A Nahuatl English Dictionary And Concordance To The Cantares Mexicanos

A Stanford University Press classic.

A study of indigenous music-making in New World societies, including the Aztecs and the Incas.

The Nahua Indians of central Mexico (often misleadingly called Aztecs after the quite ephemeral confederation that existed among them in late pre-Hispanic times) were the most populus of Mesoamerica's cultural-linguistic groups at the time of the Spanish conquest. They remained at the center of developments for centuries thereafter, since the bulk of the Hispanic population settled among them and they bore the brunt of cultural contact. This collection of thirteen essays (five of them previously unpublished) by the leading authority on the postconquest Nahuas and Nahua-Spanish interaction brings together pieces that reflect various facets of the author's research interests. Underlying most of the pieces is the author's pioneering large-scale use of Nahua manuscripts to illuminate the society and culture of native Mexicans in the Spanish colonial period. The picture of the Nahuas that emerges shows them far less at odds with the colonial world form it what is useful to them, and far more capable to maintaining their own pre-conquest identity, than has previously been suggested.

Nahuatl is the language used by the ancient Aztecs and the Nahua Indians of Central Mexico. This text introduces the language using an anthropological approach, teaching learners to understand Nahuatl according to its own distinctive grammar and to reject translationalist descriptions based on English or Spanish notions of grammar. In particular, the author emphasizes the nonexistence of words in Nahuatl (except for the few so-called particles) and stresses the nuclear clause as the basis for Nahuatl linguistic organization.

Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives presents an in-depth, highly nuanced historical understanding of this major indigenous Mesoamerican city from the conquest through the present. The book argues for the need to revise conclusions of past scholarship on familiar topics, deals with current debates that derive from differences in the way scholars view abundant and diverse iconographic and alphabetic sources, and proposes a new look at Texcocan history and culture from different academic disciplines. Contributors address some of the most pressing issues in Texcocan studies and bring new ones to light: the role of Texcoco in the Aztec empire, the construction and transformation of Prehispanic history in the colonial period, the continuity and transformation of indigenous culture and politics after the conquest, and the nature and importance of iconographic and alphabetic texts that originated in this city-state, such as the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa Quinatzin, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles. Multiple scholarly perspectives and methodological approaches offer alternative paradigms of research and open a needed dialogue among disciplines—social, political, literary, and art history, as well as the history of science. This comprehensive overview of Prehispanic and colonial Texcoco will be of interest to Mesoamerican scholars in the social sciences and humanities.

Sigmund Freud viewed the coping strategy of identification as both an expansion of the verb to identify, as well as a validation of the concept to identify with. This book shows how the Aztec emperor Montezuma and the noted Argentine writer Julio Cortzar each, respectively, used the process of identification in a Freudian manner. In the case of Montezuma, it is argued that he identified the Spanish conquistador Hernn Corts as the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror), while for Cortzar, it is demonstrated that he identified with a Moteca Indian from the Aztec world, who was about to be sacrificed.

In this companion volume to History and Mythology of the Aztecs, John Bierhorst provides specialists with a transcription of the Nahuatl text, keyed to the translation, and a linguistic apparatus to help elucidate it. The glossary offers definitions for all unusual usages in the codex, as well as careful treatment of many of the commonest (and most semantically flexible) verbs, adverbs, and particles. Detailed discussions of selected features appear in the Grammatical Notes, which complete the work.

European religious drama adapted for an Aztec audience