Indigenous Historiographies and the Reappropriation of Conquest Narratives in Mexico

In Central Mexico, collective memories about the arrival of Spanish forces, military engagements, and early colonial rule were recorded in pictorial and alphabetic form, mostly by anonymous authors, in a number of genres that included annals, chronicles, letters, genealogical narratives, testaments, land surveys. Although the resulting texts are rather heterogeneous in form, composition, and intention, this paper will examine two contrasting modes of appropriation of conquest narratives by indigenous authors. The first mode--Chimalpahin’s rewriting of Francisco López de Gómara’s 1552 popular narrative about the Conquest of Mexico-Tenochtitlan--features a Christianized, assimilated, urban Nahua intellectual. The paper will highlight the modification and changes that Chimalpahin makes to López de Gómara’s original text as a historiographical conversation between a chronicler writing for a broad Spanish audience and a Nahua annalist writing for an emerging native readership. The second mode--concise Northern Zapotec narratives about the arrival of Spaniards and the Christian faith--is found in testaments, land surveys, and calendrical texts, and exemplifies the reappropriation of conquest narratives for both local and global audiences. This paper will argue that the selective rewriting, foregrounding, and telescoping of events found in these native narratives follows historiographical preferences that highlight the local histories of native communities. Moreover, these narratives offer local perspectives on transatlantic and global histories, and often reinterpret these momentous events so local histories and historical actors are inserted into broader transatlantic narratives--world histories avant la lettre.