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

The Latin Americanist, October 2008 important given the often-times scant attention that Las Casas’s work receives in graduate courses. With remarkable ease, Castro also takes the reader on an exciting odyssey from Las Casas’s early years and arrival in America, through his “conversion” against the exploitation of the Indians, and to his years of seclusion and political struggles on their behalf. He complements this biography with detail about the friar’s struggles and failures at Valladolid and Chiapa, his last productive years in Spain, his death, and finally his historical legacy. Of his work in Chiapa, Castro concludes, “[t]he bishop of Chiapa once again demonstrated that he was unable to adapt to the reality of a changing, dynamic, emerging society that was developing in the New World. His theoretical perspective, grounded in a rigid scholastic tradition, had imprisoned him in an ideological straitjacket that he could not escape.” (122). Although this quotation clearly shows Castro’s negative revisionist take on Las Casas, he does seek some balance regarding the friar. For example, he states on other occasions, “Las Casas as a symbol of nonviolent reform emerges as a powerful role model for liberation theology” (180) or “[. . .] we must recognize that being a representative of his times, he could not break totally with the established strictures controlling societal behavior, and as such we must accept his limitations” (183). As I have personally always found Lascasian studies to be intimidating and overwhelming, I truly welcome this book and consider it a major contribution to the field of Colonial Spanish American studies. It invites acceptance and appreciation of Las Casas, the human, instead of Las Casas, the mythical saint or writer of long-forgotten and inaccessible treatises. Castro explains Las Casas’s life and works by distinguishing facts from fiction and structuring the man and the scholar into a readable and extremely useful resource for scholars and graduate students alike. Charles B. Moore Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Culture Gardner-Webb University THE ALLURE OF NEZAHUALCOYOTL: PRE-HISPANIC HISTORY, RELIGION, AND NAHUA POETICS. By Jongsoo Lee. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008, p. 294, $34.95. The imagined countenance of Nezahualcoyotl, fifteenth-century ruler of Texcoco, engages the millions of daily bearers of the Mexican 100-peso bill. Along with Moctezuma II, Malinalli/La Malinche, and Cuauhtemoc, Nezahualcoyotl (1402-1472) is one of the most easily identified of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic personalities. A stanza of verse attributed to him, memorized by Mexican schoolchildren as a prime example of Mesoamerican 88 Book Reviews humanism, appears in microscopic text next to his image on the bank note: “Amo el canto del cenzontle/Pájaro de cuatrocientas voces./Amo el color del jade/Y el enervante perfume de las flores./Pero amo más a mi hermano , el hombre.” Yet Nezahualcoyotl’s status as enlightened poet and lawgiver, conscientious objector to the bloody sacrifices of the Mexica, and devotee of the one true god as he intuited him, comes under formidable attack in this seminal and wide-ranging work in which Jongsoo Lee sets out to debunk just about everything we think we know about Nezahualcoyotl . Lee asserts that such significant twentieth-century scholars as Angel Marı́a Garibay and Miguel León-Portilla, although responsible for awakening new interest in Mesoamerican culture, did little more than reassert the inaccurate claims of sixteenth-century panegyrists Juan Bautista Pomar and Fernando de Alva Ixtilxochitl, who “willfully misinterpreted” (214) the historical record with the intent of gaining political advantage for Texcoco over the former Tenochtitlan in the nascent Spanish colonial system. After a concise and very useful introduction to the colonial sources and the justifications and motives of their writers, Lee launches his revision of Nezahualcoyotl’s roles in history, poetry, and religion. Lee’s main methodology, especially in the sections on history and religion, is the thorough consultation of sources from non-Texcocan writers that depict the same events covered by Texcocans such as Pomar and Alva Ixtilxochitl. The many narrative discrepancies among these sources lead Lee to search for common ground and make conclusions assuming the perceived biases of the writers exaggerating the deeds of their own hometown heroes...