Research
"A Nahua Family History: Kinship, Colonialism, and Indigenous Historiography in Amaquemecan Chalco, 1465-1630"
In my dissertation “A Nahua Family History,” I use Nahuatl-language sources to explore kinship, colonialism, and Indigenous intellectual production in the town of Amaquemecan Chalco across three generations. I follow the family that ruled Amaquemecan, today a small municipality on the periphery of the Valley of Mexico, as they adapted to the challenges posed by Aztec conquest, Spanish colonialism, and Christian evangelization. I show how Indigenous life and society persisted after the Spanish invasion, changed but not destroyed. My dissertation addresses family relations among local Nahua community leaders, the evolution of marriage and gender roles after the establishment of Spanish rule, and Indigenous historical memory from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.
My project takes as its starting point the Nahuatl annals of don Domingo Chimalpahin (1579-1629?), a native son of Amaquemecan, whose historical production marks the largest archive created by any Indigenous person in the early modern Americas. I probe the intricacies of Chimalpahin’s Nahua histories alongside Spanish and Nahuatl sources gathered from archives in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. By examining how the same Nahua kinfolk are represented in documents created by Indigenous and colonial actors, I construct a multi-faceted family history of the men and women who lived through the transition to Spanish rule. I also treat the period before the Spanish invasion in 1519 with the same level as the attention as I do for the period after the invaders arrived, utilizing competing sets of Nahuatl annals, pictorial accounts, and archaeological records to tell a detailed history of precolonial Amaquemecan. I thus challenge the conventional wisdom that Indigenous past cannot be recovered in any detail before 1519.
I show that the people of Amaquemecan overcame the traumas of the early sixteenth century to forge a new social order that reinterpreted Christianity and the Indigenous past to serve future generations. Nahua leaders discovered alternative models for masculine rulership and decided to reconcile old quarrels with their relatives. Elite Nahua women pursued Christian monogamy to create more equitable relationships with their husbands. The people of Amaquemecan innovated novel ideas of Christian Nahua kinship to develop relationships among themselves and between their community and outsiders that strengthened them all. Chimalpahin’s annals were both a product and driver of this new social order, as they rendered generations of local history usable for future generations. By centering the lives of the family members who ruled Amaquemecan during the transition to Spanish rule, my dissertation demonstrates how Indigenous men and women made intimate, personal decisions that shaped the course of history.