Nahuatl Imprints in the Huntington Collections

Abstract

Less than thirty years after the Spanish conquest of Central Mexico in 1521, the printing of books in both monolingual Nahuatl (Aztec) and bilingual Spanish/Nahuatl editions was thriving. The prestige which precontact Nahuas attached to their codices, painted on native figbark paper, was transferred early in the colonial period to alphabetical writing in Nahuatl on European-style paper. Both types of books, Nahuatl and Spanish/Nahuatl, would continue to appear until Mexican Independence in 1821. There are over 110 extant colonial Mexican imprints in the Nahuatl language,1 many of them to be found in the Huntington collections. While there are reprints, or modified re-editions, of earlier texts, the number of original works in the most widely spoken indigenous language of Mesoamerica can be counted in the dozens, almost all of them associated with the church. Those of most importance to contemporary scholars tend to cluster in a period defined by two imprints. That period opens with the earliest securely dated Nahuatl-language book, a Dominican doctrinal of 1548 entitled Doctrina Christiana en lengua Espanola y Mexicana; it closes in 1645 with the most sophisticated colonial grammar of any Native American language, that by the Jesuit Father Horacio Caro-chi, Arte de la lengva Mexicana.2 These imprints and others like them have been little studied. The lack of attention given to them is a direct result of the state of scholarship in the field of colonial American studies. Until recently the main avenue of approach to the many Native American peoples was through the records left by their European colonizers; thus, the linguistic, cultural, and historical sensibilities developed by scholars studying those peoples were honed in great measure on writings in French, English, Spanish, and