Euro-Americans see the Spanish conquest as the main event in the
five-century history of Mesoamerica, but the people who lived there
before contact never gave up their own cultures. Both before and
after conquest, indigenous scribes recorded their communities'
histories and belief systems, as well as the events of conquest and
its effects and aftermath. Today, the descendants of those native
historians in modern-day Mexico and Guatemala still remember their
ancestors' stories. In "Mesoamerican Memory," volume editors Amos
Megged and Stephanie Wood have gathered the latest scholarship from
contributors around the world to compare these various memories and
explore how they were preserved and altered over time.
Rather than dividing Mesoamerica's past into pre-contact,
colonial, and modern periods, the essays in this volume emphasize
continuity from the pre-conquest era to the present, underscoring
the ongoing importance of indigenous texts in creating and
preserving community identity, history, and memory. In addition to
Nahua and Maya recollections, contributors examine the indigenous
traditions of Mixtec, Zapotec, Tarascan, and Totonac peoples. Close
analysis of pictorial and alphabetic manuscripts, and of social and
religious rituals, yields insight into community history and
memory, political relations, genealogy, ethnic identity, and
portrayals of the Spanish invaders.
Drawing on archaeology, art history, ethnology, ethnohistory,
and linguistics, the essays consider the function of manuscripts
and ritual in local, regional, and, now, national settings. Several
scholars highlight direct connections between the collective memory
of indigenous communities and the struggles of contemporary groups.
Such modern documents as land titles, for example, gain legitimacy
by referring to ancestral memory.
Crossing disciplinary, methodological, and temporal boundaries,
"Mesoamerican Memory "advances our understanding of collective
memory in Mexico and Guatemala. Through diverse sources--pictorial
and alphabetic, archaeological, archival, and ethnographic--readers
gain a glimpse into indigenous remembrances that, without the
research exhibited here, might have remained unknown to the outside
world.
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