⚠ Site currently under repair ⚠

Search Issues: Update 2026-08-17 - Repairs are ongoing. Thank you for your continued patience!

Some of our more complex, multi-field searches (such as the search field on our homepage and Search All Fields) are currently under repair and may not work as expected.

Thank you to all our users who emailed to alert us to the problem! We hope to have it repaired soon.

Meanwhile, elements of the Advanced Search are working and the Alphabetical Listings are working, too.

gentil.

(a loanword from Spanish)

Headword: 
gentil.
Principal English Translation: 

a gentile or a non-Christian person; this term is found in primordial titles in the plural to describe indigenous people prior to the coming of Christianity or even after contact
(a loanword from Spanish)

Orthographic Variants: 
gentilesme, gentilestlaca, getilestlaca, Jetileztlaca, tiJetilestlaca, tigentilestlaca
Attestations from sources in English: 

in titoteouh in titotlahtocatzin camo titechmotelchihuili in titlatlacoanime in tigentilesme = You, our God and Ruler, did not despise us idolaters [or: sinners (eds.)], us gentiles (central Mexico, early seventeenth century)
Codex Chimalpahin: Society and Politics in Mexico Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Culhuacan, and Other Nahuatl Altepetl in Central Mexico; The Nahuatl and Spanish Annals and Accounts Collected and Recorded by don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Susan Schroeder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), vol. 2, 148–149.

inyn intlapohual huehuetque tocolhuan catca gentilesme motenehua = This was the count of the ancestors, our grandfathers, called heathens. (central Mexico, early seventeenth century)
Codex Chimalpahin: Society and Politics in Mexico Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Culhuacan, and Other Nahuatl Altepetl in Central Mexico; The Nahuatl and Spanish Annals and Accounts Collected and Recorded by don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Susan Schroeder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), vol. 2, 126–127.

Chimalpahin occasionally uses the double-pluralized loan "gentilesme" to speak of ancestors.
See the Codex Chimalpahin, Vol. 1, p. 152, and Vol. 2, 126, and the Annals of His Time, p. 180.

The term "gentilestlaca" is found in títulos primordiales associated with towns in the Chalco area and the Valley of Toluca. One suspects a title-producing workshop is responsible for this repeating term, even if the orthography varies somewhat, given that its broader use remains to be documented.
Stephanie Wood, “The Social vs. Legal Context of Nahuatl Títulos,” in Native Traditions in the Postconquest World, Elizabeth Hill Boone and Tom Cummins, eds., pp. 201–231. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998. See note 19, page 214.