Los lienzos de Acaxochitlan (Hidalgo) y su importancia en la historia del poblamiento de la sierra norte de Puebla y zonas vecinas (review)

Los lienzos de Acaxochitlán (Hidalgo) y su importancia en la historia del poblamiento de la sierra norte de Puebla y zonas vecinas. By Guy Stresser-PÉan. Mexico City: Centre Français d'Études Mexicaines et Centraméricaines, 1998. Photographs. Maps. Figures. Bibliography. Index. 276 pp. Paper.

The Spaniards first went to Mexico looking for slaves to replace the millions of natives of the Antilles who had died from disease and overwork in the gold placers. We will never know how many young men were rounded up along the coast from Yucatán to Tamaulipas and shipped to Cuba and Santo Domingo, but most of those who stayed behind in the tropical lowlands soon died from Old World diseases. There is no doubt that the superposition of European diseases and religious and political institutions were catastrophic, but Guy Stresser-Péan points out that the people of Mesoamerica were no strangers to trauma. A series of invasions of more or less civilized aggressors often with superior technology (apparently the bow-and-arrow were more effective than the atlatl) swept through his area, enslaving women and children and subjecting male prisoners to horrendous forms of "ethnic cleansing." Not long before the Spaniards' arrival, the Aztecs are said to have taken 24,400 captives from one of the towns studied in this book to be sacrificed at the inauguration of a temple at Tenochtitlan.

The documents reproduced and examined here serve as a palimpsest for a vast amount of background material drawn together to form an erudite regional study. The book is divided into three parts. In the first section, the author traces the history of the people who lived on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Madre in central Mexico from the ninth century of our era to the Spanish conquest. The following section is a descriptive account of two pictorial manuscripts that were recently found in the town of Acaxochitlán (Lienzo "B" has since "disappeared"). The last section offers an original cartographic reconstruction of the lowland polities at first European contact and the early colonial years.

Stresser-Péan adroitly avoids the trend in recent Mexican historiography to fit everything into a Nahuacentric mold. Mesoamerica was multiethnic and polyglot. It faced on its northern marches a primitive warlike people. South of this frontier was a patchwork of farming communities whose inhabitants spoke many languages. We do not know how many of these people were bilingual, nor to what extent Nahuatl was used as a lingua franca before mid-sixteenth century, nor do we know in many cases the degree of autonomy of a Mesoamerican polity. Some were urban agglomerations centering on important religious and commercial centers, hubs of empire; some were relatively modest theocratic-military entities with an elite led by an elected or hereditary monarch or two or more rulers; some were confederacies; some were military garrisons and centers of tribute collection. Stresser-Péan provides a useful map showing the distribution of languages, and discusses in some detail the complicated political situation here, as well as it can be determined, before and after the Spanish conquest.

The Spaniards found it expedient to retain precolumbian polities throughout the colonial period, and in some cases they remain relatively unchanged even today. However, the demographic collapse followed by the resettlement of the survivors in nuclear centers in the sixteenth century left much of the land unoccupied. Then, as the population recovered, many states that had been subordinate to others sued for autonomy, and there were boundary disputes. It would seem to have been such a conflict between Acaxochitlán and its neighbors that was the origin of one of the pictorial manuscripts described here. Stresser-Péan argues that Lienzo "B" of Acaxochitlán is a...