Camilla Townsend
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3736265 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Camilla Townsend |
| NOMBRES | Camilla |
| APELLIDO | Townsend |
| FIRMA | TOWNSEND C |
| AFILIACIONES | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8000-8576 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 61 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 71 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 59 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1997 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
“Those who Understood with their Hearts the Ancient Ones' Accounts”
This article argues that Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc should not be considered the author of the Crónica mexicana because he would not have wanted to be thought of as such. A careful study of the earliest known copy of the work, the “Manuscript Kraus 117” in the Library of Congress in Washinton, D.C., demonstrates that the author could not have been Tezozomoc, although Tezozomoc probably was one of the sources for it. Instead, the author had to be…
The Codex Borbonicus Veintena Imagery
How to Be Grateful
On Savage Shores
One day in the mid-sixteenth century, a group of Aztecs were on board a ship bound for Mexico—returning home from a visit to Europe—when their vessel got caught in a terrible storm. The ship did not sink, and one of the travelers, a musician, later wrote a song about the experience in his own language of Nahuatl. In translation, one of the stanzas reads, “The wind picks up, lightning crackles and thunder roars, so that the ocean froths as the boa…
The First Asians in the Americas
New Work on Nahua Spiritual Journeys
This essay reviews the following works: The Fate of Earthly Things: Aztec Gods and God-Bodies. By Molly H. Bassett. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. 283. $27.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780292760882. Islands in the Lake: Environment and Ethnohistory in Xochimilco, New Spain. By Richard M. Conway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. vii + 386. $99.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781316518892. El maíz se sienta para platicar: Códices y forma…
Indigenous Science and Technology
The health of people attending residential treatment for alcohol and other drug use
Feasibility and preliminary results of a call centre delivered continuing care intervention following residential alcohol and other drug treatment
Cacicas
Reviewed by: Cacicas: The Indigenous Women Leaders of Spanish America, 1492–1825 ed. by Margarita R. Ochoa and Sara Vicuña Guengerich Camilla Townsend (bio) Cacicas: The Indigenous Women Leaders of Spanish America, 1492–1825 edited by Margarita R. Ochoa and Sara Vicuña Guengerich University of Oklahoma Press, 2021 in the concluding comments in this fine new edited collection, Mónica Díaz suggests that we should sometimes relinquish our scholarly …
At the Crossroads
The people of San Germán, Puerto Rico, had gone to sleep for the night. It was 1581, and they had recently relocated their fledgling town inland in an effort to protect it from seaborne attack. But the Kalinagos who broke the people's slumber with sudden violence were well informed, for one of their number had produced a map based on knowledge he acquired while he was living in the town as a slave. He had escaped not long ago and made his way hom…
Responses From Latin America
This essay is a response to this forum's other two essays, which are by Taymiya R. Zaman and Manan Ahmed Asif. In it, I share in the excitement presently generated in the field of history by the effort to make South‐South connections and yet also warn of the inherent limitations of such efforts. Subaltern studies famously failed to take hold among Latin Americanists, largely because the colonial context there was so profoundly different than in S…
Collision of Worlds
In Collision of Worlds, David Carballo, a professor of archaeology at Boston University, takes on the gargantuan task of interweaving archaeologically based knowledge with the field of history, with the goal of illuminating the conquest of Mexico in new ways. We have long needed just such a book, and I imagine that for many years historians will consult this volume whenever they need to understand more about archaeology's contributions to the stu…
Study protocol the Continuing Care Project
Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry, ACTRN12618001231235. Registered on 23rd July 2018. https://www.anzctr.org.au/Trial/Registration/TrialReview.aspx?id=375621&isReview=true
Martin Austin Nesvig. Promiscuous Power
Martin Austin Nesvig’s book Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain is a welcome addition to the scholarship on colonial Mexico. It is set in Michoacán, in western Mexico, in the first century after the Spanish conquest. Numerous indigenous groups lived in the region, most prominently the Tarascans, or Purépecha, who had always remained independent of the Aztecs but fell relatively quickly to the Spaniards. This work, however, does …
Worlds without End The Aztecs under Spanish Rule
This article assesses the contribution to the field of Latin American history made by Charles Gibson with his seminal work The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (1964). It argues that Gibson was in effect a man ahead of his time, prepared by his own life experience to recognize not only the victimization of native peoples, but also their agency and strength. He himself, untrained in any indigen…
The Woman Who Turned into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico
Lisa Sousa has made an extraordinarily valuable contribution to the field. Her thorough study of indigenous women's lives in the populous, sedentary cultures of highland Mexico is based on research in Nahuatl, Ñudzahui (Mixtec), Bènizàa (Zapotec), and Ayuuk (Mixe) sources. The Nahuatl sources predominate in the record and hence in the book, but Sousa has made as thorough a job of it as is possible. She regularly provides the original quotations i…
Polygamy and the Rise and Demise of the Aztec Empire
Introduction
The Riches of Twilight (Circa 1600)
By about 1600, indigenous intellectuals in the City of Mexico began to fear that knowledge of the old histories was truly being lost, which led to an outpouring of indigenous history writing. Chimalpahin from Chalco was the most famous of such writers. He was a contemporary of don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl from Tetzcoco and Tezozomoc of the Mexican royal family, both of whom he seems to have known. The cosmopolitanism of Chimalpahin’s vision…
Forging Friendship with Franciscans (1560s–1580s)
Franciscan friars at missions established by the Spanish conquerors taught the Nahuas the roman alphabet. As some of their earliest students attained adulthood and became intellectuals in their own right, they occasionally found themselves arguing with their former mentors. Two indigenous men in this position were don Mateo Sánchez of Tecamachalco, a friend of fray Francisco Toral, and don Pedro de San Buenaventura of Cuauhtitlan, a friend of fra…
The Texts in Nahuatl
[F. 1v]¶ yzcate yn ialtepepouan ȳ tolteca yn imaçicayo in cattca yn ueycan tollan centecpantli yn altepetli. yn ima yn icxi Mochiuhticac yn toltecatli. yn
Becoming Conquered (The 1560s)
The 1560s were a pivotal decade for the Nahuas. For the first time, the urban Indians had to pay a head tax like all other Mexican indigenous peoples. They made extraordinary efforts to prevent this change, which they foresaw would impoverish them, and they recorded for their posterity traditional histories or annals recounting their efforts. Because of high unrest, a plot against the Crown by don Martín Cortés, son of Hernando Cortés, reverberat…
Renaissance in the East (The Seventeenth Century)
Tlaxcala, east of Mexico City, stayed relatively isolated culturally longer than did most of central Mexico. For this reason the traditional annals genre lasted longer there than anywhere else. More than two dozen texts survive from the seventeenth century. Among them is a long work by don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, an indigenous nobleman who served on the indigenous cabildo. After he died, his young friend don Manuel do los Santos Salaz…
Dialogue with Europe, dialogue with the past
Dialogue with Europe, dialogue with the past opens by making the arresting point that although indigenous elites have been omnipresent in the recent literature on colonial Latin America, they have
Domestic Architecture and Power
The field of historical archaeology is still young in South America, and can honestly be said to be in its infancy in Ecuador. Thus Ross Jamieson’s study of the city of Cuenca is a welcome addition to the literature, especially because his overall goal is “to use Cuenca as an example in order to examine the role of domestic architecture and domestic material culture in the Spanish colonial world” (p. xi). He begins by making the laudable statemen…
Annals of Native America
After the Spanish conquest, the Nahuas of colonial Mexico learned the Roman alphabet and used it to transcribe oral performances of traditional histories of their peoples. These texts were called xiuhpohaulli in Nahuatl and are usually referred to as “annals” now. They were produced by indigenous people and for indigenous people, without regard to European interests, and they therefore provide the closest view of pre-Columbian historiography we a…
Glimpsing Native American Historiography
This article argues that if we are to make progress in understanding pre-conquest notions of history among the Nahuas, we must study the earliest alphabetic annals at least as seriously as we have studied the pictorials, including not only those treating the pre-conquest period, but also those treating the authors' own times, the colonial sixteenth century. Placing the hitherto understudied Annals of Juan Bautista and Annals of Tecamachalco in th…
New World Literacy
Additional informationNotes on contributorsCamilla TownsendCamilla Townsend is Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. An editorial board member of Colonial Latin American Review, she is the author of four books on the history of the colonial Americas
Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough
Pocahontas may be the most famous Native American who ever lived, but during the settlement of Jamestown, and for two centuries afterward, the great chiefs Powhatan and Opechancanough were the subjects of considerably more interest and historical documentation than the young woman. It was Opechancanough who captured the foreign captain Chawnzmit -- John Smith. Smith gave Opechancanough a compass, described to him a spherical earth that revolved a…
Half My Body Free, the Other Half Enslaved
I'm a slave, sir'', said Reyna Maria Luisa. ''Not anymore'', Bolivar said. ''Love has made you free''. In the morning he bought her from the owner of the hacienda for one hundred pesos taken from his impoverished treasury and granted her unconditional freedom. Before he left he could not resist the temptation of presenting her with a public dilemma. He was in the back patio of the house with a group of officers who sat any way they could on the b…
Story Without Words
A woman sat silently on her raft in the river; the water made only the faintest lapping sound. She looked out at the city of Guayaquil and listened to the music and laughter, the yells and scuffling. During the chaos of the recent wars for independence, a small floating city had come to be anchored next to this big port town. A network of creeks and streams ran into the River Guayas, and then the river ran its course down to the Pacific. People c…
No One Said it was Quetzalcoatl
This article argues that, contrary to popular opinion, there is little evidence that the indigenous people of Mexico ever believed that Hernando Cortés and his men were gods, and that there is no meaningful evidence that any story about the god Quetzalcoatl's returning from the East in 1519 ever existed prior to the conquest. In order to dismantle the contruct, the origins and durability of the myth are explained, and then an alternate explanatio…
Tales of Two Cities
Camilla Townsend's provocative book compares two early republican river ports whose good economic times were tied to exports. She profiles the societies between 1820 and 1835 to explain the roots of poverty and to answer the question of why one city developed an egalitarian and inclusive ethic while the other did not. Her answer is “economic culture,” a vague phrase that is too narrow to answer her questions satisfactorily. Hers, she says, is a s…
At the Crossroads
The people of San Germán, Puerto Rico, had gone to sleep for the night. It was 1581, and they had recently relocated their fledgling town inland in an effort to protect it from seaborne attack. But the Kalinagos who broke the people's slumber with sudden violence were well informed, for one of their number had produced a map based on knowledge he acquired while he was living in the town as a slave. He had escaped not long ago and made his way hom…
Global Indios
Though Nancy Van Deusen gave her book a title to parallel that of Lewis Hanke's classic work and though she opens with a vignette featuring fray Bartolomé de las Casas, she is quite clear from the outset that she has not attempted simply to update Hanke's Spanish Struggle for Justice (1965) to reflect the moral and intellectual sensibilities of the twenty-first century. Instead, she has shifted the focus entirely away from Las Casas and centers i…
Dreaming of Dry Land
Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City." Colonial Latin American Review, 24(4), pp. 575–576
Introduction
Additional informationNotes on contributorsCamilla TownsendCamilla Townsend is Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She has written about colonial encounters in various American arenas, specializing particularly in Nahuatl language and culture
Story Without Words
A woman sat silently on her raft in the river; the water made only the faintest lapping sound. She looked out at the city of Guayaquil and listened to the music and laughter, the yells and scuffling. During the chaos of the recent wars for independence, a small floating city had come to be anchored next to this big port town. A network of creeks and streams ran into the River Guayas, and then the river ran its course down to the Pacific. People c…
Half My Body Free, the Other Half Enslaved
I'm a slave, sir'', said Reyna Maria Luisa. ''Not anymore'', Bolivar said. ''Love has made you free''. In the morning he bought her from the owner of the hacienda for one hundred pesos taken from his impoverished treasury and granted her unconditional freedom. Before he left he could not resist the temptation of presenting her with a public dilemma. He was in the back patio of the house with a group of officers who sat any way they could on the b…
Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773
Tales of Two Cities
With a common heritage as former colonies of Europe, why did the United States so outstrip Latin America in terms of economic development in the nineteenth century? In this innovative study, Camilla Townsend challenges the traditional view that North Americans succeeded because of better attitudes toward work—the Protestant work ethic—and argues instead that they prospered because of differences in attitudes towards workers that evolved in the co…
Tales of Two Cities
Domestic Architecture and Power
The field of historical archaeology is still young in South America, and can honestly be said to be in its infancy in Ecuador. Thus Ross Jamieson’s study of the city of Cuenca is a welcome addition to the literature, especially because his overall goal is “to use Cuenca as an example in order to examine the role of domestic architecture and domestic material culture in the Spanish colonial world” (p. xi). He begins by making the laudable statemen…
Time, History, and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico (review)
Ross Hassig's newest book offers a boldly revisionist look at Aztec cosmology. Hassig asserts that "the traditional emphasis on time in Aztec culture as a cyclical phenomenon that patterns behavior is the result of a theoretical predisposition that short-circuits empirical research rather than being solidly grounded in the data, and that is fundamentally miscast" (p. xiii). He first demonstrates that all cultures encompass varying conceptions of …
Tales of Two Cities
Camilla Townsend's provocative book compares two early republican river ports whose good economic times were tied to exports. She profiles the societies between 1820 and 1835 to explain the roots of poverty and to answer the question of why one city developed an egalitarian and inclusive ethic while the other did not. Her answer is “economic culture,” a vague phrase that is too narrow to answer her questions satisfactorily. Hers, she says, is a s…
Burying the White Gods
Burying the White Gods
Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico Get access Camilla Townsend Camilla Townsend Camilla Townsend is an associate professor of history at Colgate University. She is a comparativist, whose book Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America (Austin, Tex., 2000) explores contrasting colonial legacies in the Chesapeake and the Andean region. Recently, she has concluded that N…
No One Said it was Quetzalcoatl
This article argues that, contrary to popular opinion, there is little evidence that the indigenous people of Mexico ever believed that Hernando Cortés and his men were gods, and that there is no meaningful evidence that any story about the god Quetzalcoatl's returning from the East in 1519 ever existed prior to the conquest. In order to dismantle the contruct, the origins and durability of the myth are explained, and then an alternate explanatio…
Trading Roles
Reviewed by: Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí by Jane Mangan Camilla Townsend Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí. By Jane Mangan. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. This is a book on the metropolis that was once known as the miraculous city of Potosí – but it is not a book about the silver mines that gave the city its fame. Rather, Jane Mangan has given…
Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma
Resilient Cultures
Book Review| January 01 2005 Resilient Cultures: America's Native Peoples Confront European Colonization, 1500-1800 By John E. Kicza. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. xvi + 203 pp., preface, maps, bibliography, index. $30.80 paper.) Camilla Townsend Camilla Townsend Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2005) 52 (1): 218–219. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-52-1-218 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share …
Pocahontas
“What in the World Have You Done To Me, My Lover?” Sex, Servitude, and Politics among the Pre-Conquest Nahuas as seen in the Cantares Mexicanos
The year 13-Reed [1479]. It was at this time that the people of Ame-cameca and the Chalcas Tlalmanalcas came to sing for the first time in Mexico. At that time they performed the song of the women of Chalco, the Chalca Cihuacuicatl. They came to sing for the lord Axayacatzin. The song and the dance were begun in the patio of the palace while Axayacatl was still inside in the house of his women. But in the beginning the song was poorly performed. …
Estrategias del mestizaje
Alexia Ibarra has made a succinct and important statement about mestizaje in the Andes at the end of the colonial era: that mestizaje was not merely a “fiscal category” but was also used “as a strategy” by those calling themselves mestizos (p. 122). Two groups actively tried to gain exemption from tribute payments by claiming mestizo status: those who left their indigenous communities and attempted to establish new identities for themselves and t…
Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough
Pocahontas may be the most famous Native American who ever lived, but during the settlement of Jamestown, and for two centuries afterward, the great chiefs Powhatan and Opechancanough were the subjects of considerably more interest and historical documentation than the young woman. It was Opechancanough who captured the foreign captain Chawnzmit -- John Smith. Smith gave Opechancanough a compass, described to him a spherical earth that revolved a…
Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina
Feminist historians of Spain and their close collaborators around the world have orchestrated a remarkable contribution to women’s history. Part of a truly massive four-volume project ranging in coverage from the ancient world to the present day, volume 2 of Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina treats the early modern period. It is encyclopedic in its scope yet avoids the pitfalls of actually becoming an encyclopedia by having its m…
Pocahontas, Little Wanton
Journal Article Neil Rennie. Pocahontas, Little Wanton: Myth, Life and Aftermath. London: Quaritch. 2007. Pp. xii, 209. £58.00 Get access Neil Rennie. Pocahontas, Little Wanton: Myth, Life and Aftermath. London: Quaritch. 2007. Pp. xii, 209. £58.00. Camilla Townsend Camilla Townsend Rutgers University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 113, Issue 4, October 2008, Pages 1…
Here in This Year
Glimpsing Native American Historiography
This article argues that if we are to make progress in understanding pre-conquest notions of history among the Nahuas, we must study the earliest alphabetic annals at least as seriously as we have studied the pictorials, including not only those treating the pre-conquest period, but also those treating the authors' own times, the colonial sixteenth century. Placing the hitherto understudied Annals of Juan Bautista and Annals of Tecamachalco in th…
For Glory and Bolívar
Pamela Murray has provided the field with the biography of Manuela Sáenz that we have needed for many years. As studies of the history of the fledgling United States have long recognized, both women as individuals and gender roles as frames of reference were significant factors first in the break with England and then in the formation of the new nation. We have been aware of this on a theoretical level as regards Latin America as well. We now und…
The View from San Juan del Rio
After the Spanish conquest, Mexican indigenous peoples were exposed to European culture to varying degrees. The people of the Tlaxcala valley, east of Mexico City, were more isolated from Spanish colonisers than many others. Thus in the 17th century, we find a florescence of traditional indi-genous historical annals in the native language of Nahuatl, by then written out in the Roman alphabet rather than in the older pictographic forms. In this re…
Script and Glyph
Book Review| April 01 2011 Script and Glyph: Pre-Hispanic History, Colonial Bookmaking, and the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca Script and Glyph: Pre-Hispanic History, Colonial Bookmaking, and the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca. By Leibsohn, Dana. (Washington, DC: Dunbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2009. xv + 199 pp., preface, introduction, figures, plates, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.) Camilla Townsend Camilla Townsend …
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