Around the year 1325 A.D. the Mexica people settled in the Valley of Mexico and founded what we know as the Aztec empire. According to the Codex Boturini, an Aztec pictograph scroll, the Mexicas originated to the north and west of what is today Mexico City in a place they called Aztlán , “the place of reeds and herons.” Azltán was said to be an island on a lake with seven caves. During the 1960s, Chicanos embraced the concept of Aztlán as a mythical homeland of their ancestors, somewhere in the American Southwest. But where exactly could such an ancestral home have existed? This excerpt from the video “In Search of Aztlán” provides tantalizing clues.