Mesoamerican Voices: Native-Language Writings from Colonial Mexico, Oaxaca, Yucatán, and Guatemala, and: Annals of His Time: Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin (review)

Mesoamerica may have been colonized by the Spanish, but in many ways the region remained largely indigenous—socially and culturally—during that extended period of foreign political and economic domination. This was true despite a demographic disaster and a growing integration of survivors and newcomers over time. Of the many attestations of this colonial reality are the abundant native-language manuscripts that illuminate indigenous thinking and activity from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The two books under review here share an interest in Mesoamericans' experiences and perspectives as they were expressed in native-language records made under Spanish rule. Mesoamerican Voices gathers sixty examples from several different genre and four culture zones, all in English translation. Primordial titles, letters, land and tribute documents, testaments, petitions, and elder speech are among the genres, highlighting views of the Spanish invasion, political life, domestic concerns, social structure, gender ideology, crime, punishment, religious life, and philosophy. Collectively, these manuscripts span the years from circa 1540 through 1812. They were largely written by participants of, or eye-witnesses to, the events described therein.

Annalsof His Time differs from Mesoamerican Voices in that it has as its primary focus one socio-political entity, México Tenochtitlan, and exemplifies one genre, annals. But it offers an extended transcription and translation, with the Nahuatl and English side by side, of historical writings by a single author, and it covers the years 1577-1615. The last eight years, witnessed by the author, include often extensive detail and insight. The presence of the Nahuatl and the editors' discussions of the authors' orthographic and calligraphic conventions, as well as their translation philosophy and findings with regard to key terminology, will be of considerable use to scholars of language, linguistics, and ethnohistory. While James Lockhart's name appears on the cover of Annalsof His Time and not on Mesoamerican Voices, his influence on the latter is notable. Mesoamerican Voices even includes an excerpt from the Lockhart-Schoeder-Namala translation of Chimalpahin's Diario that has come to comprise Annalsof His Time. Mesoamerican Voices is also modeled after and draws from Beyond the Codices (1986), originally translated and edited by James Lockhart, Frances Berdan and Arthur J. O. Anderson. It reprints and slightly revises (with Lockhart's supervision) translations of several of the documents in Beyond the Codices. All former Lockhart students, the editors of Mesoamerican Voices are clearly influenced by his path-breaking understanding of the colonial world and of Mesoamerican literacy, in particular, and they benefit from his work on conquest accounts, primordial titles, annals, and municipal council records, among other genres.

Mesoamerican Voices also differs from Beyond the Codices in several important ways. By omitting the native-language versions, it has room to include a greater variety and array of documents. It incorporates translations of many previously unpublished manuscripts written originally in Spanish, Maya, and Mixtec (plus one Zapotec document). The editors of Mesoamerican Voices are capably applying Lockhart's methodology to additional languages and regions, creating what appear to be solid translations, and are drawing valuable comparisons. They are also able researchers who have written excellent introductions to chapters and to each document, making their familiarity with archives, their knowledge of time and place, social and cultural nuance, clearly apparent. Material in both volumes that is not already published elsewhere in some form is considerable and especially noteworthy for specialists. For the purposes of this readership, perhaps a few examples of religious topics will suffice. The excerpt from the census of...