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205 We can easily imagine a culture where discourses would circulate without any need of an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in the anonymity of a murmur. —Michel Foucault In opposition to the archive, which designates the system of relations between the unsaid and the said, we give the name testimony to the system of relations between the inside and the outside of langue, between the sayable and unsayable in every language—that is, between the potentiality of speech and its existence, between the possibility and impossibility of speech. —Giorgio Agamben one may rightly wonder if it is permissible to speak of a single Mesoamerican institution of historical writing given that the practice of history partakes of institutional rules that could very well exclude certain forms of remembering the past and telling stories. Paradoxically, the recognition of certain forms of memory by missionaries and lay officials could signal one more mode of appropriating and transforming Mesoamerican institutions. These historical accounts manifest a will to extract practical knowledge for administrative purposes but also the need to bury the pagan past for good by deploying the trope of resurrection to create a final tomb. We may thus read the work of Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc and Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quahtlehuanitzin as responses to the expropriation of the past by missionary historians like the Dominican Diego Durán. If Durán’s Historia de las Indias de la Nueva España e islas de Tierra Firme adopts the metaphor of resurrection and tells the foundational stories of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in the generic mode of romance, Tezozomoc and Chimalpahin retain the Mesoamerican annalist tradition, the xiuhamatl (count of the years), and they express the accounts in a most elegant and refined Nahuatl speech, often citing verbatim the elders whose voices they collect.1 One may also question the existence of a singular institution of Mesoamerican historical writing. This opens another set of questions that lead us to observe that Chimalpahin and Tezozomoc write at the intersection of at least in the Mesoamerican Archive speech,script,andtimeintezozomocandChimalpahin 11 Rabasa-text-final.indd 205 4/27/10 9:57 AM 206 iN thE MEsoAMEriCAN ArChiVE two institutions: one that dates back to Mesoamerican antiquity, the other that partakes of Greco-Abrahamic forms of life.2 The second institution also calls forth the semblance of a Christianized Mesoamerica, or for that matter of Nahuatlized Christianity—in short of Christian authors practicing hybrid forms of history. Our postcolonial sensibilities partake of institutional constraints and an ethos that demand that we interrogate self-ascriptions of Tezozomoc’s and Chimalpahin’s Christian identity in favor of a duplicitous (ambivalent) subject who, as if deploying an ironic trope, would say, “I am a Christian” to mean “not really.” We must nevertheless retain the notion that the Christian archive, what is actually sayable and unsayable according to its rules, dictates that Nahua subjects constitute themselves as Christians and that these same subjects constitute Mesoamerican antiquity under the influence of the devil. I propose that we give way to an understanding of these subjects in terms of a field of forces constituted by the multiple archival rules, the cultural locations, and the possibility and impossibility of giving testimony of the civilization that was destroyed by the conquest. We may then consider whether Tezozomoc and Chimalpahin conceptualized their historical vocation as representatives of a language community whose art of storytelling was on the brink of disappearing. One may thus question the ethos and the desires that lead us today to question the Christianity of such illustrious writers as Tezozomoc and Chimalpahin , to name the more self-conscious practitioners of history. This refusal most often calls forth the decolonizing agenda of our time. If the postcolonial ethos demands that we decolonize our present, which needless to say includes the past, we may want to acknowledge that this is an impossible task to accomplish , even if desirable. In decolonizing, we may want to invoke the art of doing things with inherited colonial structures that colonialism could never anticipate rather than conceiving the task of undoing colonial legacies as if the Nahua historians would engage in an anticolonial practice. In societies with colonial pasts, it is worthwhile repeating Michel de Certeau ’s dictum, “memory does its work in a locus which is not its own.”3 But rather than rushing to isolate (and celebrate) oppositional practices, we may want to...

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