| When an Aztec noble addressed his daughter, or a midwife the newly born girl, with exhortations about the life of work she faced, the sense of those words was influenced by a very different orientation toward labor and its value than is true of modern Euro-American culture. Very little of Aztec culture makes sense without a much more positive evaluation of labor than most readers can easily bring to these texts. To begin, remember that the degree of alienation of a worker from her work was much less. Even production for political tribute was performed within the household, and while the extraction of the products of this work for tribute might seem the greatest kind of alienation, the power of each worker to resist (by making poorer cloth, or making it slower) or claim distinction within her local group for her efforts was direct and unmediated. When the products of house-based hand labor were made for use in everyday life, seen in countless face-to-face settings, and remembered as the work of a particular person, pride in work was supported. You may be willing to grant this point for what we now label 'crafts', such as weaving, pottery making, feather-working. But to make Aztec life more real, you need to grant the point for what you almost certainly think of as menial labor: keeping the house clean, weeding the agricultural fields, grinding the corn for each meal.
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