Alva Ixtlilxochitl S Native Archive And The Circulation Of Knowledge In Colonial Mexico

Modern Language Association's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Honorable Mention, 2016 Born between 1568 and 1580, Alva Ixtlilxochitl was a direct descendant of Ixtlilxochitl I and Ixtlilxochitl II, who had been rulers of Texcoco, one of the major city-states in pre-Conquest Mesoamerica. After a distinguished education and introduction into the life of the empire of New Spain in Mexico, Ixtlilxochitl was employed by the viceroy to write histories of the indigenous peoples in Mexico. Engaging with this history and delving deep into the resultant archives of this life's work, Amber Brian addresses the question of how knowledge and history came to be crafted in this era. Brian takes the reader through not only the history of the archives itself, but explores how its inheritors played as crucial a role in shaping this indigenous history as the author. The archive helped inspire an emerging nationalism at a crucial juncture in Latin American history, as Creoles and indigenous peoples appropriated the history to give rise to a belief in Mexican exceptionalism. This belief, ultimately, shaped the modern state and impacted the course of history in the Americas. Without the work of Ixtlilxochitl, that history would look very different today.

Forbidden Passages is the first book to document and evaluate the impact of Moriscos—Christian converts from Islam—in the early modern Americas, and how their presence challenged notions of what it meant to be Spanish as the Atlantic empire expanded.

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 native accounts but written in the medieval chronicle style. It is a gripping tale of adventure, romance, seduction, betrayal, war, heroism, misfortune, and tragedy. Written at a time when colonization and depopulation were devastating indigenous communities, its vivid descriptions of the cultural sophistication, courtly politics, and imperial grandeur of the Nahua world explicitly challenged European portrayals of native Mexico as a place of savagery and ignorance. Unpublished for centuries, it nonetheless became an important source for many of our most beloved and iconic memories of the Nahuas, widely consulted by scholars of Spanish American history, politics, literature, anthropology, and art. The manuscript of the History, lost in the 1820s, was only rediscovered in the 1980s. This volume is not only the first-ever English translation, but also the first edition in any language derived entirely from the original manuscript. Expertly rendered, with introduction and notes outlining the author’s historiographical legacy, this translation at long last affords readers the opportunity to absorb the history of one of the Americas’ greatest indigenous civilizations as told by one of its descendants.

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and His Legacy provides a much-needed overview of the life, work, and contribution of an important seventeenth-century historian. The volume explores the complexities of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's life and works, revising and broadening our understanding of his racial and cultural identity and his contribution to Mexican history.

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898) brings together an international team of scholars to explore new interdisciplinary and comparative approaches for the study of colonialism. Using four overarching themes, the volume examines a wide array of critical issues, key texts, and figures that demonstrate the significance of Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean across national and regional traditions and historical periods. This invaluable resource will be of interest to students and scholars of Spanish and Latin American studies examining colonial Caribbean and Latin America at the intersection of cultural and historical studies; transatlantic, postcolonial and decolonial studies; and critical approaches to archives and materiality. This timely volume assesses the impact and legacy of colonialism and coloniality.

Winner, Book Prize in Latin American Studies, Colonial Section of Latin American Studies Association (LASA), 2016 ALAA Book Award, Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation, 2016 The capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, was, in its era, one of the largest cities in the world. Built on an island in the middle of a shallow lake, its population numbered perhaps 150,000, with another 350,000 people in the urban network clustered around the lake shores. In 1521, at the height of Tenochtitlan's power, which extended over much of Central Mexico, Hernando Cortés and his followers conquered the city. Cortés boasted to King Charles V of Spain that Tenochtitlan was "destroyed and razed to the ground." But was it? Drawing on period representations of the city in sculptures, texts, and maps, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City builds a convincing case that this global capital remained, through the sixteenth century, very much an Amerindian city. Barbara E. Mundy foregrounds the role the city's indigenous peoples, the Nahua, played in shaping Mexico City through the construction of permanent architecture and engagement in ceremonial actions. She demonstrates that the Aztec ruling elites, who retained power even after the conquest, were instrumental in building and then rebuilding the city. Mundy shows how the Nahua entered into mutually advantageous alliances with the Franciscans to maintain the city's sacred nodes. She also focuses on the practical and symbolic role of the city's extraordinary waterworks—the product of a massive ecological manipulation begun in the fifteenth century—to reveal how the Nahua struggled to maintain control of water resources in early Mexico City.

This book explores colonial indigenous historical accounts to offer a new interpretation of the origins of Mexico's neo-Aztec patriotic identity.

For almost two centuries North America has been a major destination for international migrants, but from the late nineteenth century onward, governments began to regulate borders, set immigration quotas, and define categories of citizenship. To develop a more dimensional approach to migration studies, the contributors to this volume focus on people born in the United States and Canada who migrated to the other country, as well as Japanese, Chinese, German, and Mexican migrants who came to the United States and Canada. These case studies explore how people and ideas transcend geopolitical boundaries. By including local, national, and transnational perspectives, the editors emphasize the value of tracking connections over large spaces and political boundaries. Entangling Migration History ultimately contends that crucial issues in the United States and Canada, such as labor and economic growth and ideas about the racial or religious makeup of the nation, are shaped by the two countries’ connections to each other and the surrounding world.