The Conquest All Over Again: Nahuas and Zapotecs Thinking, Writing, and Painting Spanish Colonialism ed. by Susan Schroeder (review)

Indigenous record keeping in Mesoamerica underwent dramatic change after the Spanish conquest. Soon after the fall of Tenochtitlan, indigenous scribes began to adopt European forms of preserving memory. Educated in the humanities and theology at colonial schools such as the Colegio Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, native elites began to produce new kinds of texts even as they sought to protect precontact forms of knowledge. As Susan Schroeder notes in the introduction to the volume, the Spaniards, by bringing the Roman alphabet to the recently conquered territories, "unwittingly contributed to a flourishing of Nahua language and culture" (p. 7). Despite an often hostile attitude on the part of Spanish authorities toward indigenous cultural traditions, native record keeping persisted through the chaos and destruction of war and thrived during the colonial period, as authors adapted European conventions to native techniques and to the needs of their communities.

The essays in this volume showcase the extraordinary intellectual heritage of the indigenous peoples of Nahua Mesoamerica and their responses to European colonialism. The contributors include prominent scholars of colonial ethnohistory and culture, and their studies reveal the complexity and richness of native sources, most of which are not well known to scholars of Spanish colonialism or to the general public. Ethnic city-states (altepetl) and their communities continued to play a critical role in record keeping even after the upheaval of conquest. The essays highlight the great variety of Nahua and Zapotec perspectives on the experience of invasion and conversion, ranging from early accounts from the postconquest era to eighteenth-century works. The works under study address different audiences and reflect their authors' differing motivations; they include pictorial writings painted on woven fabric, works in Nahuatl alphabetic script, religious theater, and títulos primordiales, or records of precontact land titles.

Kevin Terraciano's fascinating chapter compares three early accounts of the conquest from the perspective of Tlatelolco, revealing a rich local historiographic tradition that emphasizes for its indigenous audience the heroism of this altepetl's warriors against their rivals, the Tenochca people. Travis Barton Kranz examines Tlaxcalteca pictorial accounts of that state's alliance with Cortés during the war. Addressed to Spanish authorities, these painted histories record a heroic past and argue for continued privileges in recognition of prior service to the Spanish crown. Louise Burkhart's essay on the motif of the destruction of Jerusalem in eighteenth-century Nahuatl historical drama examines the use of biblical sources to evoke the destruction of conquest in a play written and performed by native people. Susan Schroeder's study of Chimalpahin's Nahuatl annals investigates the author's weaving of local native traditions together with elements of Christian and world history. Amber Brian's study of the work of mestizo Fernando de Alva Ixtlixochitl emphasizes the role of his homeland in the conquest, and Camilla Townsend considers the ethnopatriotism and privileging of Nahuatl sources in don Juan Buenaventura Zapata's annals. Barry Sell looks at the contributions of the Jesuit Horacio Carochi, whose confessional manual preserves accounts of Nahua personal experience. The final two chapters, by David Tavárez and Robert Haskett, examine calendrical and historical genres of the títulos primordiales, documents that sought to defend native rituals and to establish the right to land titles of original peoples.

Taken together, the essays provide a glimpse into the range and depth of work currently underway in Mesoamerican ethnography and cultural history, a field that has in recent decades transformed the understanding of the process of conquest and colonization in New Spain. Newcomers to Nahuatl studies, as well as scholars familiar with the Spanish colonial field and undergraduate and graduate students, will find in this volume a welcome introduction to a fast-developing field, and specialists will no doubt find valuable contributions here as well.