throughout their career, Bartola and Maximo sparked hot debates over the nature of physical, cultural, and racial difference.  The “Aztec Children’s” pamphlet reveals how disability, science, and colonialism supported each other during the nineteenth century. On the one hand, they were routinely used as medical, ethnological, and anthropological evidence of the existence of degenerate species. But, Bartola and Maximo were also deemed imposters: they were little more than imperfect Aztec knockoffs, much like their fraudulent life story pamphlet. The twists and turns of their long career represent the freak show’s signature “artful deception,” a clever interweaving of truth and fiction, authenticity and fabrication, cover ups and exposé. The freak show does not just calm the anxieties and uncertainties that accompany physical difference, but also incites energetic debate that complicates cultural standards of normalcy. 

​The “Aztecs” may have been singular, but their freak show materials weren’t...

Multiple copies of their infamous life story pamphlet can be found across various special collections.  I worked with one tucked between a collections guide for a Central American folk art museum in Austria and an ethnographic account of Nicolás de Valenzuela’s 1695 expedition to Lacandón, in University of California, Riverside’s special collections. Since authorship is attributed to John L. Stephens Esq, this text wouldn’t seem out of place in a special collections dedicated to Latin American history. It presents itself as a slim 32-page volume with an unassuming title: Pagan Rites and Ceremonies of the Mayaboon Indians in the City of Iximaya in Central America (London; 1868?):

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However... a turn of the page tells a different story: Memoirs of an Eventful Expedition in Central America, Resulting in an Unexplored Region of the Idolatrous City of Iximaya in an Unexplored Region; and the Possession of Two Remarkable Aztec Children:

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Locating and visualizing Central America was a difficult, almost impossible, task.  In his Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, Stephens laments that every discovery of a Central American ruins (usually shrouded in “immense forests”) only led to “mystery, dark, impenetrable mystery,” robbing him of the clarifying mountain views usually enjoyed by travelogue writers.  Not one to despair too heartily, Stephens later rhapsodizes Central America’s jungle ruins as prehistoric spaces of imaginative time travel where he might “one day hold conference with a perished race, and unveil the mystery that hung over the city.” Little did he anticipate that Bartola and Maximo would supply him answers to his dreamy ponderings with their pamphlet. Colonial activity is driven by “misplacements,” which occur when indigenous objects enter into new contexts and introduce incongruities to the status quo.  

Bartola and Maximo’s outlandish biography (and freak show artifacts more generally)  offer truly wild instances of these processes of misplacement.  Totally shameless, Bartola and Maximo’s impresarios did not even attempt to adapt Stephens’ book: instead, entire sections of travelogue were copied and laced together with schlocky entr’actes showcasing the “Aztecs” whose textual presence is communicated through a smaller typeface. So if the moments of “mystery” in Stephens’ travelogue symbolize the limits to the reach of colonialism, Bartola and Maximo’s narrative literally fills in the gaps with their narrative, just as diminutive as their bodies.

​Their pamphlet wan't the only strange episode in the story of the Aztecs...

In a plot twist to rival any soap opera, in 1867 Bartola and Maximo made headline news through their marriage to one another—“under civil contract” and “in the presence of the Registrar General” no less (Manchester Courrier and Lancashire General Advertiser 1867.)  Now deemed a cheap ploy to drum up fading interest in the pair, the marriage was quite the to-do and news sources enjoyed emphasizing the inviting minutiae of their truly modern marriage: “’Little Max,” (“as the bridegroom is familiarly known”) was gracious and intelligible during the post-ceremony breakfast held at Willis’ Rooms for the “Aztecs and their intimate friends,” and he cut a handsome figure in his “faultless suit of black cloth” (Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer 1867.)  Bartola, in a wedding dress purchased in St. Petersburg, was the picture of desirable Victorian femininity, positively radiating “self-respect and retiring self-control” (The Morning Post 1867.)

 The brother-sister wedding scheme re-enacts the cultural customs of ancient “Aztecs,” their priestly caste forbidden from intermarriage, but through a distinctly modern sensibility.  Unfortunately, married life for the “Aztecs” was not all fun and games and it too became fodder for the freak show’s “artful deception.”  When they returned for a mid-1880s tour of North American dime museums, gossipy reports surfaced of marital discord. The North American maintains that during a show at the Ninth and Arch Dime Museum (Philadelphia, PA) “Maximo, the Aztec gentlemen …kept his eyes riveted on the platform occupied by the seven beautiful Sutherland sisters.” Enamored of their operatic singing voices and “Niagara of Curls,” Maximo cast a desiring eye, and handkerchief, the way of the youngest sister, Julia.  His lovemaking earned him the ire of Bartola who “would no doubt have wreaked summary vengeance on his curly pate had she not been promptly secured.”  While an interesting little interlude in the private lives of freak performers, this eyewitness report this dissention at the dime museum may be apocryphal seeing as how a “Julia Sutherland” never existed.  Whatever the case may be, it does confirm American humorist William Livingston Alden’s contention that all freaks do is fall in love and quarrel in William Livingston Alden Among the Freaks.

Bartola and Maximo eventually fizzled out into relative obscurity. Maximo vanishes from the historical record some time after this 1885 episode and Bartola was last documented in the early-twentieth century performing as the “Last Living Aztec” in Germany. Taking Bartola and Maximo’s status as Sacred Objects to heart, the London Illustrated News (1853) ponders: “Can the Aztec Speak?” And as these materials and stories show, the freak show's "artful deception" lends surprising new voice to these figures once regarded as curios frozen in time