God, it’s always the obtuse colonizers…

Yes! Actually, Mexican farmers are still fighting to preserve their numerous (really numerous, really rich) variety of corn because capitalists and allies are pushing for monopolies (hence, the same seeds), for profitable crops (hence, the best seeds for that purpose), and rare seeds are in danger. It took centuries to get there…

Mexican ecological fights are bloody.

Personal rant. And I do not understand in which state of mind you need to be to kill someone protecting special corn seeds or butterflies. For what? More money that is not needed because there’s enough already in the world? Go take it from the guys who retain it! Leave Nature, and their animals, and the people alone, FFS.

The neurodivergent urge…

Aztlán was the place they said they came from (probably in today’s U.S. territory). The “Aztecs” called themselves “Mexica”. That’s also their name in Spanish, and I have a faded memory that it is not the name in English only because an anthropologist had trouble pronouncing it or something. Whatever.

Mexicas (meh - SHE - kahs) founded Tenochtitlan. After its fall, you are right, Mexico was named ‘Mexico’ from Nahuatl but people pronounced and pronounce it ‘MEH - hee - koh’ because of the Spanish language influence (think, as in Quixote, ‘kee - HO - teh’).

There were Mexican intellectuals pushing for a ‘meh - SHEE - koh’ pronunciation in the 20th century, but they failed miserably.

But those native people are still alive and the majority identify as Mexicans (additional to their community’s identity). They’re often bicultural, bilingual, etc.

Are you really going to walk to Xochimilco, where there are still chinampas, and tell the people they should not take credit for them as a society, for example? As crazy as to walk to an ethnic German in Köln and telling him/her that the Köln cathedral and the… Cologne, sorry, whatever, and the food and the stuff is not really their heritage because “you weren’t Germany until…”. WTH? Then all Germans did during the Weimar Republic wasn’t them. All they did as Empires wasn’t them. I hope it’s not an awful analogy.

Like, you’re technically correct, but pragmatically it doesn’t make much sense to me in this case.