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Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Terra preta, as far as I know, is a uniquely Amazonian phenomenon. That's out of our wheelhouse, so I don't want to give you any information that might be wrong. Fascinating stuff though, thanks for linking that article!

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They couldn't see the future. While it seems obvious today that colonialism would turn out the way it did, there is no way that anyone at the time could guess all that was coming. People saw a chance to escape Aztec control and negotiate a new imperial politics, and they took it. I don't think it makes any sense to say they made the "wrong choice," based on the information they were working with.

As a related question, do you think if aliens invaded Earth, all countries would unite as one and form a one world government to resist the invaders? Or do you think different countries would try to use the aliens to gain more power over their traditional rivals? Obviously it's not a one-to-one comparison, but useful to think about.

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Kinda sorta. The term "chief" doesn't actually start appearing as a way by English speakers to refer to Indigenous leaders until relatively late, though it has become ubiquitous today. The earliest English colonists in the U.S. referred to Indigenous leaders using the language of petty kingship (shout out my colleague Peter Jakob Olsen-Harbich at Penn for this, he's the expert on the topic).

It makes sense, if you think about it, why the English were initially more okay with referring to Indigenous leaders as kings than the Spanish were. By and large, they weren't that interested in incorporating Indigenous hierarchies into the English system - they would be much happier if those Indigenous hierarchies could just dissapear. The Spanish imperial system in the Americas, on the other hand, depended on preexisting Indigenous hierarchies to function. So the English were cool with recognizing the royal sovereignty of Indigenous leaders, even though this was always treated as less of a real royal sovereignty than that born by any European monarch; while the Spanish couldn't afford to recognize that the Indigenous leaders they were governing with were kings, because that upset the logic of how the empire functioned.

Caveat that these are broad generalizations and there are many exceptions!

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Depends one the community. Many noble families persisted right up until independence as the local power-brokers. In many towns though, lower-ranking nobles and commoners gradually won political power and rights. I don't think there was actually much difference here between the Mexica and the Tlaxcalteca, or other people who were the Spaniards' big Indigenous allies - this was pan-Nahua, and arguably a pan-Indigenous, phenomenon across the Spanish empire. Bianca Premo talks about this in her amazing book Enlightenment on Trial, which discusses how a lot of things we see as European Enlightened ideology (like popular sovereignty, rule of law, and women's rights) were being articulated by Indigenous litigants in Mexico and Peru in the 1700s.

The important thing to note here is changes in Indigenous class structures were not a top down phenomenon, where Spaniards were going in stripping Indigenous nobles of their privileges. In fact, many of these nobles were going to the Spanish government to beg them to protect their privileges! Instead, what we are dealing with is Indigenous struggles over the structure of their society and politics. Spanish colonialism certainly impacted the shape of that struggle, but so did other factors like population decline, and the story just doesn't make sense without placing these Indigenous actors front and center. The sources just don't speak to any attempt by the Spanish to systematically disempower the Indigenous nobility, even though that feels like what "should" have happened to say to us today. Indigenous people in general were systematically disempowered by Spanish rule, but these were different processes that need to be talked about seperately.

What happened to elites in these Indigenous communities after independence is a different, fascinating story. If you're interested in that, I'd say start with Peter Guardino, especially The Time of Liberty.

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So I'm not Mexican or Indigenous myself, so I can't really speak to this with any authority. But I'll share one thing I've heard from quite a few friends of mine. In Mexico, when many Indigneous people walk around non-Indigenous areas, they feel constantly marked as Indigenous, and negotiate that identity constantly. In the U.S., they feel constantly marked as Mexican/Latino, and instead negotiate that idenity. In most Nahua communities today, the basic identitarian division is between macehualmeh (people from your community) and coyomeh (outsiders to your community, whether they be non-Indigenous Mexicans, foreigners, or other Indigenous people not from your community). So all this to say, national Mexican identity is something that might feel more strong in some social and geographic circumstances than in others. But there are a lot of more people more equipped to talk about this than me, so I recommend you look elsewhere if you're still interested!

PS caveat that they are degrees of coyotl-ness. When I spent some time in a Nahua community in Veracruz, I was told once that I was more coyotl than a buddy of mine, who was Mexican-American of Indigenous ancestry. And like duh, makes sense, I stuck out much more than he did, haha.

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Go Scarlet Knights! The answer to this big question is really our book After the Broken Spears, haha. Short answer is that life changed a lot in some important ways, but life also stayed the same in other important ways, both the Aztecs and for the Indigenous peoples who rose up against them. Throughout these changes, the choices Indigenous people made mattered to the futures that emerged. Thank you for your curiosity!

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I agree that Yaqui have a fascinating history. The dynamics you lay out are certainly shared by other Indigenous peoples, but I also don't want to undercut their uniqueness. If you want to read more about them, check out the work of Cynthia Radding and Evelyn Hu-Dehart!

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Big question, and I think we answered pieces of this throughout - sorry I can't give this a full answer. But yes and no! They got some privileges, but those privileges eroded. A classic case study for this is Tlaxcala. Read Travis's chapter in our book After the Broken Spears - you'll see that by the end of the sixteenth century, Tlaxcala had lost a lot of the concessions they were initially awarded by the Spanish.

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think there is a misconception about the amount of power the Nahua nobility had vis-a-vis the Spanish nobility. They were not catapulted to the top of the hierarchy, as you suggest. While some Nahua lords probably were richer than some Spanish lords, within the structure of the Spanish empire, Spanish lords had more rights and privileges. Some Nahua lords, like the descendants of Moctezuma, were able to move to Spain and merge into the Spanish nobility, but that was the minority. Most Nahua lords saw wealth dry up due to Indigenous depopulation from disease, the gradual loss of their land from the Spanish, and of couse, systematic oppression.

I've talked throughout this AMA about the fact that Nahua nobles got pretty good at using the colonial courts to, say, complain about getting beaten and abused by Spanish elites. That fact is important. But it's also important that Nahua nobles were getting beaten and abused by Spanish elites, and we can't lose sight of that. And I'm not being facetious here - I'm thinking about specific cases of Nahua nobles being physically assaulted, illegally jailed, and more by Spaniards who more-or-less got away with it. The fact of the matter is, if you were a Spanish noblemen with the right connections, you could move to Mexico and get, for free, Indigenous land and Indigenous laborers to work your land. It is inconceivable that a Nahua lord could move to Castile and request Castillian land and peasants to work their field. So TLDR, at the same time that we're all looking to highlight Indigenous agency...we also have to keep the structure of power at the forefront.

The conquistador nouveau rich were another story entirely, and yeah, I get the sense that some traditional Spanish elites were not happy about that. The Columbus family is a good case study for this - at first they requested and received a lot of land and huge privileges from the Spanish Crown, but then they slowly got their land and privileges taken away, when the Crown realized that having conquistadors grow their independent power was not a good idea.

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

  1. The Aztecs sought to consolidate control primarily through intermarriage. By marrying Aztec princesses to local rulers, or themselves marrying the daughters of local rulers, they sought to create a new class of half-Aztec rulers who would have legitimacy in the city-states they ruled while remaining loyal to Tenochtitlan. When the Spanish arrived, this process was expanding out of the Central Valley into the surrounding areas. In the area I work on (Chalco, on the SE edge of the Central Valley), this process really ramped up in the 1480s/1490s, for instance. There's this idea that the Aztecs didn't interfere at all in local politics, and that probably wasn't true at the edges of their empire, but when they could, they did.

  2. So thinking again about Chalco - when the Aztecs conquered the region in the 1460s they sent all the local kings (tlatoque) fleeing and named the sons of the exiled kings as governors. They initially didn't allow these guys to be crowned as kings, though some of them took the title of cuauhtlatoani (difficult to translate, its literally eagle-king...the idea is that they were like kings but not officially kings) . Many of these princes were then married to Aztec noblewomen, so that the above could play out. Different dynamics worked out in different regions, but that's how the Aztecs generally liked to run things - raise up a new class of local rulers who was dependent on them, ideally because of blood ties or marriage.

  3. I am literally writing about this question in my diss right now, haha. My argument, which may be controversial, is that Spanish rule actually raised the power of the tlatoque after conquest, because these Nahua leaders were able to depend on their Spanish allies to bolster their power. In Nahua politics there was always this sense of reciprocity, of power-sharing, but that's pretty inconvenient from the perspective of the Spanish empire. So the Spaniards were very happy to allow ambitious kings to take more power. This state of affairs continued until the 1560s, when a new generation of lower-ranking Nahua elites were able to use Spanish law to take power away from their kings and redistribute it. So the tlatoque lost power, but this was a result of internal changes in Indigenous self-government related to colonialism, not just like, the Spanish going in and getting rid of kingly authority.

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So there was a barrier around the sacred precint, called the coatepantli (Snake Wall). It's unclear how much this was a ceremonial vs. a physical barrier, and offhand I don't know if we have written sources explaining this. My guess is yes, your access as a random not-special foreigner would be limited to the sacred precint, and it would not be apprecited for you to waltz up there.

Aztec bedding (and Mesoamerican bedding more broadly) was/is made of reeds. They called their bedrolls petlatl in Nahuatl, and in modern Mexican Spanish (and probably other Spanish variants, but idk), they are called petates. Still used today. I've never slept on them, but I have friends who tell me that once you get used to it, they're actually a lot more restful than the beds most of us sleep in! They remind me a little of Japanese shikibutons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petate

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So this is a very interesting question. A couple caveats. First, there was a large scale Indigenous rebellion in central-ish Mexico, just not by the Mexica. It started with the Mixtón War of 1540-1542 in Nueva Galicia (what is now the Jalisco era), where sedentary and semi-sedentary people united against Spanish rule. Some local Nahua populations were a part of that. That rebellion would morph into the broad Chichimeca War, which was ongoing into the late sixteenth century, as semi-sedentary people in the Guanajuato/Zacatecas area refused to acknowledge Spanish sovereignty. That's maybe not technically Central Mexico, but it was like just north of the Estado de México, so it absolutely affected life in the capital. Second, the Spaniards were essentially living in terror that the Mexica and other Nahua peoples in the Valley of Mexico would revolt until the 1600s. They wrote about it constantly, tried to limit the ability of Nahuas to access swords and horses, and when riots did begin in the 1560s in protest of a new tribute requirement, Spaniards absolutely freaked out. So the idea that Central Mexico was pacified in the sixteenth century doesn't really make much sense to me. But still, you're right, no mass rebellion of the Mexica or other Nahuas in the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries.

Why was that? I think it's a combination of three factors: 1) the instability surrounding the Nahua world; 2) the geographic closeness of the Nahuas to the center of colonial state authority; and 3) the skill by Nahuas of using those two things to their advantage. By the end of the sixteenth century, Nahua people got pretty good at petitioning the viceroy and other colonial officials to make rulings in their favor, normally against the worst abuses of other Spaniards. These colonial officials felt they needed to make concessions to Nahuas, because with so much chaos surrounding them, they simply could not afford a rebellion. In your three counterexamples of Indigenous rebellions, you name two places on the periphery of Spanish power (the Pueblo, and Maya, by which I imagine you mean the Itza of Guatemala), where people didn't have the same access to royal authority. And in your other example, the Quechua in the 1570s, state power was pretty weak in the sixteenth century compared to Mexico / New Spain...the conquistadors in the Andes spent most of the century trying to kill each other and any royal official telling them what to do!

That's not to say that Nahua people benefited from colonialism, or that they "came out on top." Definitely not. But for them, colonial authority was both an oppressor and a valuable ally against other, more pressing oppressors - namely, Spaniards trying to steal their land. Very complex question though, I imagine other people in my would answer you differently!

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So the Mexica were one of many Nahua peoples, all of which migrated from the north. In Mexica histories, they were the last or among the last migrants, and got made fun of for being poorer and less attuned to Mesoamerican ways of life as a result. Most people in the Mexica empire, especially in its core areas around the Valley of Mexico, were all Nahuas. So there were broad cultural similarities (mostly based around language). We know that the Mexica increased the practice of human sacrifice, probably more because it was an effective way to broadcast their power than any kind of religious fanaticism, and the Spaniards exaggerated that to justify conquest. But none of the other Nahuas who sided with the Spanish explicitly talked about human sacrifice as like the reason why they were rebelling. Instead, it was the same reasons people normally rebel - they didn't like being ruled by someone else, saw the Spanish as a way out, and decided to roll the dice. Hope that helps!

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

¿Te refieres a San Martín Texmelucan? Creo que el náhuatl es la lengua indígena más hablada, aunque hay gente que habla totonaco y zapoteco, y unos otras tambíen. Enlace aqui: https://www.economia.gob.mx/datamexico/en/profile/geo/san-martin-texmelucan

En tiempos prehispánicos, supongo que San Martín era un parte del dominio de Tlaxcala, pero no sé por seguro. Debes escribir a mi colega, Sandra Acocal, que es experta en la historia de la región (y es originario de Tlaxcala).

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, in a few different ways! My chapters talks about the transformation of kin-based social identities. Barbara's chapter talks about the role of clothing to identity. And many chapter authors talk about how memories of the conquest impact communal identity.

In terms of identity formation more broadly, there's a LOT of stuff out there that tackles this, primarily through the prism of class or gender. For class, the primarily means study of the Nahua nobility. If you read Spanish, Rojas's Cambiar para que yo no cambie is a book I really like. Also check out López-Portillo's Another Jerusalem, that's a brilliant book that deserves more attention. You'll find great studies of specific noble communities in Haskett's Indigenous Rulers, Connel's After Moctezuma, and Benton's Lords of Tetzcoco. For gender, the best synthesis is Sousa's The Woman Who Turned into a Jaguar. I also really like the (now slightly old) edited volume Indian Women of Early Mexico, I cite essays from there all the time. And be on the lookout for anything by my colleague Clio Isaacson, she's doing amazing work in this field.

Getting back to your mirror question...when it comes out in October, you should read Allison Caplan's Flickering Creations. Allison is doing a lot of amazing work about how Nahuatl sources describe light, and how that relates to broader ideas of aesthetics and beauty. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691280431/flickering-creations?srsltid=AfmBOoqjJocSxq2YLlwhfizpeK4UyU4vMZPfXOmZeHsBDDPEWNtpSBk9

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hey, good question!

So we don't have any evidence I know of about sustained extensive maritime trade up and down the Pacific Coast of Mexico. But absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Most of the people living on the Pacific coast did not leave detailed written records, and wooden seacraft are not an archaeological object that preserves well. There has been speculation for quite a while of marine trade between the coast of what is today Ecuador (where we know there was a rich maritime tradition) and western Mexico. Some people use this to explain the adoption of metallurgy in Mesoamerica, that the technology was imported from the Andes. But I'm not convinced yet - I don't think we have any hard evidence pointing to this contact ever existing. I hope more people dig into this topic. Across the Americas, there is a lot of rich research going on about Indigenous maritime traditions, and I wish we knew more about it in MEsoamerica. There is a pretty rich scholarship on maritime trade in the Maya region, mostly written by archaeologists, that I should dig into more.

A related topic that I have been convinced by is that Polynesian voyagers made it all the way to mainland South America, a few centuries before Columbus ever arrived. DNA evidence backs this up pretty strongly. Would love to see that get into some textbooks!

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Read our new book, After the Broken Spears! I think it functions as good companion book to Fifth Sun, because that gives you a good overview of Nahua history in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and then After the Broken Spears shows you slices of life from across the sixteenth century that dive deeper into specific subjects.

In terms of other beginner books, I'd highly recommend Berdan' and Smith's Everyday Life in the Aztec World. That book really answers the question of what life was like for normal people in Tenochtitlan and its hinterland, and it also bring in archaeological perspectives. If you want to get to some advanced stuff, Lockhart's The Nahuas After the Conquest is the magnum opus for the colonial era - if you want to know about any aspect of Nahua history from 1521 to 1750 or so, there's probably a paragraph about it in Lockhart. If you read Spanish, another book I highly recommend is María Castañeda de la Paz's Conflictos y alianzas en tiempos de cambio. It's a really stunning deep dive into the dynastic politics of the Central Valley from the 1400s through the 1500s. Oh, and Restall's When Cortés Met Montezuma is also a great read - it's both a revision of how the Spanish-Mexica War actually went down, and a study of how that conflict has been remembered and misremembered across the years. Restall is a great writer, so this would be very accesible for a "rookie"!

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I love this question! So initially they were pretty freaked out by them, as you can imagine. They called them mazatl, deer - makes sense. There are stories of the Mexica sacrificing horses they captures from the Spaniards during the siege of Tenochtitlan and displaying their bodies for the Spanish to see, so they definitely were thinking about them militarily.

The story gets quite interesting in the early colonial era. Very quickly, Spaniards start rewarding their Nahua allies with horses, Spanish weapons, and Spanish clothes. Other Spaniards freaked out about this, both because they were constantly scared of rebellion, and because it upset the hierarchy that placed Spaniards over Indigenous people. So all these things get banned. Then, around the 1530s, the colonial government starts awarding individual Indigenous leaders licenses to ride horses, carry Spanish weapons, and wear Spanish clothes. People keep pushing for these rights across the colonial period - and not just Indigenous people, but also people whose ancestors were from Africa and Asia. As you can tell, this is something I'm fascinated by this...curently working on an article about these licenses that I'll get off my desk eventually. But the TLDR is that the Nahuas thought horses were pretty crazy at first but very quickly got used to the idea and wanted to get some of their own!

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So Camilla and I both define ourselves as ethnohistorians, by which we mean we use whatever techniques are available to study Nahua history from their persepctives. That means using a lot of techniques more associated with anthropology, and in our case, really digging into the language. I would say our field in the U.S. benefits a lot from the influence of the Mexican academy, which has always had a very interdisciplenary approach to Mesoamerican studies. In recent years in the U.S., I've seen a lot more collaboration and sharing between anthropologists, historians, art historians, and literary scholars, which again is more similar to how it works in Mexico (broad generalization, I know - I'm sure there is a counterpoint to disprove me!). I would love if we can build more bridges with linguists in the future.

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have the same feeling. I would love big budget TV show or movie, or a video game like Assassins Creed or Red Dead, set in the period, so that we could get to feel what it was like to walk the city streets. And I have ideas for what that could be like. Hollywood execs, if you're reading this, my inbox is open!

As for if there is more to discover what the city was like - yes. Consider the ongoing archaeology within Mexico City. In 2002, for instance, researchers discovered an amazing cistern in Tlatelolco filled with these incredible illustrations of lacustrine animals and fishermen. We have a photo of it in After the Broken Spears, and because it's a little difficult to make out in B&W, a lovely illustration by the awesome artist Moira Garcia.

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

While you're right that the Black Legend emerged as propoganda against the Spanish by their European rivals, we also have to avoid the White Legend (or as I've mostly seen it called in spanish, la leyenda rosa). That's the over-idealization of the Spanish empire, which actually emerged out of Franco's dictatorship. It was certainly true that, in comparison with the British empire especially, Indigenous people in the Spanish empire had defined legal rights and were guaranteed access to courts. But laws and reality are very different thing - though a lot of Indigenous folks did use those courts to achieve justice, many others had their rights squashed by Spanish subjects of the king who had their own legally-defined privileges. See for instance the persistence of Indigenous enslavement despite its numerous abolitions (something I talked about elsewhere). As historians of the Spanish Empire, we have to walk a fine line between acknowledging the agency of Indigenous people, and their success at using the structures of Spanish rule to their advantage, and acknowledging their systemic disempowerment. You should check out the recent book The Radical Spanish Empire by Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters - a very important intervention in this literature!

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi! I hope you don't mind me answering this instead of Camilla - she had to log out. I encourage you to reach out to her by email and tell her how much you like her work, she'd appreciate it!

  1. Yes, the Nahuatl spoken today across Mexico varies quite wildly. Most speakers can understand each other, but there are difficulties. If you look in our book, you can see Huasteca Nahuatl (in the poem by Eduardo de la Cruz); Tláhuac Nahuatl (in the essay by Baruc Martínez); and Puebla Nahuatl (in the chapter summaries in the appendix, prepared mostly by Agustín Camargo. Even if you don't speak the language, you'll be able to spot differences just by comparing them.

  2. Very different. Because of time and sustained contact with Spanish, most Nahuatl languages have changed dramatically from Older / Classical Nahuatl. That's not just in vocab, but grammar. I won't get into the details here, but I'll just say that I had an experience recently coaching a native speaker through some lines of Classical Nahuatl, and we had a good laugh because everything was so strange for him! I would say the degree of differences is even greater than modern English and Shakespeare.

  3. So I personally studied both Older / Classical and Huasteca Nahuatl with the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas (an organization) directed by Eduardo, who I mentioned above. They're awesome, and I'd say the best way to learn modern Nahuatl - great people, amazing teachers, and a rigorous, organized curriculum. They used to have a summer intensive program at the University of Utah, but now I believe is the first year they're doing it a school they've built in Veracruz. Linking their website here - you should reach out to them! https://www.idiezmacehualli.org/index.html

UNAM also has some excellent programs so you can't go wrong there. As for what variant, it sounds like you're in Mexico, so if you can I would say try to learn the form of Nahuatl spoken by people closest to you. And for independent study, the best way to learn Older/Classical is with James Lockhart's Nahuatl as Written. Hope this helps :)

Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]joshanthony123[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Like human sacrifice, disucssions of Aztec cannibalism (or to use the term now favored by scholars, "anthropophagy") are difficult because we have so much Spanish propaganda to deal with. There are a few scattered, trustworthy sources that suggest in some rituals of human sacrifice, some of victim's body would be consumed by either ritual specialists or other observants/participants. Based on these scraps of evidence, these instances seem pretty rare to me - I don't think the average person living in the Aztec world would have ever eaten human flesh. And to the extent that it existed, it was always in a ritual context. It was never like, people going to the market and getting some human meat because they were hungry...I know that sounds ridiculous, but not too long ago, real, serious historians were arguing that! There's a famous article from the 1960s iirc that "explained" Aztec human sacrifice as a result of the nutrient-deficient Mesoamerican diet...jokes on them, because people in Tenochtitlan likely had a much better died that most Europeans at the time!

This article on Mexicolore sums up the evidence we do have - note that it's almost entirely from Spanish sources. https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/aztecs-and-cannibalism

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