Aztec Latin

Ucla Historical Journal, 1992

Ma quimatican Yn quexquichtin quitasque yhuan quipohuasque Ynin esCritura de Benta ticchihua Yn tehuantin... Let those know who should see and read this instrument of sale made by us... cin ualic u >ibtabal in testamento tu tanil in yum Batab y_ Justicias... I state my will for it to be written down before the batab and magistrates... yodzanacahui tutu yaha dzaha nudzahui... Let this document in the "Mixtec" language be read...Πntroduction to Indigenous Writing Soon after the arrival of Europeans in the land that they called New Spain, Franciscan and Dominican friars taught the art of alphabetic writing to members of the indigenous elite. As a result, indigenous peoples during the colonial Mexican period produced (mostly legal) documentation in their own languages using the Roman alphabet. The first group to do this were the Nahuas (sometimes called "Aztecs") of central Mexico; material in Nahuatl has survived in greater quantities than sources from other Indigenous Writing and Literacy 9 language-groups and has been studied far more by scholars. dditional work has also been published on Yucatec Maya and Cakchiquel sources and, more recently, on Mixtec documentation. There are also sources, known of but unstudied by scholars, in Zapotec, Chocho, Quiche, Otomi, Tarascan and no doubt other Mesoamerican languages.-^Smaller bodies of documents that have not surfaced or survived may have been written in lesser-spoken languages (see Figure 1: Map of Mesoamerican Languages). This chapter makes general remarks about indigenous-language documentation of colonial Mexico, but our specific comments refer only to the sources with which we are familiar-those in Nahuatl, Mixtec and (Yucatec) Maya. Our concern is to draw attention to the existence of these sources, to the ethnohistorical work in which they have been utilized, and to the potential this material holds for future study. In discussing the characteristics of indigenous sources in three different languages, we are hereby contributing a comparative framework that has yet to receive adequate attention, as well as working towards the disintegration of the term "Indian"~found by ethnohistorians to be increasingly inaccurate and unhelpful, save in its reflection of the Spaniards' racial per

El Palacio, 1936

El Palacio. ISSN: 0031-0158. Cultural anthropology Anthropological linguistics Catholic Church Catholicism Christianity and culture Christianity and other religions Religion and culture Comparative religion Conversion Indians of Mexico Aztecs Mayas Otomi Indians Rarámuri Indians Yaqui Indians Culture History Languages Conquest, 1519-1540 Mexico

A survey of the classical Latin texts from the Colegio de Santa Cruz contained in the Sutro Library of the California State Library. Includes comments on handwritten marginalia.

2002

This thesis is a library and archive-based study within the field of historical anthropology. It is concerned with one particular case of cross-cultural borrowing that occurred during the sixteenth century Spanish conquest of mainland North America; a process of imperial expansion that resulted in the establishment of several colonial provinces, which comprised all of present-day Mexico, Guatemala and some parts of the United States of America and were administratively dependent on the viceroyalty of New Spain. The thesis focuses on the creation of the most northerly province within this territory, Nuevo Mexico, which - unlike other provinces in the Spanish overseas domains - had a social and political existence before it had an actual geographic embodiment. Rather than the actual politico-geographic entity founded as a colonial "kingdom" in 1598, Nuevo Mexico is understood in this study as a "disembodied imaginary world," mainly consisting of the image of the Az...

In 1577 Augustinian friar Juan de la Anunciación wrote that the unofficial notebooks of sermons in native languages that were in circulation resulted in doctrine “so varied, so indigestible, so confusing” that the entire project of evangelization was at risk. The existence of both an official, sanctioned Christian discourse and an unofficial, native discourse operating at the peripheries of power highlights one of the essential tensions in early colonial Mexican society. Much has been written about how the production of native language religious texts framed and molded the Church’s message. This paper is an attempt to shift the analytical gaze from “message sent” to “message received,” from center to periphery, from official to unofficial discourse. I argue that by focusing on religious texts that can be safely said to have been produced solely by natives for natives we can gain access to this so-called “indigestible” doctrine and its role in the emergence of multiple native Christianities.

Relating Continents: Coloniality and Global Encounters in Romance Literary and Cultural History,, 2023

This chapter provides a close analysis of the significance of a singular intellectual project that showcases the vibrant religious and humanistic discourse that issued from several Nahua-Franciscan partnerships in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As argued below, this Nahuatl exegesis of On the Imitation of Christ depicts the fine editorial guidance of the Franciscan Luis Rodríguez, and the extraordinary collaboration of Nahua scholar Hernando de Ribas with the Franciscan Alonso de Molina. This chapter presents novel evidence regarding the identity of the authors of two manuscript versions of the Imitation in Nahuatl, one held at the Escorial Library in Spain, and the other at the John Carter Brown Li- brary in the United States. It also presents innovative information regarding the structure of a Nahuatl adaptation of On the Imitation of Christ. While the original manuscript of Kempis’s Imitation opens with a concise first chapter, the Nahuatl adaptation held at El Escorial turned this chapter into an impressive rhetorical salvo: an adaptation of its contents into a six-part university sermon, a public mode of engagement and performance favored by preachers and academics in late medi- eval times, and which was recast to conform to the intellectual terrain of sixteenth- century Nahua audiences.

Voices, 2014

Renaissance Quarterly, 2019

The "Codex Mendoza" is one of the earliest, most detailed, and most important postconquest accounts of pre-Hispanic Aztec life. Nahuas and Spaniards manufactured the codex through a complex process that involved translations across media, languages, and cultural framings. Translations made Aztec culture legible and acceptable to nonnative viewers and readers by recasting indigenous practices, knowledge, ontology, and epistemology. Following a stratigraphic approach that examines the process through which natives and Spaniards created a transcultural manuscript, the article examines the multiple interpretations and negotiations involved in producing images, books, and information about the indigenous world in early colonial Mexico.

During the sixteenth century in Spanish colonial America, some speakers of Náhuatl and Quechua who wrote in Castilian referred to the Renaissance discourse of Prisca theologia in order to defend themselves against accusations of idolatry and construct a Christian monotheism or religious revelation about the origin of their own peoples. These transformations of "idolatry" into "religion" instigated the translation of several terms and concepts in Náhuatl or Quechua to Neoplatonic vocabulary in Castilian. While the scope of this article does not allow a full discussion of all the relevant authors and discursive operations, it will focus on contextual clues and cultural considerations as well as on grammatical and semantic issues. In reading the following account, one should bear in mind that Náhuatl and Quechua have linguistic structures that are entirely different from English, Spanish or other Indo-European languages, and few Western concepts have equivalents in these languages. The abundance of diverse documents written in Náhuatl and Castilian during the Colonial period in Mexico is evidence of these cultural exchanges. The tlamatini (plural tlamatinime, "those who know something," "those who have the wisdom of the word") was the equivalent of "philosopher" in the pre-Hispanic past. They discussed human existence as well as the nature and place of man in the world, and were the teachers of the calmecac, the school for priests and nobles. The tlamatinime debated about these themes with the first twelve Franciscans who arrived in America in 1524. In 1564, the Spanish

In this article, I explore the parallel responses of two groups of colonial subjects who were confronted with the institutional changes that occurred in the context of Enlightenment ideas in eighteenth-century Mexico: Creole clerics headed by the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero; and native religious men who petitioned to colonial authorities and the crown for additional spaces for the education of indigenous men.