Aztec migration enters the Valley of Mexico

1220

Nahua-speaking wanderers called the Mexica reached the freshwater lakes of the central Mexican plateau after generations of migration from the north. They were poor, quarrelsome, and unwelcome. A century and a half later their descendants would build Tenochtitlan. According to their own chronicles, the war god Huitzilopochtli guided them southward with the promise of an eagle perched on a cactus devouring a serpent.