Landscape in the Indigenous Historical Imagination: The Geography of the Mexican Annals

As I read historical annals written by Mexican indigenous peoples, both in the mid-sixteenth century (in the years when pre-contact native historians were still alive) and several generations later, I find some interesting consistency in the way the action centers around notable geographic landmarks. I will explore this phenomenon in specific texts from nearby regions: the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca and the Annals of Puebla. In the second text, the indigenous writer is living and working in a seventeenth-century Spanish city, laid out and functioning according to European notions, and yet his spatial imagination is in many ways similar to that of his forebears.