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For many generations, the Nahuas of Mexico maintained their tradition of the xiuhpohualli (SHOO-po-wa-lee), or "year counts," telling and performing their history around communal firesides so that the memory of it would not be lost. When the Spaniards came, young Nahuas took the Roman letters taught them by the friars and used the new alphabet to record historical performances by elders. These written texts were carefully preserved and even expanded upon for over acentury. The annals, as they have often been called, were written not only by Indians but also for Indians, without regard to European interests. Difficult to understand for generations, these texts are now uncovered by Camilla Townsend, who has turned them into a narrative woven together with thelives of their writers.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Glossary
- Introduction
- Chapter One: Old Stories in New Letters (1520s-1550s)
- Chapter Two: Becoming Conquered (the 1560s)
- Chapter Three: Forging Friendship with Franciscans (1560s-1580s)
- Chapter Four: The Riches of Twilight (c. 1600)
- Chapter Five: Renaissance in the East (the 17th century)
- Epilogue: Postscript from a Golden Age
- Appendices
- The Texts in Nahuatl
- Historia Tolteca Chichimeca
- Annals of Tlatelolco
- Annals of Juan Bautista
- Annals of Tecamachalco
- Annals of Cuauhtitlan
- Chimalpahin, Seventh Relation
- Don Juan Bautista Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza
- Annals of Puebla
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Camilla Townsend is Professor of History at Rutgers University. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico and Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley, among other books.
Summary
For many generations, the Nahuas of Mexico maintained their tradition of the xiuhpohualli. or "year counts," telling and performing their history around communal firesides so that the memory of it would not be lost. When the Spaniards came, young Nahuas took the Roman letters taught to them by the friars and used the new alphabet to record historical performances by elders. Between them, they wrote hundreds of pages, which circulated widely within their communities. Over the next century and a half, their descendants copied and recopied these texts, sometimes embellishing, sometimes extracting, and often expanding them chronologically.
The annals, as they have usually been called, were written not only by Indians but also for Indians, without regard to European interests. As such they are rare and inordinately valuable texts. They have often been assumed to be both largely anonymous and at least partially inscrutable to modern ears. In this work, Nahuatl scholar Camilla Townsend reveals the authors of most of the texts, restores them to their proper contexts, and makes sense of long misunderstood documents. She follows a remarkable chain of Nahua historians, generation by generation, exploring who they were, what they wrote, and why they wrote it. Sometimes they conceived of their work as a political act, reinstating bonds between communities, or between past, present, and future generations. Sometimes they conceived of it largely as art and delighted in offering language that was beautiful or startling or humorous.
Annals of Native America brings together, for the first time, samples of their many creations to offer a heretofore obscured history of the Nahuas and an alternate perspective on the Conquest and its aftermath.
Additional text
Townsend shows that prehispanic history keeping always reflected the interests of ruling groups and altepetl, and scholars can interpret these texts...by examining how they reflect Nahua ideas about history, politics, religion, and kinship and also how they portray colonial events, people, and power relations. Townsend does a masterful job of both....Townsend is an elegant writer, her book a pleasure to read. It covers much ground geographically and chronologically.
