a silk cotton tree (Ceiba pentandra), a "large and beautiful" tree (see Molina and Karttunen); frondous, this tree produces something that looks like cotton bolls
# Un árbol, ropa o otro tipo de comida nada más se revienta cuando ya no sirve. “La leña de mi papá ya se está desasiendo porque no lo careó antes y espesaron a picar los mosquitos”.
fat (sixteenth century, central Mexico) Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 10 -- The People, No. 14, Part 11, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), 98.
vanguard merchants, merchants who worshipped Yacateuctli and carried his likeness on their long journeys (central Mexico, sixteenth century) Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 1 -- The Gods; No. 14, Part 2, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1950), 18.
to trade or, more literally, to act as a pochtecatl; to be a merchant Sarah Cline, "The Testaments of Culhuacan," in James Lockhart, Lisa Sousa, and Stephanie Wood, eds., Sources and Methods for the Study of Postconquest Mesoamerican Ethnohistory (Eugene, OR: Wired Humanities Project, e-book, 2007.