Preserving the History of Cemanahuac: Domingo Chimalpahin's Rewriting of Spanish Narratives in the Annals of His Time (ca. 1608–1615)

This article explores the ways in which the seventeenth-century Nahua author don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin (henceforth Chimalpahin) systematically copies from, revises, and translates into Nahuatl the works of European-born authors Henrico Martínez, Mateo Alemán, and Antonio de Morga, authors who had adopted the capital city of New Spain as their home and held positions of power in the colonial administration. The article illustrates that Chimalpahin does not merely borrow or copy from the texts of these European authors who celebrate New Spain but revises their triumphalist narratives. By presenting a close reading of the Spanish texts Chimalpahin copies from and revises and comparing them to Chimalpahin's own Nahuatl text, I illustrate that Chimalpahin's Annals of His Time counters the Eurocentric discourses that celebrate the greatness of New Spain and its capital city, creating a Nahua archive for future generations of Nahua readers to know the ancient history of their ancestors and understand how they had been dislocated with the conquest and how they continued to be marginalized at the turn of the seventeenth century.