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Return to Aztlan - Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo Mexico (Paperback)
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Return to Aztlan - Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo Mexico (Paperback)
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Long before the Spanish colonizers established it in 1598, the
"Kingdom of Nuevo Mexico" had existed as an imaginary world-and not
the one based on European medieval legend so often said to have
driven the Spaniards' ambitions in the New World. What the
conquistadors sought in the 1500s, it seems, was what the native
Mesoamerican Indians who took part in north-going conquest
expeditions also sought: a return to the Aztecs' mythic land of
origin, Aztlan. Employing long-overlooked historical and
anthropological evidence, Danna A. Levin Rojo reveals how ideas
these natives held about their own past helped determine where
Spanish explorers would go and what they would conquer in the
northwest frontier of New Spain-present-day New Mexico and Arizona.
Return to Aztlan thus remaps an extraordinary century during which,
for the first time, Western minds were seduced by Native American
historical memories. Levin Rojo recounts a transformation-of an
abstract geographic space, the imaginary world of Aztlan, into a
concrete sociopolitical place. Drawing on a wide variety of early
maps, colonial chronicles, soldier reports, letters, and native
codices, she charts the gradual redefinition of native and Spanish
cultural identity-and shows that the Spanish saw in Nahua, or
Aztec, civilization an equivalence to their own. A deviation in
European colonial naming practices provides the first clue that a
transformation of Aztlan from imaginary to concrete world was
taking place: Nuevo Mexico is the only place-name from the early
colonial period in which Europeans combined the adjective "new"
with an American Indian name. With this toponym, Spaniards
referenced both Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the indigenous metropolis
whose destruction made possible the birth of New Spain itself, and
Aztlan, the ancient Mexicans' place of origin. Levin Rojo collects
additional clues as she systematically documents why and how
Spaniards would take up native origin stories and make a return to
Aztlan their own goal-and in doing so, overturns the traditional
understanding of Nuevo Mexico as a concept and as a territory. A
book in the Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture
initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
General
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