‘It is rare indeed that a historian of early Latin America can read a first-person account of public events and find that it unmistakably offers a perspective that only a native person would have had. The historical annals of colonial Mexico, written in Nahuatl … do just that’ (p. 1). With these words, Camilla Townsend introduces her impressive study of two Nahuatl annals – texts containing a chronological listing of events throughout the years – from the Tlaxcala–Puebla region. This work provides readers not only with an indigenous perspective of the social, political and religious events of the region, but also with a nuanced understanding of the annals genre and the similarities and differences between examples from Tlaxcala and Puebla. To accomplish this, Townsend visited archives throughout Europe, Mexico and the United States, obtained a command of the previous work done on Nahuatl annals, performed an incredibly thorough analysis of the texts and their authors, which she presents in accessible prose, and enlisted the expertise of James Lockhart in the form of an essay.

The work consists of an introduction, the essay by Lockhart and the transcription and translation of two Nahuatl annals: one from Tlaxcala, the other from Puebla. Understanding that the annals genre can be somewhat cryptic, Townsend uses her introduction to supply the reader with sufficient context to make good use of the subsequent translated material. Much of this context concerns the historical background of the Tlaxcala–Puebla Valley and its annals. As allies of the Spanish against the Mexica (Aztecs), Tlaxcalans successfully negotiated for themselves certain privileges of autonomy. Thus, when the Spaniards searched for a location for a city between Mexico City and the port of Veracruz, instead of selecting Tlaxcala they chose an abandoned territory on the city's southern border to found the city of Puebla. As a result, Puebla experienced a higher degree of Spanish influence than did Tlaxcala, the consequences of which are evident throughout the annals themselves.

Indeed, Townsend employs her understanding of Tlaxcala and Puebla's history to elucidate the similarities and differences between their annals. Generally speaking the Tlaxcalan annals evince a greater retention of traditional elements, such as an understanding of the native calendar and an insular view of the native polity that largely disregards events outside its boundaries. In contrast, the Puebla annals exhibit less command of the native calendar and a scope that extends beyond the polity to include the surrounding region. Finally, Townsend leads an investigation into the anonymous authors of the Tlaxcala and Puebla annals that is worthy of the best sleuths. Her command of the documents' context and of their historical settings allows her to convincingly identify the two most likely suspects: don Manuel de los Santos y Salazar of Tlaxcala, and don Miguel de los Santos of Puebla.

The differences in Tlaxcala and Puebla's exposure to Spanish culture and its influence on the annals again emerge in Lockhart's essay examining the Nahuatl of the texts. The discussion examines comparatively how the annals fit into a rubric of stages that Lockhart previously developed to map Nahuatl language change in the colonial period. Through an erudite study of the texts’ vocabulary, rhetoric, loanwords, loan verbs and loan particles, Lockhart categorises the Tlaxcalan text as Stage 2 and the Puebla text as ‘perhaps the most comprehensive single illustration of Stage 3 Nahuatl extant' (p. 45). Overall, although both texts show signs of belonging to an eastern branch of Nahuatl, the Tlaxcalan text contains more archaic elements than the Puebla text, which demonstrates both its composition in a cosmopolitan centre rife with Spanish contact, and a change in Puebla's conceptual organisation of rank, naming patterns and rhetoric.

Alone, the transcriptions and translations of the annals that conclude the study give credit to this work and its author and are a great contribution to the increasing volume of available translated Nahuatl texts. Townsend's excellent translations appear side by side with the Nahuatl transcriptions and, when coupled with her extensive footnotes, provide full disclosure of the translation process. Those interested in the colonial society of Central Mexico, Nahuatl and/or the indigenous peoples of colonial Latin America will benefit from this work, which proves why Nahuatl annals ‘deserve far more attention than they have so far received’ (p. 1).