Maximo and Bartola and Adoption

Maximo and Bartola CDV by Edmonds of Southampton, c1867
Source: Wikipedia.org.

Biography

fl. 1849 - 1901

Also known as Máximo Váldez Nuñez and Bartola Velásquez

Mexican-American sideshow exhibits

Brother and sister “Maximo” and “Bartola” (their real names are unknown) were probably born in the early 1840s in Mexico, to Innocento Burgos and Marina Espina, poor peasants. Both had a condition known as microcephaly, with very small heads and were severely developmentally delayed, with small bodies.

As children they were bought from their parents by a Spanish trader named Ramón Selva, who promised to take them to America to be cured. In fact, he sold them on to an American. From 1849 to 1890 (possibly as late as 1901) they were exhibited as “The Last of the Ancient Aztecs” and “The Aztec Lilliputians,” with a concocted story about them having been taken from a secret city in Mexico, where they had been worshipped as idols. They aroused enormous interest, among the scientific community as well as the general public, and traveled America and Europe, being exhibited to the masses and also to the crowned heads and their families.

In 1867 they were apparently married to each other in London, using the names Nuñez and Velásquez. They disappear from the historical record in 1890, except for a possible recording in 1901, and nothing is known of their deaths.

There were a number of other such exhibits in the 19th and 20th centuries billed as Aztecs, all of who seem to have been microcephalic. [Last updated: 10 JAN 2005]

References

Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) © Roger Ridley Fenton