Annals of Native America

In an unusual style inspired by the mid-twentieth-century Erich Auerbach tome Mimesis, this work reproduces sizable sections of a variety of primary sources in translation (the originals almost exclusively are in Nahuatl) and places them in historical context to highlight the mechanisms employed by Nahuas to preserve their history and identity under colonialism. Townsend’s effort highlights the appeal and persuasiveness of good storytelling and narrative, but as is characteristic of her other work, undergirding the highly accessible volume is deep research and insight into the Nahuas. The audience seems to be a general readership—the introduction explains in detail things that should be apparent to experts—but all readers will appreciate her interpretations of the Nahua past through the Nahuas’ own histories.Townsend focuses on Native annals, mostly in European script rather than painted manuscripts, produced in Nahuatl in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These are well-known texts, well examined individually and often used by historians, anthropologists, and art historians. Working with them collectively, Townsend makes a compelling case that they represent a consistent Native struggle to preserve and pass along an independent history for a Native audience. Taken together, the continuities among these texts reveal a profound and rich indigenous discourse. Her work takes up James Lockhart’s challenge that we examine and understand separately the Native experience in the words of the Nahuas and helps to reveal the force of their collective insight into the Native experience under colonialism.The texts include the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, Chimalpahin’s corpus, Annals of Tecamachalco, Annals of Tlatelolco, Annals of Juan Bautista, Annals of Cuauhtitlan, the work of don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, and the Annals of Puebla. The work also considers sections of the Florentine Codex, the Codex Osuna, and the Codex Aubin. Townsend includes fine English-language translations and, in an appendix, the original Nahuatl for many of the quoted texts. The bulk of each chapter showcases Townsend’s historical skills. An accomplished student of Nahuatl, she uses her keen historical sense to explain, credibly and reliably, the omissions and intentions of Nahua intellectuals when the texts appear opaque to modern observers.Townsend focuses on finding authorship and Native voice in the xiuhpohualli (yearly accounts), that, on their surface, seem to derive from communities and had no identified author (with the noted exception of Chimalpahin, the seventeenth-century Native historian from Chalco). The detective work done by Townsend ably resurrects plausible authors for most of these texts, although in the very helpful endnotes she acknowledges the uncertainty of some of these choices. Townsend’s demonstrated capacity to write excellent narrative history serves this work well as it accomplishes the rare feat of making highly readable a deeply researched study that historians will also find valuable and insightful.Townsend makes a great contribution to the understanding of the Nahuas by elucidating how, across time and space, Native peoples used traditional forms of preserving and relaying knowledge to maintain their identity after the Spanish invasion. Documenting this over different altepetl with various texts adds strength to the interpretation. Historians should applaud Townsend’s insistence on the usefulness of these Native texts to provide access to the Native voice, a valuable correction to assertions made by others that these texts are hopelessly colonized. Townsend makes accessible to modern readers texts intended for Nahuas themselves through careful storytelling and excellent historical analysis that builds on the New Philology pioneered by Lockhart and the historiography that has flourished since. Native authors wrote for Native audiences who had the cultural and social understanding to derive meaning from the stories recounted. It is testament to Townsend’s intellectual connection to the Nahuas and their history that she can at the same time elucidate these stories and give them meaning that is both comprehensible to the educated reader and also compelling and interesting to those who study deeply the Nahuas

Ancient history · Annals · Archaeology · Colonialism · Ethnology · Genealogy · History · Latin American history and culture

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