Tetzcoco was one of the most important cities of the pre-Hispanic Aztec Empire. When the Spaniards arrived in 1519, the indigenous hereditary nobles that governed Tetzcoco faced both opportunities and challenges, and were forced to adapt from the very moment of contact. This book examines how the city's nobility navigated this tumultuous period of conquest and colonialism, and negotiated a place for themselves under Spanish rule. While Tetzcoco's native nobles experienced a remarkable degree of continuity with the pre-contact period, especially in the first few decades after conquest, various forces and issues, such as changing access to economic resources, interethnic marriage, and intra-familial conflict, transformed Tetzcoco's ruling family into colonial subjects by the century's end.
Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives presents an in-depth, highly nuanced historical understanding of this major indigenous Mesoamerican city from the conquest through the present. The book argues for the need to revise conclusions of past scholarship on familiar topics, deals with current debates that derive from differences in the way scholars view abundant and diverse iconographic and alphabetic sources, and proposes a new look at Texcocan history and culture from different academic disciplines. Contributors address some of the most pressing issues in Texcocan studies and bring new ones to light: the role of Texcoco in the Aztec empire, the construction and transformation of Prehispanic history in the colonial period, the continuity and transformation of indigenous culture and politics after the conquest, and the nature and importance of iconographic and alphabetic texts that originated in this city-state, such as the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa Quinatzin, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles. Multiple scholarly perspectives and methodological approaches offer alternative paradigms of research and open a needed dialogue among disciplines—social, political, literary, and art history, as well as the history of science. This comprehensive overview of Prehispanic and colonial Texcoco will be of interest to Mesoamerican scholars in the social sciences and humanities.
Modern Mexico derives many of its richest symbols of national heritage and identity from the Aztec legacy, even as it remains a predominantly Spanish-speaking, Christian society. This volume argues that the composite, neo-Aztec flavor of Mexican identity was, in part, a consequence of active efforts by indigenous elites after the Spanish conquest to grandfather ancestral rights into the colonial era. By emphasizing the antiquity of their claims before Spanish officials, native leaders extended the historical awareness of the colonial regime into the pre-Hispanic past, and therefore also the themes, emotional contours, and beginning points of what we today understand as 'Mexican history'. This emphasis on ancient roots, moreover, resonated with the patriotic longings of many creoles, descendants of Spaniards born in Mexico. Alienated by Spanish scorn, creoles associated with indigenous elites and studied their histories, thereby reinventing themselves as Mexico's new 'native' leadership and the heirs to its prestigious antiquity.
This volume presents the story of Hernando Cortés's conquest of Mexico, as recounted by a contemporary Spanish historian and edited by Mexico's premier Nahua historian. Francisco López de Gómara's monumental Historia de las Indias y Conquista de México was published in 1552 to instant success. Despite being banned from the Americas by Prince Philip of Spain, La conquista fell into the hands of the seventeenth-century Nahua historian Chimalpahin, who took it upon himself to make a copy of the tome. As he copied, Chimalpahin rewrote large sections of La conquista, adding information about Emperor Moctezuma and other key indigenous people who participated in those first encounters. Chialpahin's Conquest is thus not only the first complete modern English translation of López de Gómara's La conquista, an invaluable source in itself of information about the conquest and native peoples; it also adds Chimalpahin's unique perspective of Nahua culture to what has traditionally been a very Hispanic portrayal of the conquest.
"In 1325, the Aztecs founded their capital city Tenochtitlan, which grew to be one of the world's largest cities before it was violently destroyed in 1521 by conquistadors from Spain and their indigenous allies. Re-christened and reoccupied by the Spanish conquerors as Mexico City, it became the pivot of global trade linking Europe and Asia in the 17th century, and one of the modern world's most populous metropolitan areas. However, the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan and its people did not entirely disappear when the Spanish conquistadors destroyed it. By reorienting Mexico City-Tenochtitlan as a colonial capital and indigenous city, Mundy demonstrates its continuity across time. Using maps, manuscripts, and artworks, she draws out two themes: the struggle for power by indigenous city rulers and the management and manipulation of local ecology, especially water, that was necessary to maintain the city's sacred character. What emerges is the story of a city-within-a city that continues to this day"--
For many years, scholars of the conquest worked to shift focus away from the Spanish perspective and bring attention to the often-ignored voices and viewpoints of the Indians. But recent work that highlights the “Indian conquistadors” has forced scholars to reexamine the simple categories of conqueror and subject and to acknowledge the seemingly contradictory roles assumed by native peoples who chose to fight alongside the Spaniards against other native groups. The Native Conquistador—a translation of the “Thirteenth Relation,” written by don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl in the early seventeenth century—narrates the conquest of Mexico from Hernando Cortés’s arrival in 1519 through his expedition into Central America in 1524. The protagonist of the story, however, is not the Spanish conquistador but Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s great-great-grandfather, the native prince Ixtlilxochitl of Tetzcoco. This account reveals the complex political dynamics that motivated Ixtlilxochitl’s decisive alliance with Cortés. Moreover, the dynamic plotline, propelled by the feats of Prince Ixtlilxochitl, has made this a compelling story for centuries—and one that will captivate students and scholars today.
A descendant of both Spanish settlers and Nahua (Aztec) rulers, Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578–1650) was an avid collector of indigenous pictorial and alphabetic texts and a prodigious chronicler of the history of pre-conquest and conquest-era Mexico. His magnum opus, here for the first time in English translation, is one of the liveliest, most accessible, and most influential accounts of the rise and fall of Aztec Mexico derived from indigenous sources and memories and written from a native perspective. Composed in the first half of the seventeenth century, a hundred years after the arrival of the Spanish conquerors in Mexico, the History of the Chichimeca Nation is based on native accounts but written in the medieval chronicle style. It is a gripping tale of adventure, romance, seduction, betrayal, war, heroism, misfortune, and tragedy. Written at a time when colonization and depopulation were devastating indigenous communities, its vivid descriptions of the cultural sophistication, courtly politics, and imperial grandeur of the Nahua world explicitly challenged European portrayals of native Mexico as a place of savagery and ignorance. Unpublished for centuries, it nonetheless became an important source for many of our most beloved and iconic memories of the Nahuas, widely consulted by scholars of Spanish American history, politics, literature, anthropology, and art. The manuscript of the History, lost in the 1820s, was only rediscovered in the 1980s. This volume is not only the first-ever English translation, but also the first edition in any language derived entirely from the original manuscript. Expertly rendered, with introduction and notes outlining the author’s historiographical legacy, this translation at long last affords readers the opportunity to absorb the history of one of the Americas’ greatest indigenous civilizations as told by one of its descendants.
Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives presents an in-depth, highly nuanced historical understanding of this major indigenous Mesoamerican city from the conquest through the present. The book argues for the need to revise conclusions of past scholarship on familiar topics, deals with current debates that derive from differences in the way scholars view abundant and diverse iconographic and alphabetic sources, and proposes a new look at Texcocan history and culture from different academic disciplines. Contributors address some of the most pressing issues in Texcocan studies and bring new ones to light: the role of Texcoco in the Aztec empire, the construction and transformation of Prehispanic history in the colonial period, the continuity and transformation of indigenous culture and politics after the conquest, and the nature and importance of iconographic and alphabetic texts that originated in this city-state, such as the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa Quinatzin, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles. Multiple scholarly perspectives and methodological approaches offer alternative paradigms of research and open a needed dialogue among disciplines—social, political, literary, and art history, as well as the history of science. This comprehensive overview of Prehispanic and colonial Texcoco will be of interest to Mesoamerican scholars in the social sciences and humanities.
An update of a popular work that takes on the myths of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, featuring a new afterword. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest reveals how the Spanish invasions in the Americas have been conceived and presented, misrepresented and misunderstood, in the five centuries since Columbus first crossed the Atlantic. This book is a unique and provocative synthesis of ideas and themes that were for generations debated or perpetuated without question in academic and popular circles. The 2003 edition became the foundation stone of a scholarly turn since called The New Conquest History. Each of the book's seven chapters describes one "myth," or one aspect of the Conquest that has been distorted or misrepresented, examines its roots, and explodes its fallacies and misconceptions. Using a wide array of primary and secondary sources, written in a scholarly but readable style, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest explains why Columbus did not set out to prove the world was round, the conquistadors were not soldiers, the native Americans did not take them for gods, Cortés did not have a unique vision of conquest procedure, and handfuls of vastly outnumbered Spaniards did not bring down great empires with stunning rapidity. Conquest realities were more complex--and far more fascinating--than conventional histories have related, and they featured a more diverse cast of protagonists-Spanish, Native American, and African. This updated edition of a key event in the history of the Americas critically examines the book's arguments, how they have held up, and why they prompted the rise of a New Conquest History.
