Arms of Martín García Macouzet

Blazon

Argent a tau cross pommeté in foot Azure, on a chief Gules a lion’s face erased Or between two bezants;

Symbolism

Blue and red are the principal colours of the arms of the city of Lyon, France, and of the state of Michoacán, Mexico. Thus they honour Dr. Macouzet’s ancestor, Jean-François Macouzet, a physician from Lyon who settled in Mexico and participated in the establishment of the Faculty of Medicine of Michoacán in the early nineteenth century. The colours also represent Martín Macouzet’s own undergraduate studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where blue is used in academic regalia to denote graduates of the Faculty of Chemistry, and graduate research at McGill University, whose arms are red and white. The gold charges (D’or in French blazon) are a pun on the given name of Dr. Macouzet’s wife, Dora Rodriguez Maya. The T-shape represents a stylized aerial view of a yácata, a pre-Conquest Tarascan temple representative of Michoacán. Once erected by the Tarascans to honour their agrarian gods, here the yácata honours Dr. Macouzet’s academic research in food science. On the chief, the gold circles represent Ignacia Procopia Sornoza y Herrera, the wife of Jean-François Macouzet; family tradition indicates that she was descended from the last indigenous Tarascan king of Michoacán, Tzintzincha Tangaxoan, who was forced to pay tribute to the Conquistadors in the form of round shields made of silver and gold. A lion appears on the arms of Lyon, the place of origin of Jean-François Macouzet, and on the arms of the province of Quebec, the homeland of Martín Macouzet’s three children.