| Family and the validation that came from being part of family is a core concept that is probably simultaneously the most and least accessible aspect of what it was to be Mexica in Tenochtitlan. Most accessible, because here we come down to the web of kin relations that seem like our own experience: fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, sisters and brothers, grandparents and grandchildren. Indeed, Susan Kellogg's formal analysis of Aztec kinship suggests that the Aztec system was close to that typical of European groups at the time. At that time. Five hundred years ago. And that, unfortunately, is the problem: not many of us really know what European families were like that long ago. Let's begin with size and stability. The family resided over time in the same place, often in a remodeled or expanded version of the house that had seen generations born and die. The house was more than a container for life: it was an enduring context for the continuity of the family. It physically inscribed the family as a permanent presence on the landscape. From at least 1200 BC, families in Mexico buried their dead beneath the floor of the house and its yard, so that the house compound literally was the place of the ancestors. Within that compound, multiple generations resided together, and multiple siblings shared house space. This point is difficult, because we tend to present the picture as if we could start the system at any point with an idealized couple who have children who marry and live in the compound with their offspring. Some of the Aztec sources present the same vision of an idealized origin. Real life is messy. At any point, given what we know about Aztec practices, a house may have harbored elderly siblings, their adult sons, sons' wives, and children, and younger, unmarried sons and daughters. Most adult daughters moved away to the house of their husband's parents, and some adult men gained privileges through service in war that took them completely out of the neighborhood. Other young adult men and women left their homes to serve in and reside at temples. Children of deceased relatives might be adopted or fostered in the home, and despite the preference for daughters to marry away, a couple with no male children might convince the man marrying a daughter to relocate to their home.
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