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  • Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico by Amber Brian
  • David Henige
Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico. By Amber Brian (Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 2016) 196pp. $55.00

As Europeans fanned out to conquer the world, they quickly learned that the most effective way to establish and maintain sovereignty was to work through native rulers, but determining just who comprised this category proved unexpectedly problematical. Colonizing powers had several alternatives. In India, for example, the British suppressed some existing entities and brought them under direct rule, establishing new states for services rendered and promulgating sanads (charters) as necessary to maintain a semblance of continuity.

Throughout this process, native informants proffered formal declarations about the past, especially concerning affairs immediately prior to the imposition of colonial rule. Colonial officials relied heavily on those data whenever they suited their own changing political aims. Struggles over legitimacy could persist for decades, generations, even centuries. The alacrity with which the conquered people absorbed and enthusiastically advanced the arguments that appeared to be most appealing to the colonizers is telling. Such occasions became reciprocal and repeated opportunities for cost/benefit analysis, in which the indigenous parties sought advantage by whatever means available. [End Page 109]

When the Spanish arrived in central Mexico, Tetzcoco ( Texcoco), who was in subsidiary alliance with the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, was allowed to maintain quasi-independence under Spanish rule. Inevitably, disputes quickly surfaced regarding “legitimacy” there, enduring for at least 150 years. Near the end of this period, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a scion of the Tetzcocan royal family, produced and/or acquired several works purporting to describe the pre-contact history of Tetzcoco, which in his hands—surprise!—fared rather better than other sources would suggest.

As her title indicates, Brian’s work is concerned with the ways in which local historical claims were developed, shared, rehashed, and reconfigured by various interest groups, even as late as the end of the seventeenth century. Brian provides a detailed and useful account of Ixtlilxochitl’s manifold contribution to the revision of prehispanic Mexican history. As a member of the Tetzcocan ruling dynasty and a Hispanized member of the civil service, Ixtlilxochitl was able to supply a composite account of Tetzcoco. He had the gravitas to launch it as the accepted canonical version for another three centuries. Like other indigenous historians in scores of other times and places, he learned how to tell the colonizers what they wanted to hear, in a discursive style that aped their own.

The undoubted cynosure of Ixtlilxochitl’s oeuvre was Nezahualcoyotl, who reigned during the fifteenth century. To take him at his word, Nezahualcoyotl was the quintessential philosopher-king/warrior (like Alfonso X?) whose mythic credentials were based on a return from childhood exile to reclaim the throne and a long succession of triumphant military campaigns. In Brian’s work, which contributes to a spate of recent studies about Ixtlilxochitl and his ilk, use of the term circulation is extraordinarily apropos. It encapsulates the fatuity of treating this genre on an as-read basis, reminding scholars to tread gingerly when they deploy this category to reconstruct the history of pre-contact central Mexico.

David Henige
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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