After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest
I am the co-editor, with Camilla Townsend, of After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest, forthcoming with Oxford University Press for January 2025. Some information about the conference which inspired this book can be found here. A preliminary description of the book follows; more information, including a table of contents and link to purchase, will be added in coming months.
In the decades that followed Hernando Cortés's conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the Aztec empire transformed into the center of the largest European colony in the Americas. It has long been assumed that Indigenous people's personal experiences of this cataclysmic era are inaccessible. Spanish records do not record how Nahuas and other Indigenous peoples spoke privately about the great changes, and records written in native languages like Nahuatl mostly date from the latter half of the sixteenth century. Through close readings of existing Nahuatl sources, presented with original translations, After the Broken Spears illustrates that records of Indigenous experiences of the early colonial period are both more abundant than first appears and more richly detailed than ever imagined. By listening carefully to these accounts, with Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars working in collaboration, the contributors offer a comprehensive vision of how Mexico's Indigenous people lived through the years after the conquest and negotiated the creation of their new world.
Most of the chapters explore Indigenous histories of the early colonial period as they appear in songs, annals, tall tales, and more. The contributors demonstrate how these stories originally circulated as oral accounts first composed in the early sixteenth century and were later copied into alphabetic Nahuatl script by intellectuals determined to preserve their people's history. Other chapter examine early legal documents produced by Indigenous people, contextualizing these documents with Nahuatl histories to reveal dramatic confrontations between local communities and their Spanish overlords. Original translations of Nahuatl texts accompany each chapter, and extensive commentary and footnotes render them legible for a wide audience.
Interspersed between these source-based chapters are commentaries written by five Indigenous Mexican intellectuals. Their sections form an intrinsic part of the construction of the book, highlighting specific historical themes and relating them to the present day. Just as their ancestors did five hundred years ago, these writers continue to negotiate the ramifications of Spanish conquest for their communities. After the Broken Spears thus underscores the continued relevance of the early Indigenous history of colonial Mexico and proposes a novel way to write histories of this era.