Hernan Cortés did not conquer the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, with 300 European soldiers as one popular version suggests. In fact, he would never have even reached the spectacular city without the aid of tens of thousands of Amerindian warriors from various polities throughout the region. Many Mesoamerican city-states already in conflict with the Aztecs allied themselves with the Spanish invaders against their domineering imperial Mexica lords. Nevertheless, in English-language academic discourse, we continue to conceptualize the fall of the Aztec empire as a one-on-one conflict between the Mexica ruler, Moctezuma, and the European conquistador. The details we study about this encounter that are accessible in English come from the accounts of the Spanish and their Indigenous, mostly Mexica, informants. Nevertheless, at the moment of the European arrival in Mexico, the Triple Alliance, a confederation of three of the most powerful city-states: the Mexica-Tenochca (“Mexica” or “Aztecs”), the Tetzcocans, and the Tepanecs, maintained power over the region. While the Mexica dominated the alliance militarily, the Tetzcocans and the Tepanecs managed to preserve their autonomy over their own allied tributaries for nearly 100 years. We know this because the Tetzcocans, like the Mexica, had their own chroniclers before and after the arrival of the Europeans. Unfortunately, until the publication of this volume, only a few of their narratives have been accessible to the English-speaking world. This text will open up the study of the Conquest of Mexico and Indigenous participation in the colony of New Spain.This translation of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s History of the Chichimeca Nation: Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Seventeenth-Century Chronicle of Ancient Mexico by Brian, Benton, Villella and García Loaeza, represents the first English translation of the notable narrative. This is not the team’s first translation of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s work. Brian, Benton and García Loaeza honed their skills on a translation of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s “Thirteenth Relation,” a narrative of how his great-grandfather, Ixtlilxochitl, allied himself with Cortés to conquer Tenochtitlan. That project produced the book The Native Conquistador: Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s account of the Conquest of New Spain (Penn State University Press, 2015). The collaborative processes of literary scholars Brian and García Loaeza and historians Benton and Villella provided insightful tools with which to decipher the dense, poetic Spanish of the mestizo chronicler’s five-hundred-year trajectory of Tetzcocan events from the arrival of settlers in the Valley of Mexico (Anahuac) early 11th century to the siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521.This translation was made directly from the scholar team’s paleography of the original manuscript in Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s hand. Unlike the Spanish original, the editorial team used punctuation and capitalization to aid the comprehension of the reader, and since Baroque Spanish uses sprawling, metaphoric sentences that lead to ambiguous antecedents and possible pronoun confusions, the translation team decided to shorten many of the sentences in the spirit of readability. Although it is known now as History of the Chichimeca Nation, this title seems to have been added in a colonial edition (33). Alva Ixtlilxochitl calls his manuscript “Summary Account.” Like the Spanish-language original, the translation of the History of the Chichimeca Nation (Historia) uses short chapters with very descriptive subtitles. For example, “Chapter 11: Of the civil wars among the Chichimecs and others that occurred during the reign of Quinatzin (29)” describes those battles in detail.In the first section of the Historia, Chapters 1–13, Alva Ixtlilxochitl reminds the reader that Mesoamerica and Colonial Mexico have Indigenous historical traditions that should be treated with the same authority as European sources. In the opening lines of Chapter 1, the chronicler introduces the “most serious authors and historians of Pre-Christian times” including “Quetzalcoatl . . . foremost among the ancients (33)”. He also mentions the modern scholars Nezahualcoyotl, Itzcoatl, and Xiuhcozcatl, and indicates there are many others whom he will name when he cites them. The author importantly points to Amerindian Historiography in a gesture that encourages his readers to reflect more deeply on the sophistication of Mesoamerican cultures. These sources are often difficult to navigate for European-trained scholars. This translation, by scholars comfortable in both Amerindian and European sources, opens access for many to better grasp this perspective.The first chapters continue narrating Mesoamerican creation and cosmology from the Tetzcocan perspective. Alva Ixtlilxochitl then describes the arrival of various ethnic and political groups into Anahuac. The chronicler narrates the arrival of the Toltec people and then the Chichimec migrations from the north. The nomadic, Nahuatl-speaking Chichimecs of the title arrived in Anahuac in waves and settled in a variety of places around Lake Texcoco and its environs. In this section, Alva Ixtlilxochitl offers careful details of alliances and genealogies that help sort out the complex and cosmopolitan nature of the Valley of Mexico.The second section from Chapters 14–31, describes the participation of the Tetzcocans in Tepanec Wars, a fierce conflict between the rival city-states that had established themselves in the Valley. This war eventually resulted in the establishment of the Triple Alliance. This section also details how the crown prince, Nezahualcoyotl, fared during this conflict and how he grew into a warrior poet king. In Chapters 32–49, Alva Ixtlilxochitl chronicles the 43-year rule of Nezahualcoyotl, including one of the longest chapters in the text, Chapter 36, “Of how Nezahualcoyotl built a palace for his residence, which was the grandest in New Spain, and its description” (132–136), and Chapter 47 “Which deals with some of the prophecies and sayings of King Nezahualcoyotzin” (173–174).The following section (Chapters 50–76) records the 42-year reign of Nezahualcoyotl’s son, Nezahualpilli. The title of Chapter 52 affirms the administrative talents of this Tetzcocan ruler: “[w]hich deals with some things that Nezhualpiltzintli did at the beginning of his rule that demonstrated the prudence and common sense with which God had endowed him since childhood, which the authors found noteworthy” (184). Nevertheless, subsequent chapters document a significant rise in military campaigns, indicating a growing unrest in Anahuac. The final chapter in this section narrates the civil conflict that arose upon the death of Nezahualpilli between his sons and the Mexica ruler (also their uncle), Moctezuma Xocoyotzin (234–36), setting the stage for the Tetzcocans’ alliance with Cortés. The final chapters of History (77–95) detail Hernan Cortés’s origin and arrival in Mexico. The work culminates in the siege of Tenochtitlan, again from the Tetzcocan perspective. Oddly, the very last chapter ends mid-sentence in the middle of the first skirmish (314).One of the most powerful aspects of this new translation is that the project grew from a team that had as their agenda an interrogation of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s writing in order to make it accessible, both linguistically and culturally, to a scholarly public, considering not only the text itself, but its socio-cultural and historiographic contexts. Mechanically, the team has also succeeded. This edition is well-indexed, so if readers wanted to know more about the powerful ruler Quinatzin, they would find fifteen pages that mention his name, five images from the Quinatzin Map, and two notes (330). The editorial team produced a very readable product, the introduction and contextualizing notes provide a framework that render this text quite accessible for students and scholars of Colonial Mexico at every level.