Colonial Nahuatl Research Articles

Indigenous Life after the Conquest: The De la Cruz Family Papers of Colonial Mexico

Indigenous Life after the Conquest: The De la Cruz Family Papers of Colonial Mexico offers a unique glimpse into the dynamics between one prominent Nahua family and their community of Tepemaxalco in the Toluca Valley. The volume presents translations of five Nahuatl- and Spanish-language documents produced by the De la Cruz family, including a record book, a tribute document, an excerpt of baptismal records, and two testaments. The volume also provides a transcription of the original Nahuatl and Spanish of the record book kept by don Pedro de la Cruz and his descendants between 1647 and 1821. The documents represent various genres of colonial Nahuatl writing and address a number of important social, economic, and cultural themes. Together these sources highlight both change and continuity in an Indigenous community of colonial Mexico.The records from Tepemaxalco demonstrate the persistence of Nahua social organization and stratification. A noble class, including don Pedro and his descendants, hold political and religious offices, sponsor the church, and possess impressive amounts of wealth in land, houses, livestock, and goods. Commoners appear as those who pay tribute in labor and coin; don Pedro remembers the “poor” with a bequest of food in his last will and testament. References to family members and ritual kin reveal social networks within and beyond the household. Records concerning tribute and communal labor shed light on the ways that households, and especially groups within the altepetl (Nahua ethnic state), pooled resources and worked tribute lands to pay for community and church expenses.The material in the sources on religious culture is particularly rich. The Nahua authors speak of local devotions to saints and describe how individuals and the community sustained the saints and church with their labor and bequests. Members of the De la Cruz family and Nahua church officials, especially cantores (church singers), make substantial donations and organize labor drafts on communal lands to purchase expensive decorations and altarpieces for the church, clothing for the saints, and garments for dancers. They buy paints and dyes for artistic endeavors and commission Spanish and Nahua craftsmen to paint and guild murals, lienzos (Indigenous painted cloths), and retablos. They are particularly concerned with music as an aspect of religious expression and describe efforts to buy an organ, guitars, and trumpets for the church.As a volume intended for classroom use, Indigenous Life after the Conquest provides a rich collection of documents that introduce students to the complexity of the colonial Nahua world. It is a world in which the altepetl remains the basis of sociopolitical organization, even as there is evidence of change in religious beliefs, material culture, and many other matters within the community. An insightful introductory essay will help students make sense of the bigger picture that the myriad details in the sources reveal. A glossary and brief commentaries on each of the documents will help make the material approachable to an undergraduate audience. This fascinating collection would be of interest to students in courses on colonial Latin America, Indigenous peoples of Mexico, Mexican religion, or ethnohistorical sources and methods.

Aztec and Maya Apocalypses: Old World Tales of Doom in a New World Setting by Mark Z. Christensen

Reviewed by: Aztec and Maya Apocalypses: Old World Tales of Doom in a New World Setting by Mark Z. Christensen Amara Solari Aztec and Maya Apocalypses: Old World Tales of Doom in a New World Setting. By Mark Z. Christensen (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. 2022. Pp. xii, 252. $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-806-19035-8.) Writing amid our current apocalypse, the global COVID-19 pandemic, historian Mark Z. Christensen has offered a complete reimagining of the fundamental role the idea of “Doomsday” played in the Christianization of the Indigenous populations [End Page 223] of the American continents in the early modern period. The author—an ethnohistorian who is renowned for his translation abilities in both colonial Nahuatl (the Aztec language) and Yucatec Mayan (the Mayan dialect spoken in most of the Yucatan Peninsula)—clearly outlines in his Introduction three goals for his tome. His overarching goal is to translate and analyze relatively obscure eschatological texts, composed in these two Indigenous languages, to convey their creative adaptation to serve the idiosyncratic spiritual needs of the evangelical endeavors in New Spain. Secondly, Christensen strives to complicate the historiographical tendency to approach native responses to Christianity in one of two modes: to assume the wholesale adoption of the European religion, or on the more extreme end of this continuum, envision that all Indigenous interpretations of Christianity were inherently subversive. Christensen’s approach is much more nuanced than either of these, as he stresses the importance of a scholarly appreciation of both contributing religious traditions, an academic method that ultimately allows for Indigenous Christianity to be the result of active and ongoing negotiations between Indigenous neophytes and their resident friars. The importance of Christensen’s approach cannot be overstated as it serves to reinscribe agency onto native communities of New Spain. His final articulated goal is to offer his readers English translations of his textual source base. After providing an overview of Spanish and Mesoamerican worldviews of the early modern period, Christensen spends his first body chapter succinctly synthesizing contemporaneous eschatology, explaining how and why millenarianism was a pragmatic worldview for the Spaniards responsible for New World conquests of both territory and of souls. Thereafter, Christensen craftily organizes the remaining chapters along an eschatological chronology. Chapter 2 turns to the topics of the first judgement, limbo, and purgatory, using Juan Bautista Viseo’s Confesario (1599), Ignacio de Paredes’s Promptuario (1759), Juan Coronel’s Discursos (1620), and the anonymous Sermones en lengua Maya (18th century) to analyze how these moments of “personal apocalypses” were conveyed to Nahuatl and Mayan-speaking audiences. Chapter 3 moves on to the Apocalypse proper, providing translations of such important texts as the “Fifteen Signs” from an anonymous Maya sermons copybook (which can be partially correlated with texts and images from the 15th-century German book, Der Antichrist und die fünfzehn Zeichen) and Bautista’s Nahuatl Sermonario (1606). Personal resurrection following the Final Judgement is the topic of the next Chapter, which analyzes the Seven Articles in the Dominican Martín de León’s Camino de cielo (1611) and in Coronel’s Discursos predicables. Chapter 5 finishes the body chapters, focused on four texts (Fabián de Aquino’s 16th-century copybook, Coronel’s Discursos and Discursos predicables, and the “Teabo Manuscript”), which describe heaven and hell. This book is a welcome and overdue addition to the academic subfields of Latin American religious studies and ethnohistory; Christensen’s analytically rich translations of Nahuatl and Mayan documents are a true gift. It also bears noting that beyond the relatively small circle of Mesoamerican ethnohistorians, this book speaks to the larger field of Catholic studies, evidencing, as it does, one of the most [End Page 224] creative examples of religious localization and native negotiation in global history. Moreover, this text could be easily incorporated into an undergraduate or graduate syllabus as Christensen’s conversational writing style makes for a very enjoyable read, despite his apocalyptic subject matter. [End Page 225] Amara Solari The Pennsylvania State University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...

Indigenous Life after the Conquest: The de la Cruz Family Papers of Colonial Mexico

Caterina Pizzigoni and Camilla Townsend's translation of a set of Nahuatl-language documents represents the 16th volume in Latin American Originals, a series edited by Matthew Restall that presents translations of primary source texts with specialist scholarly apparatus. Colonial-era wills and other forms of mundane documents have long provided scholars a rich source of material to study Indigenous history, notably in the groundbreaking work of the late James Lockhart. The materials in Pizzigoni and Townsend's Indigenous Life after the Conquest are distinctive in this tradition because the records belonged to a single family and were maintained by that family over centuries. As Pizzigoni and Townsend explain in their introduction, the de la Cruz family from the Toluca Valley were elite but not noble. They were the sort of family whose wealth and status grew in the colonial period, much to the chagrin of Indigenous families descendant from the great tlatoque who ruled over central Mexico before the arrival of Europeans. The core set of de la Cruz documents was initially identified by Lockhart in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. He shared transcriptions of the materials with Pizzigoni, who in turn located additional records related to the family in various archives. In this slim volume, Pizzigoni and Townsend present translations of five of these documents accompanied by a robust introduction that provides insight into the multiple generations of family members who produced them.The lengthiest of the texts, the first document is titled “The de la Cruz Family Record Book,” and it, unlike the remaining four documents, is presented initially in Nahuatl as transcribed from the manuscript and then in English translation. Don Pedro de la Cruz began the book in 1647 to keep records of donations he made to local churches. A decade later, around the time that don Pedro assumed the role of gobernador of the altepetl of Tepemaxalco, the book evolved to become a repository of other events related to his community, in the tradition of Nahua historical annals, or xiuhpohualli. This book would be maintained by the family until the nineteenth century. The final entry is in the year 1842, decades after Mexican independence. The document provides an extraordinary window on the daily lived experiences of Nahua elite families during the colonial period. We find records of financial accounts and labor tribute, descriptions of harvests and building projects including evolving repairs and additions to the church, and entries detailing the specific positions that individuals in the community held. The notations are remarkable for the precision with which they capture daily life in an Indigenous community, as the authors recorded events they deemed significant, ranging from an eclipse to the donation of a bell to the church and the purchase of chickens used to entertain guests from Mexico City. The quotidian becomes noteworthy through its sheer consistency and duration.Document 2 provides records for the year 1658 from a tribute roll maintained by don Pedro de la Cruz during his first eight years as governor of Tepemaxalco, from 1657 to 1665. In addition to alphabetic notations of monetary tribute, the document contains a duplicate accounting in non-European pictoglyphic notations that show contributions from each tlaxilacalli, or subdistrict of the altepetl. Document 3 provides the seventeenth-century birth records of members of the de la Cruz family found in the Archivo Parroquial de San Pedro y San Pablo in Calimaya, Mexico. Document 4 is the will of don Pedro de la Cruz, dated 1667, while document 5 is the will of his son-in-law don Juan de la Cruz, dated 1691. Don Juan's will was written with care over a period of time and reflects with great consideration how his assets should be distributed and how his death should be remembered in his church and community. This final document is followed by several brief scholarly supplements, including an epilogue, a note on language and orthography, and a glossary.Renowned experts, Pizzigoni and Townsend bring their knowledge of colonial Nahuatl as well as Nahua cultural and social history to these unique sources. The ancillary materials situate the corpus of colonial-era manuscript records for the reader, while the documents themselves provide a rich depiction of daily life for the de la Cruz family, an Indigenous family whose members held leadership positions in their local community over the course of centuries. In this way, these records attest to the survival and endurance of Indigenous lives and traditions under Hispanic colonial rule.

On classifiers and their absence in Classical and Colonial Nahuatl

AbstractThis paper addresses the issue of the reported optional character of numeral classifiers in Classical and Colonial Nahuatl. On the basis of the qualitative assessment of the co-occurrence of numerals with classifiers or zero in constructions which serve the purpose of quantifying or ordinally ranking NPs, the optionality hypothesis is assessed. The question is raised whether or not the presence and absence of classifiers is arbitrary or triggered by formal and/or functional factors. To this end, empirical evidence of the phenomena under review has been gathered from a selection of texts of the colonial era. Quantitative findings based on theCodex Florentinusare presented too. The discussion of these data uncovers that the classifier system of Classical and Colonial Nahuatl does not lend itself to a straightforward characterization so that further investigations are called for.

‘Micropoetics’: The Poetry of Hypertrophic Words in Early Colonial Nahuatl

This paper investigates instances of what has been called ‘linguistic hypertrophism’ in certain Nahuatl texts from early colonial Mexico. Beyond the mere description of this phenomenon, this paper proposes that certain types of hypertrophic words found within the corpus of colonial Nahuatl literature can be analyzed as single-word poetic texts. Furthermore, it is argued that these words display many of the characteristic features of Nahuatl poetics, including couplets, triplets, and parallel structuring, all within the morphological boundaries of individual words. Words analyzed here constitute understudied examples of indigenous literary production and serve as evidence of the persistence of indigenous orality and poetics well into the colonial period.

Language Encounters: Toward a Better Comprehension of Contact‑Induced Lexical Change in Colonial Nahuatl

The extensive corpus of colonial Nahuatl texts lights on almost every sphere of colonial life and cross‑cultural interactions between the Europeans/Spaniards and the indigenous world. This corpus contains rich language data related to contact‑induced change that reveal a simultaneous, prolonged use of neologisms and loanwords, a widespread “Nahuatlization” of foreign terms as well as adoption of Spanish ideas and cultural stereotypes. The linguistic phenomena discussed in the present paper focus on lexical change, neologization, meaning change, borrowing and the creation of calques. These language innovations reveal the nuances of the complex process of cross‑cultural translation, the receptivity of European influence, the domestication of the new and the survival of traditional language resources.

Early and contemporary Nahuatl texts in sociolinguistic perspective

This paper will present a series of illustrations at different levels of sociolinguistic analysis, including phono-morphological as well as semantic materials stemming from work in progress on the investigation of Nahuatl linguistic ideologies in historical as well as in a contemporary perspective. For this aim, selected Nahuatl texts pertaining to so called Classical Nahuatl (CN), early colonial Nahuatl documents as well as the contemporary use of contact varieties in different settings will be considered, re-contextualizing them in their socio-pragmatic and ethno–historical dimensions. Such verbal practices belong to several types of genres and linguistic varieties, which analytically have been reduced to a grammatical schema, with very scarce if any attention to the Nahua verbal sociolinguistic culture and its variability. In this sense, our focus will be on the relation of variability and power, understanding linguistic variability as an eloquent index of the ethno-pragmatics of power relationships established in any (bilingual) society, most of all in terms of specific power arrangements and differentials manifested in heteroglossic phenomena.

Nahuatl Theater, Volume 2: Our Lady of Guadalupe (review)

Nahuatl Theater, Volume 2: Our Lady of Guadalupe. Edited by Barry D. Sell, Louise M. Burkhart, and Stafford Poole. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 229. $49-95.) Each year, on the eve of the celebration on December 12 that is dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe, there begins the ritual of the appearance of television series, films (new or old), theater productions, books, and many periodical articles concerning the miracle of the presence of the Virgin Mary in Tepeyac, to the north of Mexico City. In accordance with social conditions, economics, and political demands in the country, it is possible to detect the inclusion in this material of changes to some situations, or the pre-Hispanic, colonial, or modern people participating in the part of the account that is the best known and most often repeated.This is the Nican mopohua (It is told in an orderly way), a text in the Nahuatl language that was published for the first time in 1649. It has become the axis and paradigm for our knowledge of the tradition. And so it seems that this custom of using the Guadalupan apparitions as a foundation and beginning for other narrations, primarily those with a tendency to admonish and promote the exemplary life, has its beginning in previous centuries, as the work reviewed here proves. In this second volume on the Nahuatl theater (the first, entitled Nahuatl Theater. Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico, was edited in 2004 by Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart, with the assistance of Gregory Spira), the editors undertake the laborious task of reconstructing and translating into English various Guadalupan texts in the Nahuatl language: a Coloquio (Dialogue on the Apparition of the Virgin Saint Mary of Guadalupe) and a comedy with the title Portento mexicano (The Wonder of Mexico), as well as a song, a sermon, and a prayer. The translations, to which Lisa Sousa also contributed, are accompanied by two critical essays written by Stafford Poole and Louise M. Burkhart. These clarify various aspects of the contents, particularly the social relationships that the works reflect. Thanks to the experience that they have acquired in critical translations of colonial Nahuatl texts, the editors bring us a highly useful work, a contribution to various areas of knowledge concerning the indigenous Mexican of the past and especially Guadalupan studies, which traditionally have been based on a limited number of sources from the indigenous and Hispanic traditions. …

Nahua Confraternities in Early Colonial Mexico: The 1552 Ordinances of Fray Alonso de Molina, OFM

This bilingual critical edition of Fray Alonso de Molina’s little-known confraternity regulations is a valuable addition to the growing corpus of colonial Nahuatl texts in available in English. Molina, brought to Mexico as a small child, was the Franciscans’ premier expert in Nahuatl and is a key figure in the early period of colonial Mexican history. He is best known as the author of the bilingual dictionary in Spanish and Nahuatl (1555 and 1571), a text crucial for friars’ evangelization efforts and still used as a key resource for modern scholars and translators. Molina also produced a bilingual confessional manual that went through multiple editions. This critical edition of his confraternity ordinances makes available another significant text. However, although the ordinances were important, editor-translator Barry Sell’s claim that they are the “most important” of Molina’s oeuvre (p. 50) is an exaggeration. However, Sell’s assertion that their “ultimate value lies precisely in challenging students of early modern central Mexico to use native and intrusive sources to study Nahuas and Spaniards, both on their own terms and their complex and fascinating interaction” (p. 63) is amply supported by the volume’s introductory articles and careful transcription and translation.The introductory essays, short and incisive, provide evidence and insight on early colonial processes. The contribution of Europeanist Larissa Taylor compares the Nahuatl regulations to ones found in Europe, concluding that Molina’s “is a set of rules that does not differ significantly from what one would find in the ‘Old World’ ” (p. 18). This might not be surprising, but the explicit comparison by an expert is valuable information. Distinguished colonial historian Asunción Lavrin gives an overview of confraternities in Spanish America, drawing on her considerable scholarly expertise in religious history. She points out that the Molina regulations emerge in a formative period of colonial history when, as she puts it, “the classic seed from which a mighty oak developed, and illustrate a relationship of subordination of the indigenous to the religious tenets of Christianity” (p. 37). Barry Sell’s two essays on the 1552 manuscript provide information on other known Nahuatl sodality regulations and offer keen insights into the extant copies of Molina’s regulations. As scholars attempt to establish the pace and depth of Christianization in Mexico and the effect of religious institutions on indigenous organization, the growth in the number and size of confraternities is a useful indicator. Although some have placed the true flowering of confraternities in the early seventeenth century, Sell argues persuasively that the existence of Molina’s regulations dating from the mid – sixteenth century, as well as Nahuatl confraternity records from Tula in the 1570s, point to an earlier florescence. Sell has studied the Tula records in detail and compares that community-based information with the Molina text.Three copies of Molina’s regulations are known to exist, residing in the collections of the University of California, Berkeley, Tulane University, and the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología in Mexico. The existence of several copies of this early colonial text is of importance in itself, given the labor-intensive nature of hand copying and the small number of literate Nahuatl speakers available to perform it. According to Sell, the task of copying probably fell to literate Nahua men. He has examined all three copies carefully and found textual evidence to support his contention that the manuscripts are consistent with Nahua writing practices. Some of the meticulous and persuasive explication of this point is of greater interest to linguists and philologists than to the historian or general reader, but Sell’s discussion of how these texts were produced gives insight into early sixteenth-century processes of cultural interaction. Molina and his fellow Nahuatl-speaking Franciscan, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, relied extensively on literate Nahua men both as translation consultants and as copyists. Although Molina’s name appears as the author of the confraternity regulations, Sell points out he was not a lone writer working in isolation but rather part of an extensive network of fellow friars and their Nahua consultants.Sell has transcribed and translated the copy located in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. With the Nahuatl and English translation on facing pages, the volume will be useful both for those who wish to compare the texts and for those who wish to consult only the translation. Footnotes compare the Berkeley manuscript with the other extant copies. Sell also includes full transcriptions of those two manuscripts.This critical edition will prove useful to those interested in indigenous peoples, comparative religious history, and philology. For scholars focused on the history of early colonial Mexico, this volume is an indispensable primary source. The supporting scholarly material in the introductory essays and the textual transcription, translation, and commentary itself make this volume a valuable contribution to the field.

Nahuatl Theater. vol. 1. Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico

This volume (the first of four projected volumes) contains transcriptions and English translations of seven religious plays in Nahuatl that have survived from Mexico’s colonial period. The plays themselves are preceded by Miguel León-Portilla’s foreword and four analytical essays. The foreword reviews the historical context of the plays, summarizes the work of scholars writing prior to the 1974 publication of the first volume of Fernando Horcasitas’s El teatro náhuatl: Epocas novohispana y moderna, and an appreciation of the career of Horcasitas. The 1974 volume was intended as the first of five, but the project was cut short by Horcasitas’s death in 1980. Burkhart and Sell’s preface sets forth the abundance of research on colonial Nahuatl published since then and discusses the impact of this scholarly work for the transcriptions and translations of three plays that appear here and in the Horcasitas edition. They also detail their methodology.In the first of the four essays, Sell quotes James Lockhart, who said of the Horcasi-tas volume that the transcriptions “mainly modernize the orthography, with consequent loss of distinctions, although some idiosyncrasies of the originals are retained.” In fact, Horcasitas recast, in a somewhat modernized and standardized style, both the plays in question and two volumes of folktales told by Doña Luz Jiménez. He intended to make this Nahuatl material more widely accessible to Mexican readers unfamiliar with colonial orthographic abbreviations and phonetic transcription. Such an editorial policy, not primarily intended for an audience of philologists, was hardly the result of carelessness or ignorance on the part of Horcasitas. We can only be grateful for the new versions now made available by Sell and Burkart. Sell’s essay also locates the seven plays in historical, philological, and thematic context, examining dates that appear within the texts themselves, cross-references to plays in other contemporary writing, rhetorical features, and subject matter as it reveals ecclesiastic and social anxieties of the times.Burkhart’s essay looks at the concept of the “good death” and how this played out among the Nahua in terms of care for the dying, last confession, final disposition of material possessions, the survival of the soul, and divine retribution. Daniel Mosquera compares the possible Spanish sources for the plays with their Mexican counterparts, and Viviana Díaz Balsera devotes her essay to one play, “The Sacrifice of Isaac,” with its fraught theme of human sacrifice in the context of Mesoamerican society, where the indigenous practice of human sacrifice was still a recent memory.The transcriptions and translations of the plays, printed on facing pages, facilitate cross-reference between the Nahuatl and the English. Footnotes at the bottom of the left-hand pages refer to issues of transcription, while footnotes on the right-hand pages present alternative translations and identify translations that are tentative. Differences in tone are partly due to the translator: Sell being primary translator of four of the plays and Burkhart of three. Sell tends to a more colloquial style. For instance, in translation, Ishmael speculates that he can spirit Isaac away from their father’s feast by sneaking him out (p. 153). Later, the messenger angel bearing God’s command to offer up Isaac tells Abraham, “Now listen up!” (p. 161). In another text, Don Sebastián scorns the practice of “hanging around at Church” (p. 275). The Nahuatl verbs that Sell translated in this colloquial fashion are neutral with respect to this degree of informality.On the other hand, some differences of tone appear to reflect the relative age of the Nahuatl texts themselves. The play about the Final Judgment, translated by Burkhart, is rife with the Nahuatl high rhetoric also to be found in the Florentine Codex and the Bancroft Dialogues, both products of the sixteenth century. In the play, there is a decidedly indigenous character whose role is to get people to sweep, keep vigil, rise early, expose themselves to cold, and abstain from food—all precontact practices adapted to Christian life (p. 193). On the other hand, the play about an avaricious merchant (whose dialogue mentions the year 1627) is for the most part free of precontact rhetorical devices, although there is a classical reference to the slippery earth (p. 261).The plays illustrate a pervasive preoccupation with sudden-onset mortal illness and final confession. For this reason, two other recently published books, Daniel T. Reff’s Plagues, Priests, Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005) and Osvaldo F. Pardo’s The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2004) can be profitably read together with Nahuatl Theater. Reff has a chapter on disease and the rise of Christianity in colonial Mexico, and Pardo has one on penance and contrition among the Nahuas.

Consecrated Transactions: Of Marketplaces, Passion Plays and other Nahua-Christian Devotions

Consecrated Transactions: Of Marketplaces, Passion Plays and other Nahua-Christian Devotions

Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature, by Louise M. Burkhart

<i>Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature</i>, by Louise M. Burkhart

Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature. By Louise M. Burkhart. Albany: State University of New York, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, 2001. [Distributed by the University of Texas Press] Pp. viii, 165. Illustrations. Notes. References Cited. Index. $25.00 paper.

Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature. By Louise M. Burkhart. Albany: State University of New York, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, 2001. [Distributed by the University of Texas Press] Pp. viii, 165. Illustrations. Notes. References Cited. Index. $25.00 paper. - Volume 59 Issue 4

Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature; Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries

Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature; Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries

:Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Náhuatl Literature

:<i>Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Náhuatl Literature</i>

Y la Ana lloró: cesión de un sitio para casa, San Miguel Tocuilán,1583

A latter sixteenth-century document from a small town on the eastern shore of Lake Texcoco tells in considerable detail the story of how a married couple, related to a member of the town council, obtained the grant of a house site. The document reports the process from the first feelers put out by the family, through the council's colorful deliberations on the occasion of a meal, to the proceedings at the site and the general embraces at the end. Everything is told in dialogue form, an extreme example of the declamatory tendency of colonial Nahuatl documentation in general. Several aspects of social and political ritual are revealed, including the role of the woman as principal petitioner for a family.