A specific and less flattering myth episode sits behind Xochiquetzal's later association, in several colonial sources, with adultery rather than only the innocent pleasures of beauty and craft. The early colonial compilation known as the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas, assembled from Nahua informants in the sixteenth century, records that Xochiquetzal was originally the wife of the rain god Tlaloc, living with him in comfort, until Tezcatlipoca, the trickster among the great gods, abducted her and made her his own consort, an act of open theft between two of the pantheon's most powerful figures rather than a courtship. Sources vary in how they treat the abandoned Tlaloc and in whether Xochiquetzal is portrayed as a willing or unwilling party, and the episode was seemingly used, by some colonial-era native and Spanish compilers, to explain why a goddess otherwise devoted to beauty and the household arts also carried associations with sexual transgression, an uncomfortable pairing left aside in favor of her gentler artisan and floral aspects.
The episode also illustrates a broader caution about Aztec myth as it survives today: nearly every version was recorded by Spanish friars or their native assistants after the conquest, working from images, informants and their own theological expectations, so a story like this one may carry a colonial moral emphasis, condemning the goddess of pleasure for infidelity, that sat less heavily in the pre-conquest imagination that first told it. Modern scholars of Nahua religion generally treat the tale as genuine pre-conquest material reshaped in the telling rather than invented outright, but the exact balance between preserved myth and colonial retelling cannot be fully recovered.