Within a space kept clear by a cordon of other soldiers, a metal post stood fixed into the flagstones of the square. Indeed, the soldiers collected and prodded and herded so many of us into the city's central square that we were crammed shoulder to shoulder. I and my mother and my uncle were among the vast crowd commanded by the city's Spanish soldiers to attend the ceremony, so I supposed that this event was intended to be some sort of object lesson to all of us non-Spaniards. In the years since that day, too, I have seen people die in war and in various other ways, but never before then had I seen a man deliberately put to death by fire, nor have I since. The executions had always been done with the maquáhuitl sword or with arrows or with the strangling 'flower garland.' The accidental deaths had mostly been the drownings of fishermen from our seaside city who somehow fell afoul of the water goddess. But the sacrifices had always been done by means of the obsidian knife that tears out the heart. Therefore, in order to establish a seemingly coherent plot of the past that would overcome fragmentation and chaos, the indigenous witnesses appearing in our sources relied heavily on unique visual schemata that assisted them in assembling the mental shreds and remnants of past experiences to restore them within the traditional framework and formulae of information transmission only modestly affected by the Spanish conquest.On that long-ago day when I watched the man being set afire, I was already eighteen years old, so I had seen other people die, whether given in sacrifice to the gods or executed for some outrageous crime or simply dead by accident.

It emphasizes that early colonial Cohuixca testimonies were deeply influenced by what are called, in Western terms, cadastral maps or cartographic histories or, in Nahuatl, amoxtli tlalamatl altepeamatl (' land papers, ' titles of each town and district) in the former Cohuixca province of Tepecoacuilco (Cohuixcatlacapan), these geographical elements being heavily reinforced by oral retelling.

To do so, it introduces a qualitative methodological approach into ethnohistory, which discerns pervasive patterns of special understanding that guided indigenous testimony in the Colonial Spanish courtroom. This article aims to fill in some of the lacunae that still exist regarding the Cohuixca ethnicity of the northeastern part of the State of Guerrero.

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