The flood of scholarly writing about indigenous histories of the Americas that picked up steam around 1992, the year of the protest or celebration – depending on one's point of view – of the Quincentennial, has not abated; nor has the influence of major works published around that time, especially James Lockhart's The Nahuas after the Conquest (Stanford University Press, 1992) and Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America (Harper Collins, 1996), diminished. Lockhart and Todorov, in very different ways, expressed and encouraged the interdisciplinary turn not only toward the textual and cultural but also toward an examination of colonial indigenous history through indigenous ways of seeing the world. This much-needed corrective to a historiography that remained rooted in triumphalist perspectives for far too long has led lately to a growing body of research dealing with Spanish conquests.
This emergent scholarship emphasises the use of indigenous-produced documentation to understand these events through the worldviews of indigenous peoples. Matthew Restall recently examined this trend in an essay on the New Conquest History (in History Compass) and characterised it as having ‘profoundly altered’ understandings of the conquest period. One of the books he mentions, The Conquest All Over Again, I review here. It constitutes a significant contribution to the New Conquest History and is based upon intensive analyses of indigenous-focused texts (whether produced by indigenous, mestizo or, in one case, Spanish authors), and covers a wide range of document types, including annals, plays, confessionals, primordial titles and pictorials. In these varied genres, Nahuas (and in one essay, Zapotecs) grapple with the impact, meaning and consequences of conquest. Each essay shows the challenges wrought by invasion, war, and new forms of rule and expression. These challenges led natives to produce literature that sometimes spoke to that new audience of Spanish officials but more often addressed primarily native audiences and concerns. Rather than discuss the essays in the chronological order in which they appear in the book, I group them here as texts that speak largely to indigenous audiences, those that are what I call ‘outer directed,’ and those whose audience is potentially bicultural.
Among the essays are texts (by Terraciano, Burkhart, Townsend, Tavárez and Haskett) that appear to have been directed solely or primarily to indigenous audiences. Kevin Terraciano's essay analysing three texts relating to the conquest of the Tlatelolca, the people he calls ‘the other Mexica’, features a virtuoso translation of an obscure document dating from approximately 1545, connected to a text known as the Annals of Tlatelolco. The Nahuatl-language text deals with the Cortés expedition to Honduras during which several indigenous rulers, Quauhtemoc among them, were put to death by Cortés. Comparing this fascinating early text to two other Tlatelolco-based indigenous accounts, Terraciano provides a detailed overview of Tlatelolca renderings of the conquest, their resentment of the Tenochca, and the disruptions and cruelty wrought by the Spanish and their native allies. Whereas indigenous writings from other regions (see Haskett's essay on Cuernavaca) sometimes downplay disruptions caused by the Spanish invaders, these Tlatelolco-based texts most certainly do not.
In Louise Burkhart's essay, concerning a Nahuatl-language retelling of a Castilian play, ‘La destruycion de Jerusalem’, about the Roman-led fall of Jerusalem, we also see references to violence. While the playwriting tradition she discusses owed much to Franciscan efforts to use drama as a tool of cultural persuasion, many such plays were adapted or written by Nahuas for Nahuas. This essay provides a fine introduction to this body of texts, the subject of a four-volume compilation and analysis co-edited by Burkhart and Barry Sell, another contributor to this volume. Three other essays focus on indigenous writers writing for their communities. Camilla Townsend analyses an annalist and his writings from seventeenth-century Tlaxcala from the perspectives of identity and linguistic change. David Tavárez considers Zapotec primordial titles and calendars and how Spanish legal concepts became deeply embedded and meaningful within eighteenth-century Zapotec-language texts, clearly intended for local time and history-keeping. And Robert Haskett, also writing about the eighteenth century, investigates Nahua renderings of the coming of Catholicism to Cuernavaca as described in primordial titles from that area. Each of these essays demonstrates how vibrant Mesoamerican traditions took stock of new ideas, practices and beliefs and found ways to encode them within regional and ethnic linguistic and literary traditions, largely for the purposes of individual communities.
Other authors analyse pictorial or textual traditions that are more explicitly addressed to colonial officials. Travis Barton Kranz works with a series of pictorials related to and including the Lienzo de Tlaxcala and details how Tlaxcalteca promoted themselves and their altepetl to the colonial government by means of these texts. He explains how related images across the series changed as indigenous painters and writers responded to what they believed the most persuasive forms of visual and written rhetoric would be to maintain privileges granted to Tlaxcala and its nobility during the sixteenth century. Amber Brian compares don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl's two conquest-related accounts, the ‘Thirteenth Relation’, part of his Compendio historico and the incomplete rendering of conquest history in his Historia de la nación chichimeca. A highly acculturated figure, Alva Ixtlilxochitl nevertheless created and added to a kind of indigenous archive, in his case with the purpose of extolling the glories of Tetzcoca history as the descendants of its pre-Hispanic nobility sought help from the Spanish king and other officials to maintain lands and privileges. In his Historia, this author produces a more Spanish-centred conquest account that downplays some of the bitterness he had expressed in the earlier ‘Thirteenth Relation’. The tension and contradictions within his body of writing speak to the multiple perspectives Alva Ixtlilxochitl brought to the task of writing Spanish-language native histories that would promote Tetzcoca identity and the interests of its colonial nobility.
We come finally to two essays about writers whose audiences need more explanation. This is especially the case for the well-known seventeenth-century writer, Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin. A Nahua who wrote mainly in Nahuatl, Chimalpahin also made a copy of an important Spanish account of conquest, Francisco López de Gómara's La conquista de México. Why and for whom did Chimalpahin write? On the one hand, his well-known annals present highly detailed pictures of Mexico Tenochtitlan and other cities, and he wrote a chronicle about Amecameca, intending to provide an historical record for these Nahua communities. But he also produced that copy of López de Gómara's book, preserving not just Nahua histories but also a Spanish version of the conquest of Tenochtitlan, embellished with additional information on native practices as well as many Christian references. Whereas Alva Ixtlilxochitl used indigenous history, texts and oral accounts largely to address Spaniards, Chimalpahin is unique among indigenous chroniclers in copying and editing a published account in the Spanish language. Schroder speculates that ‘he may have intended nothing more than to make a true copy of La conquista; he was going to use the book as a copy text for a Nahuatl-language edition that revised and challenged the Spanish version; or both, that is, he used his Spanish copy with his important but rather conventional changes as a cover for what he rewrote for an exclusive Nahua readership’ (p. 108). He took care to display his devotion to the Catholic faith, however, which suggests his belief – or perhaps worry – that Spanish eyes would come upon the text.
Barry Sell's essay describes papers of the gifted Jesuit linguist Horacio Carochi, among which are some 30 folios of confessional samples produced early in the seventeenth century. The focus of these pages is not on the questions that priests should ask (the typical focus of confessional manuals), but lies instead on the answers they might receive from native parishioners. Carochi seems to have intended to relay something of Nahuas' experiences in daily life to priests who would hear confessions throughout the churches of rural and urban central Mexico. Thus he was translating Nahua culture and behaviour for men who would be immersed in bilingual and bicultural interactions during the colonial era.
This carefully edited volume, featuring chapters of uniformly high quality, gives the reader entrée into a series of indigenous- or mestizo-authored texts that do not so much replace Spanish-authored writings (though these essays will certainly inspire more complex re-readings) as provide readers with an introduction to an array of lesser-known or unknown authors and texts telling different stories of conquest for a variety of purposes and audiences. The book largely shares with the New Conquest History a de-emphasis on the conquest as cataclysmic and transformative. This school or approach is not the place to learn about early colonial demography, political change or labour issues, but for readers interested in colonial indigenous literacies, literatures and cultures and Mesoamerican history in the post-conquest era, this volume illustrates how the vast central Mexican indigenous archive is transforming understandings of conquest and its consequences.
