The View from San Juan del Rio

Abstract

After the Spanish conquest, Mexican indigenous peoples were exposed to European culture to varying degrees. The people of the Tlaxcala valley, east of Mexico City, were more isolated from Spanish colonisers than many others. Thus in the 17th century, we find a florescence of traditional indi-genous historical annals in the native language of Nahuatl, by then written out in the Roman alphabet rather than in the older pictographic forms. In this region, a new city was founded, Puebla de los Angeles, with Spanish, indigenous and African settlers. Here lived an indigenous historian named don Miguel de los Santos, who produced a text embodying the perspective of indigenous residents, but comingled with the history of the Spaniards as well as that of Africans and other groups of Native Americans. Making fascinating use of his people’s traditional multi-vocal histories, don Miguel was able to maintain a certain flexibility in the face of Spanish conquest: he found that new content and even new styles could be incorporated without obliterating the old.