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A descendant of both Spanish settlers and Nahua (Aztec) rulers, Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578–1650) was an avid collector of indigenous pictorial and alphabetic texts and a prodigious chronicler of the history of pre-conquest and conquest-era Mexico. His magnum opus, here for the first time in English translation, is one of the liveliest, most accessible, and most influential accounts of the rise and fall of Aztec Mexico derived from indigenous sources and memories and written from a native perspective. Composed in the first half of the seventeenth century, a hundred years after the arrival of the Spanish conquerors in Mexico, the History of the Chichimeca Nation is based on...
This text contains essays on the archaeology and ethnohistory of Northern Mesoamerica. Topics covered include the early setting, the frontiers of Mesoamerica, the heartland of the Gran Chichimeca, Tepecano Quelite cultivation, the Loma San Gabriel culture and others.
Concerns over native resistance to evangelization on and beyond the Chichimeca frontier (the frontier between sedentary and nomadic natives) prompted the Augustinian missionaries to use graphic visual images of hell to convince natives to embrace the new faith. The Augustinians believed that they were in a war against Satan.
In this book Leisa A. Kauffmann takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the writings of one of Mexico’s early chroniclers, Fernando de Alva Ixtilxochitl, a bilingual seventeenth-century historian from Central Mexico. His writing, especially his portrayal of the great pre-Hispanic poet-king Nezahualcoyotl, influenced other canonical histories of Mexico and is still influential today. Many scholars who discuss Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s writing focus on his personal and literary investment in the European classical tradition, but Kauffmann argues that his work needs to be read through the lens of Nahua cultural concepts and literary-historical precepts. She suggests that he is best understood in light of his ancestral ties to Tetzcoco’s rulers and as a historian who worked within both Native and European traditions. By paying attention to his representation of rulership, Kauffmann demonstrates how the literary and symbolic worlds of the Nahua exist in allegorical but still discernible subtexts within the larger Spanish context of his writing.
Even before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, the practice of taking captives was widespread among Native Americans. Indians took captives for many reasons: to replace--by adoption--tribal members who had been lost in battle, to use as barter for needed material goods, to use as slaves, or to use for reproductive purposes. From the legendary story of John Smith's captivity in the Virginia Colony to the wildly successful narratives of New England colonists taken captive by local Indians, the genre of the captivity narrative is well known among historians and students of early American literature. Not so for Hispanic America. Fernando Operé redresses this oversight, offering the first...