For many generations, the Nahuas of Mexico maintained their
tradition of the xiuhpohualli. or "year counts," telling and
performing their history around communal firesides so that the
memory of it would not be lost. When the Spaniards came, young
Nahuas took the Roman letters taught to them by the friars and used
the new alphabet to record historical performances by elders.
Between them, they wrote hundreds of pages, which circulated widely
within their communities. Over the next century and a half, their
descendants copied and recopied these texts, sometimes
embellishing, sometimes extracting, and often expanding them
chronologically. The annals, as they have usually been called, were
written not only by Indians but also for Indians, without regard to
European interests. As such they are rare and inordinately valuable
texts. They have often been assumed to be both largely anonymous
and at least partially inscrutable to modern ears. In this work,
Nahuatl scholar Camilla Townsend reveals the authors of most of the
texts, restores them to their proper contexts, and makes sense of
long misunderstood documents. She follows a remarkable chain of
Nahua historians, generation by generation, exploring who they
were, what they wrote, and why they wrote it. Sometimes they
conceived of their work as a political act, reinstating bonds
between communities, or between past, present, and future
generations. Sometimes they conceived of it largely as art and
delighted in offering language that was beautiful or startling or
humorous. Annals of Native America brings together, for the first
time, samples of their many creations to offer a heretofore
obscured history of the Nahuas and an alternate perspective on the
Conquest and its aftermath.
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