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The Roman destruction of Jerusalem—as portrayed in medieval Christian legend—was a common referent in Spanish colonial historiography. In this context, it served to convey a sense of the magnitude of conquest in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Multiple colonial texts also apply the anti-Semitic message that fundamentally characterizes this legend to the context of New Spain, justifying wars of imperial conquest as divine justice for perceived offenses against God. An anonymous Nahua translator-playwright also accommodated a version of this legend for performance to Nahua audiences. As scholars note, this play is an abridged translation into Nahuatl of an Iberian source text. This article shows how this version modifies key passages, conveys polemical commentaries in an unmistakably Nahua voice, and undermines the common application of this medieval narrative in New Spain. Rather than blame the rigors of conquest on the victims of conquest, it instead highlights error on the part of Christian empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1805, the pueblo of Tultitlan fell victim to an ostensibly mysterious new plague. After a year of curative treatment, it spread across what is now Mexico State, prompting urban officials to authorize the use of smallpox vaccination—an intervention that elicited fierce debate steeped in tensions around Indigeneity, religion, and parental rights. Drawing on newspapers and other colonial records, the article examines how different Nahua families responded, centering their concerns and expectations—of immunization and religious and public health officials—to reframe critical questions about the gender and racial politics of vaccine history and its contested relationship to colonial rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children with one Spanish and one Indigenous parent (called mestizos in subsequent generations), particularly from the lower levels of society, were viewed as problematic in the first decades of Spanish rule in New Spain. By the 1550s, colegios had been established to house and educate them. This article examines official discourses surrounding early mestizos and their colegios and their place within Novohispanic society. While documents produced by royal and church officials form an important share of the primary sources used in the study, the author also examines more mundane documents related to the colegios produced by Mexico City's notaries from the 1550s to the 1570s. The notarial documents demonstrate that these institutions were important to Mexico City residents both rich and poor, both white and non-white. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the seventeenth century, transatlantic and transpacific diasporas created one of the world's most globalized early modern societies in New Spain. As the slave trades to the colonial centers of central Mexico reached frenetic levels after the turn of the seventeenth century, processes of encounter, exchange, and transmission began to characterize these diverse communities. For "chinos" arriving in Acapulco, careful observation and experience coalesced into mobile bodies of knowledge ranging from the social practice of blasphemy to spiritual ritual. These varied modes of cultural production facilitated negotiation of enslaver/enslaved relations and represented a kaleidoscope of responses to power relations in colonial society. Through these forms of contestation, knowledge production in enslaved communities became central to the rhythms of daily life in New Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers questions of authorship in Juan Bautista Viseo's "Second Sermon for Advent" about "frightful, and terrible signs" of Judgment Day. Although Bautista acknowledges important contributions by Nahua scholars in the production of his Nahuatl-language sermonary, he does not plainly recognize them as coauthors. However, the text itself registers indigenous perspectives. This sermon describes several natural phenomena, such as eclipses, comets, floods, windstorms, and earthquakes, as signs of the Apocalypse. For Nahuas, these phenomena similarly foretold disaster or correlated to storied calamities of ages past. Therefore, the sermon refutes ancestral teachings on celestial signs and age-ending cataclysms, distinguishing so-called lies from doctrinal truth. Yet other passages take a heterodox step in the opposite direction, reinforcing connections between Christian and native thought on world time and portents of doom, or citing figurative "signs" of ancestral tradition that speak to the theme of divine judgment. Such passages, this article demonstrates, suggest Nahua co-authorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay applies the analytic category of technologies proposed by historian Marcy Norton as complex systems of knowledges, practices, and products generated in specific social contexts to a study of the sixteenth-century bureaucratic surveys known as the Relaciones geográficas (RG) manuscripts. As a methodological intervention, the principal aim is to draw out the relatively understudied Indigenous knowledges and practices found throughout the corpus. The first section of the essay outlines the conceptual framework of technologies and contextualizes the RG survey and response processes. The remainder of the essay discusses Indigenous technologies including collective land memory, natural resources, and herbal medicines recorded in the Archdiocese of Mexico corpus of RGs (appendix), thirty-one manuscripts in total. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on recent scholarship emphasizing native contributions to Spanish American legal and political cultures to consider how Nahua leaders in early colonial Mexico influenced the construction of imperial policy vis-à-vis indigenous patrimonial lands. By examining a series of cases brought before colonial authorities in Mexico City in the 1530s, it details the efforts of certain highborn Nahuas who resisted efforts by Spanish conquerors to expand their access to Indian wealth. When challenged before colonial tribunals, they defended their actions by emphasizing the overriding importance of custom, ancestry, and kinship in determining land and resource rights. Whether successful or not, such arguments had broader consequences, as they compelled colonial authorities to explicitly weigh and adjudicate disputes shaped to a substantial degree by pre- Hispanic history, by events occurring decades and generations prior to the Spanish conquest. Thus Nahua patrimonial restorationism helped induce precedents that explicitly afforded legal weight to local custom and ancestry at a critical early stage when imperial law with regard to Indian lands remained inchoate and shifting. Not only did it facilitate royal efforts to constrain conqueror claims to native wealth, it also contributed to the eventual recognition of native patrimonial lands in Spanish imperial law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In circa 1550, an indigenous mapmaker painted a watercolor of viceregal Mexico City and its environs. The Uppsala Map has long been a source for examining social life in the Basin of Mexico, yet its description of the city has been one less studied. This essay scrutinizes the mapmaker's graphic commentary on the vice-regal capital. In particular, it studies how a narrative figure's corporeal expressions and optic interest presented the city for examination. A formal analysis of the map suggests that the city's traza (urban plan) was not spatially unitary, a point underscored by the actas de cabildo, or municipal decrees, mandated. These demonstrate anxiety over spatial irregularity, which in the opinion of the city council threatened the city's policía (the virtue of living a Christian way of life within an ordered settlement). Lastly, this essay situates the Uppsala Map within the cartographic milieu of the Spanish Atlantic world through a study of cartographic elements that closely resemble those found in Alonso de Santa Cruz's 1542 world map. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the practice of ordaining young men because of their personal language ability, a process referred to as an ordination a título de lengua. As a result of reforms codified by the Catholic Church in the Council of Trent, prospective priests were required to support themselves without assistance from the Church, a requirement called a title. This requirement was satisfied if an ordinand enjoyed a benefice or a chantry. Because of the need to have as many priests who knew native languages as possible, the crown ordered that the ability to speak a native language could be used in lieu of a title. Starting in the 1560s the bishops of Mexico began to keep track of clergy according to their ability to speak a native language. When the system of oposiciones (competitive placement exams) began in the 1580s, candidates for benefices would be tested on their language ability. This article traces the development of a bilingual secular clergy in order to evaluate whether royal officials responded to the widespread use of Nahuatl at the time of contact or whether those same officials encouraged the spread of Nahuatl through their policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most interesting aspects of sixteenth-century Mexico is the predominance of native languages, Nahuatl in particular, among all members of colonial society. Conquistadors, encomenderos, estancieros, missionaries, and even tradesmen learned native languages because it helped further their interests in a society divided between two cultural spheres, Hispanic and indigenous. This article highlights the unique position of sixteenth-century mestizos and mulatos as bearers of indigenous culture and language in colonial Mexico. These individuals born of mixed unions were often acculturated in both Hispanic and indigenous cultures. As people in the middle of colonial society, they were uniquely positioned to navigate within and between the two dominant cultural spheres of colonial Mexico. Using Inquisition documents, criminal records, and petitions to the crown, this article analyzes how these individuals served as more than just intermediaries between each cultural space. It suggests that mestizos and mulatos were much more prominent cultural actors than has generally been assumed. Their linguistic and cultural fluency helped shaped many aspects of New Spain's evolving culture and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nahuatl played an essential role in the evangelization of Central Mexico. Although the crown and its appointed officials vacillated between the use of Nahuatl and Spanish in teaching the Christian doctrine, the majority of ecclesiastics supported the use of Nahuatl, particularly in the composition of religious texts. Examining a Nahuatl sermon on the ministry of St. Sebastian, this article illustrates the necessity of Nahuatl in evangelization while exposing the potential for such a necessity to produce religious texts with unorthodox contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes warfare and diplomacy between colonial and non-colonial peoples on the northeastern frontier of New Spain in the eighteenth century. It considers the relationship of Spanish and Nahua colonists to indigenous populations in the north. It argues that shared assumptions about military hierarchy transcended cultural boundaries, permitting diplomatic exchange and political integration. Drawing on archival military and missionary records, the article illustrates the process by which European and indigenous political units were first rendered mutually intelligible, later connected by alliance, and finally integrated through joint settlement and corporate governance. Fundamental to these processes were the communication and synthesis of cultural schemata expressing the correspondence of military commands to each party's historical memory and social geography. This article offers a partial explanation for the development of Tlaxcalan-Chichimec pueblos and a general set of principles for understanding intercultural diplomacy in frontier environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 1787 in Papantla, New Spain, native Totonacs rose in riot. While the captain of militia of a neighboring community described this as a case of natives rising up against Spaniards and justice generally, a close examination of the event reveals multiple divisions within the community. This study explores how factional interests in Papantla divided the community across racial lines. It particularly considers how one group of native leaders who opposed a corrupt alcalde mayor (Spanish magistrate) were able to foster his removal from office and how corresponding actions by the alcalde mayor's native supporters forced the removal of his successor. This uprising further demonstrates how native leaders were able to tap into community hostility over the Bourbon reforms and deploy that anger in the interests of their own political gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 1775, Kumeyaay Indians attacked and destroyed Mission San Diego, at the foot of Alta California. In the wake of that event, Spanish officials interrogated and tortured Indians to gather intelligence. While historians have recounted the uprising's origins and aftermath, they have not recognized that their accounts ultimately rest on coerced testimony. This article suggests that, even after torture had fallen out of favor in the courts of New Spain, the practice continued informally in the northern borderlands, where Spanish colonists lived among numerous and often hostile native peoples. It concludes that the desire and determination to uncover native intentions have led ethnohistorians to accept coerced testimony that is of dubious historical value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her survey of the indigenous cacicazgo (lordly estate) in New Spain, Margarita Menegus Bornemann (2005) asks why previous studies of this hybrid Indian/Spanish institution have emphasized property and neglected the owners' seigniorial relations with their subject commoner populations. This paper attempts an answer to this question for the Mixteca Baja region in southern Mexico, positing a shift in cacicazgo management away from direct involvement in local government and patronage networks and toward a more impersonal style of (often absentee) landownership. I assess the significance of these trends for the changing status of cacique in the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging primary documents and scholarly debates, this article examines an array of practices in colonial Mexico as it undertakes a discursive account of how gender ideologies informed the politics of discipline and a range of behaviors from atypical sexuality to cross-dressing and witchcraft. It speaks to a lived world set ambiguously between violations of social norms and the uncertainties of official culture as it examines these heterodox practices, especially as they relate to Indians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rare indigenous perspectives on the Spanish Conquest and Christianization of Mexico are gleaned from late-colonial Nahuatl manuscripts known as primordial titles, or titulos, from central New Spain. Although the coming of the sword and cross had become cosmic events by 1650 or later, when titulos were recorded, there is mounting concern in them about the growing penetration of Spaniards and mestizos into outlying Indian towns and their encroachment on increasingly scarce resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]