Huaxtec origin. The Huaxtecs were a people of Maya origin or affinities, isolated from the main body of that race, dwelling on the east coast of Mexico, and retaining many of their peculiar customs; and it is noteworthy that a Huaxtecan goddess should be alluded to in Mexican tradition as coming to Tollan, the city of the Toltecs, the people whom so many writers have tried to identify with the Maya. As has been observed, she was accompanied at the ochpaniztli festival by a band of youths dressed to represent Huaxtecs, who in the Codex Borbonicus picture of the festival are shown as wearing the cone-shaped Huaxtec cap. She herself wears the Huaxtec nose-ornament in common with the octli-gods. She is repeatedly stated to have had her “home” in Cuextlan, the Huaxtec country, and there are good grounds for supposing that its inhabitants, of whose religion we know little, had brought the cult of the Earth-mother to such a pitch of complex perfection as rendered its absorption of the allied Mexican cults merely a matter of time and occasion.
That she was originally a personification of the maize is also clear. In her songs she is alluded to as “the yellow bloom” and “the white bloom,” and the references to her dwelling in Tamoanchan, the western paradise where the maize was supposed to have had its mythical origin, and where she gave birth to Cinteotl, the young maize-god, proves her association