The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl: Pre-Hispanic History, Religion, and Nahua Poetics (review)

Jongsoo Lee has presented a meritorious work. Certain sections are particularly worth reading. Among these is the introduction, in which he asserts that the cherished image of Nezahualcoyotl as a powerful fifteenth-century Mexican monarch who devised the region’s first rationalistic legal code, wrote poetry, and abhorred human sacrifice was “invented by a European colonial ideology after the conquest” (p. 1). Here, Lee succinctly shows that the friars who wrote of him were invested in believing in a culture advanced by European standards in need only of Christianity; that certain Spanish-educated men partially descended of the Texcocan nobility, specifically Juan Bautista Pomar and Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, were defending their own interests in circulating ideas pleasing to the clergy; and that post-independence intellectuals were later only too delighted to maintain the idea of New World antecedents that rivaled the classical world. These ideas are not entirely new, but we have long needed to have them presented coherently in one place.

In part 1, “The Sources,” Lee outlines what we have at our disposal that may help uncover an understanding of Nezahualcoyotl closer to the truth. He emphasizes an effort to deconstruct the chronicles of Pomar and Ixtlilxochitl, coupled with primary research among the region’s native pictorials. He mentions Nahuatl alphabetic sources, primarily the annals and the songs, but ultimately argues that the great division in our sources is not between those written in Spanish for Hispanic audiences and those written in Nahuatl for Nahua audiences, but rather, between those sources originating in Texcoco, which argue for the peaceful prince, and those originating in “other regions,” which “do not support [such] representations of Nezahualcoyotl” (p. 44). This does not seem to me to be the most useful distinction to make, and indeed, Lee’s own work ultimately takes us further than this.

In part 2, “Revising Pre-Hispanic History,” Lee perhaps argues against a straw man. He asserts that there is no evidence for the idea that Nezahualcoyotl was a supremely powerful monarch, rivaling or surpassing the Mexica high kings, but in fact, no one except the speakers in his Texcocan sources seriously makes that case today. At one point, Lee appears to be going farther down this path, and seems to argue that the Triple Alliance itself never even existed, but he then pulls back and acknowledges that the Mexica apparatus of control relied on certain powerful allied states, among them certainly Tlacopan to the west of the lake and Texcoco to the east.

Parts 3 and 4, “Revising the Study of Nahua Poetics” and “Revising the Study of Nahua Religion,” coherently make the related arguments that the genre of the orally performed song in pre-Conquest Mexico precluded individual authorship, and that the essential themes we find in all the songs, including those from Texcoco, mirror what we know in general of Nahua culture. The Texcocan songs, rather than being about an unknown single god or a Biblical-style afterlife, as has been argued, in fact concern war, sacrifice, and valor, as we might expect. Here, in order to make his case even more effectively than he already does, Lee needs to amend the translations we have available to us from Angel Garibay, Miguel León Portilla, and John Bierhorst, rather than accepting them, as he almost always does. Perhaps, however, he refrains out of respect for scholars who have, after all, made extraordinary contributions to the field.

In the epilogue, Lee takes to task the poet, Ernesto Cardenal, for unintentionally continuing a colonial tradition in subscribing to the image of Nezahualcoyotl as the peaceful poetking. Fleetingly, in the introduction, Lee acknowledges that the colonial friars who clung to the image of the pre-Conquest glory that was Texcoco did so in response to men like Sepúlveda, who wanted to deny the indigenous all rationality. He might acknowledge here that Cardenal was...