Hello, my name is Quiauhxochitl (which means Rain Flower) and I live in the country that you now call Mexico. When I lived there, about 500 years ago, it wasn’t Mexicans who lived there but Aztecs.

We have this great city, which was built 200 years earlier on a great swamp. We were very proud of our city of Tenochtitlan because it was the largest in the world and half a million people lived there. It was built using floating islands of reeds and mud, as well as reclaimed land. This made it very difficult for invaders to attack us, but it also gave us very fertile land for growing our crops. Because we grew all the food that we needed easily, we had time and spare food to barter, to make other great structures, such as our pyramids and temples, our parks, pools and zoos.

In Tenochtitlan the houses are very different depending on where you are. Near the water’s edge, they are small, with one room and a flat roof, but in the centre of the city, the houses are big, with lots of room in each one, and rush mats on the floor and a wicker chest to keep extra clothes in. The poor people that live in the small houses on the water’s edge have clothes made from agave fibre, which is rather coarse and rough, but the richer people have clothes made from cotton with lots of embroidery on.

As children we go to school, but we have a lot of work to help our parents too, doing things like fetching water and carrying things to the market. We don’t use any money, but exchange things that we have extra, for things that we want. This is called bartering. Girls help at home with grinding corn and cooking, while boys help in the fields and fish. Our parents are very strict with us and we are often punished for laziness and disobedience. When we are born, it is not our parents who give us our names, but a soothsayer (a kind of priest).

We have breakfast at about 10 o’clock and it is made from ground maize and looks like porridge. We mix honey with it to make it taste sweet. If we are rich enough to barter for meat, we can get turkeys, pheasants, duck, deer, wild pig, rabbit, fish and shrimp for our evening meal, but often we can only barter for them for special feast days. Otherwise we will eat beans, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes with our tortillas.

Because Tenochtitlan is a very big city, we have priests, government officials, astrologers, doctors, scribes and soothsayers. The boys are taught by priests to read and write and can enter one of these professions, or they could train to become a warrior or a metal worker. Aztec jewellery is very special.

The warriors use bows and arrow, spears and swords. Our swords are wooden with very sharp flakes of a stone called obsidian, pushed in to the wood along the edge. When a soldier has captured 3 prisoners, he is allowed to wear his hair in a topknot with feathers in it to prove how brave he is.

The part of our life, that most modern people will remember us for, because you don’t do it any more, is our sacrifices. We believe that we have to make sacrifices to ensure that there will be another day tomorrow, and that our crops will grow and our enemies be defeated. We know that this is the case because there have been four other worlds in our religion, each which has been destroyed. So we cut the hearts out of many people and cut their heads off too. The priests do this in the temple and there are thousands of skulls displayed around each temple still.

The Aztecs were very, very successful until the priests made a terrible mistake. They foresaw a great golden god coming to live amongst the people and told the emperor Montezuma all about it, so when the Spaniard Cortez arrived, with his blond hair and beard, Montezuma believed that this was the god he had been told about. Cortez and his men took all the gold and jewels from the temples and started killing us Aztecs. Eventually our great city life collapsed and could not be revived.

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