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The Conquest All Over Again
Nahuas and Zapotecs Thinking, Writing, and Painting Spanish Colonialism

Susan Schroeder
Susan Schroeder is France Vinton Scholes Professor of Colonial Latin American History at Tulane University. She is the author of numerous books, book chapters, and articles about intellectualism, religion, resistance, society, politics, and women in colonial Nahua Mesoamerica. She is the co-editor and co-translator (with Arthur J.O. Anderson) of the Codex Chimalpahin and general editor of the Series Chimalpahin.

The Spaniards typically portrayed the conquest and fall of Mexico Tenochtitlan as Armageddon, while native peoples in colonial Mesoamerica continued to write and paint their histories and lives often without any mention of the foreigners in their midst. Their accounts took the form of annals, chronicles, religious treatises, tribute accounts, theatre pieces, and wills. Thousand of documents were produced, almost all of which served to preserve indigenous ways of doing things. But what provoked record keeping on such a grand scale? At what point did precontact sacred writing become utilitarian and quotidian? Were their texts documentaries, a form of boosterism, even ingenious intellectualism, or were they ultimately a literature of ruin? This volume seeks to address key aspects of indigenous perspectives of the conquest and Spanish colonialism by examining what they themselves recorded and why they did so.

Contributors and chapter titles: Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Aztec Pictography and European Prose: Translation across Language, Script, and Genre”; Amber Brian, “Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Narratives of the Conquest: Historical Discourses and the Colonial Subject”; Louise M. Burkhart, “Staging Conquest: A Nahuatl Historical Drama of the Destruction of Jerusalem”; Travis Krantz, “Sixteenth-Century Pictorials from Tlaxcala: A Multiplicity of Responses to the Conquest”; Susan Schroeder, “Chimalpahin and Writing Indian History for Generations to Come”; Barry David Sell, “’Perhaps our lord God has forgotten me’: Intruding into the Colonial Nahua (Aztec) Confesssional”; David E. Tavárez, “Sacred Time and Colonial Authority: Representation of Spanish Rule in the Zapotec Calendar of Villa Alta”; Kevin Terraciano, “Three Texts in One: Images of the Conquest of Mexico in Book XII of the Florentine Codex”; Camilla Townsend, “Don Juan Zapata and the Notion of a Nahua Identity”; Stephanie Wood, “Women in Conquest Paintings: Representations of Indigenous Women in Conquest Pictorials from New Spain.”

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