Download or read book The Lords of Tetzcoco written by Bradley Benton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines how the indigenous nobility of Tetzcoco navigated the tumult of Spanish conquest and early colonialism.
Download or read book The Lords of Tetzcoco written by Bradley Benton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tetzcoco was one of the most important cities of the pre-Hispanic Aztec Empire. When the Spaniards arrived in 1519, the indigenous hereditary nobles that governed Tetzcoco faced both opportunities and challenges, and were forced to adapt from the very moment of contact. This book examines how the city's nobility navigated this tumultuous period of conquest and colonialism, and negotiated a place for themselves under Spanish rule. While Tetzcoco's native nobles experienced a remarkable degree of continuity with the pre-contact period, especially in the first few decades after conquest, various forces and issues, such as changing access to economic resources, interethnic marriage, and intra-familial conflict, transformed Tetzcoco's ruling family into colonial subjects by the century's end.
Download or read book The Lords of Tetzcoco written by Bradley Thomas Benton and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Spaniards arrived in central Mexico in 1519, Tetzcoco was one of the two most important ethnic states in the region. It was a cultural center--home to famed "poet-kings"--And was second in power only to the Aztec capital of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Yet by the beginning of the seventeenth century, Tetzcoco had been reduced to a mere shadow of its former grandeur. This dissertation focuses specifically on Tetzcoco's native nobility in this period of waning influence. Using a combination of Spanish- and Nahuatl-language documents as well as indigenous pictorial sources from archives in Spain and Mexico, this work chronicles the strategies employed by the indigenous hereditary nobles of Tetzcoco to navigate the first century of Spanish rule and serves as a case study of the powerful forces that reshaped and transformed local power and indigenous leadership. These changes did not occur as quickly as once believed; the Spanish conquest, while tumultuous, did not destroy native aristocrats. Indeed, some factions of the Tetzcoca nobility benefited from the Spanish arrival, as Cortés and his men eliminated rivals in local government. The native aristocracy continued to govern in a manner similar to that of the precontact period until the 1560s. By the last few decades of the sixteenth century, however, the family's power and place in local politics was under increasing pressure. Spaniards increasingly challenged the native nobles' control over local land and tribute. Several wealthy and influential mestizos, or individuals of mixed-race, emerged to rival the indigenous members of the aristocracy for influence. And after the death of the Tetzcoca leader in 1564, the viceroy took power from the old ruling family by appointing local leaders of his choosing in Tetzcoco. The traditional native aristocrats became divorced from the corporate roles that they traditionally played in Tetzcoco's political life and no longer participated in direct governance. Being ousted from local office effected different nobles in different ways. Some were reduced to poverty and obscurity. Those that possessed the family's entailed estate, however, simply withdrew into private lives of affluent leisure modeled on the aristocracies of Europe.
Download or read book Texcoco written by Jongsoo Lee and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2014-02-14 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives presents an in-depth, highly nuanced historical understanding of this major indigenous Mesoamerican city from the conquest through the present. The book argues for the need to revise conclusions of past scholarship on familiar topics, deals with current debates that derive from differences in the way scholars view abundant and diverse iconographic and alphabetic sources, and proposes a new look at Texcocan history and culture from different academic disciplines. Contributors address some of the most pressing issues in Texcocan studies and bring new ones to light: the role of Texcoco in the Aztec empire, the construction and transformation of Prehispanic history in the colonial period, the continuity and transformation of indigenous culture and politics after the conquest, and the nature and importance of iconographic and alphabetic texts that originated in this city-state, such as the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa Quinatzin, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles. Multiple scholarly perspectives and methodological approaches offer alternative paradigms of research and open a needed dialogue among disciplines—social, political, literary, and art history, as well as the history of science. This comprehensive overview of Prehispanic and colonial Texcoco will be of interest to Mesoamerican scholars in the social sciences and humanities.
Download or read book Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico 1500 1800 written by Peter B. Villella and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Mexico derives many of its richest symbols of national heritage and identity from the Aztec legacy, even as it remains a predominantly Spanish-speaking, Christian society. This volume argues that the composite, neo-Aztec flavor of Mexican identity was, in part, a consequence of active efforts by indigenous elites after the Spanish conquest to grandfather ancestral rights into the colonial era. By emphasizing the antiquity of their claims before Spanish officials, native leaders extended the historical awareness of the colonial regime into the pre-Hispanic past, and therefore also the themes, emotional contours, and beginning points of what we today understand as 'Mexican history'. This emphasis on ancient roots, moreover, resonated with the patriotic longings of many creoles, descendants of Spaniards born in Mexico. Alienated by Spanish scorn, creoles associated with indigenous elites and studied their histories, thereby reinventing themselves as Mexico's new 'native' leadership and the heirs to its prestigious antiquity.
Download or read book Chimalpahin s Conquest written by Susan Schroeder and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-19 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the story of Hernando Cortés's conquest of Mexico, as recounted by a contemporary Spanish historian and edited by Mexico's premier Nahua historian. Francisco López de Gómara's monumental Historia de las Indias y Conquista de México was published in 1552 to instant success. Despite being banned from the Americas by Prince Philip of Spain, La conquista fell into the hands of the seventeenth-century Nahua historian Chimalpahin, who took it upon himself to make a copy of the tome. As he copied, Chimalpahin rewrote large sections of La conquista, adding information about Emperor Moctezuma and other key indigenous people who participated in those first encounters. Chialpahin's Conquest is thus not only the first complete modern English translation of López de Gómara's La conquista, an invaluable source in itself of information about the conquest and native peoples; it also adds Chimalpahin's unique perspective of Nahua culture to what has traditionally been a very Hispanic portrayal of the conquest.
Download or read book History of the Chichimeca Nation written by and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A descendant of both Spanish settlers and Nahua (Aztec) rulers, Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578–1650) was an avid collector of indigenous pictorial and alphabetic texts and a prodigious chronicler of the history of pre-conquest and conquest-era Mexico. His magnum opus, here for the first time in English translation, is one of the liveliest, most accessible, and most influential accounts of the rise and fall of Aztec Mexico derived from indigenous sources and memories and written from a native perspective. Composed in the first half of the seventeenth century, a hundred years after the arrival of the Spanish conquerors in Mexico, the History of the Chichimeca Nation is based on native accounts but written in the medieval chronicle style. It is a gripping tale of adventure, romance, seduction, betrayal, war, heroism, misfortune, and tragedy. Written at a time when colonization and depopulation were devastating indigenous communities, its vivid descriptions of the cultural sophistication, courtly politics, and imperial grandeur of the Nahua world explicitly challenged European portrayals of native Mexico as a place of savagery and ignorance. Unpublished for centuries, it nonetheless became an important source for many of our most beloved and iconic memories of the Nahuas, widely consulted by scholars of Spanish American history, politics, literature, anthropology, and art. The manuscript of the History, lost in the 1820s, was only rediscovered in the 1980s. This volume is not only the first-ever English translation, but also the first edition in any language derived entirely from the original manuscript. Expertly rendered, with introduction and notes outlining the author’s historiographical legacy, this translation at long last affords readers the opportunity to absorb the history of one of the Americas’ greatest indigenous civilizations as told by one of its descendants.
Download or read book The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan the Life of Mexico City written by Barbara E. Mundy and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Book Prize in Latin American Studies, Colonial Section of Latin American Studies Association (LASA), 2016 ALAA Book Award, Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation, 2016 The capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan, was, in its era, one of the largest cities in the world. Built on an island in the middle of a shallow lake, its population numbered perhaps 150,000, with another 350,000 people in the urban network clustered around the lake shores. In 1521, at the height of Tenochtitlan's power, which extended over much of Central Mexico, Hernando Cortés and his followers conquered the city. Cortés boasted to King Charles V of Spain that Tenochtitlan was "destroyed and razed to the ground." But was it? Drawing on period representations of the city in sculptures, texts, and maps, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City builds a convincing case that this global capital remained, through the sixteenth century, very much an Amerindian city. Barbara E. Mundy foregrounds the role the city's indigenous peoples, the Nahua, played in shaping Mexico City through the construction of permanent architecture and engagement in ceremonial actions. She demonstrates that the Aztec ruling elites, who retained power even after the conquest, were instrumental in building and then rebuilding the city. Mundy shows how the Nahua entered into mutually advantageous alliances with the Franciscans to maintain the city's sacred nodes. She also focuses on the practical and symbolic role of the city's extraordinary waterworks—the product of a massive ecological manipulation begun in the fifteenth century—to reveal how the Nahua struggled to maintain control of water resources in early Mexico City.
Download or read book Texcoco written by Jongsoo Lee and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives presents an in-depth, highly nuanced historical understanding of this major indigenous Mesoamerican city from the conquest through the present. The book argues for the need to revise conclusions of past scholarship on familiar topics, deals with current debates that derive from differences in the way scholars view abundant and diverse iconographic and alphabetic sources, and proposes a new look at Texcocan history and culture from different academic disciplines. Contributors address some of the most pressing issues in Texcocan studies and bring new ones to light: the role of Texcoco in the Aztec empire, the construction and transformation of Prehispanic history in the colonial period, the continuity and transformation of indigenous culture and politics after the conquest, and the nature and importance of iconographic and alphabetic texts that originated in this city-state, such as the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa Quinatzin, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles. Multiple scholarly perspectives and methodological approaches offer alternative paradigms of research and open a needed dialogue among disciplines—social, political, literary, and art history, as well as the history of science. This comprehensive overview of Prehispanic and colonial Texcoco will be of interest to Mesoamerican scholars in the social sciences and humanities.
Download or read book Universal Empire written by Peter Fibiger Bang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The claim by certain rulers to universal empire has a long history stretching as far back as the Assyrian and Achaemenid Empires. This book traces its various manifestations in classical antiquity, the Islamic world, Asia and Central America as well as considering seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European discussions of international order. As such it is an exercise in comparative world history combining a multiplicity of approaches, from ancient history, to literary and philosophical studies, to the history of art and international relations and historical sociology. The notion of universal, imperial rule is presented as an elusive and much coveted prize among monarchs in history, around which developed forms of kingship and political culture. Different facets of the phenomenon are explored under three, broadly conceived, headings: symbolism, ceremony and diplomatic relations; universal or cosmopolitan literary high-cultures; and, finally, the inclination to present universal imperial rule as an expression of cosmic order.
Download or read book Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest written by Matthew Restall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An update of a popular work that takes on the myths of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas, featuring a new afterword. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest reveals how the Spanish invasions in the Americas have been conceived and presented, misrepresented and misunderstood, in the five centuries since Columbus first crossed the Atlantic. This book is a unique and provocative synthesis of ideas and themes that were for generations debated or perpetuated without question in academic and popular circles. The 2003 edition became the foundation stone of a scholarly turn since called The New Conquest History. Each of the book's seven chapters describes one "myth," or one aspect of the Conquest that has been distorted or misrepresented, examines its roots, and explodes its fallacies and misconceptions. Using a wide array of primary and secondary sources, written in a scholarly but readable style, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest explains why Columbus did not set out to prove the world was round, the conquistadors were not soldiers, the native Americans did not take them for gods, Cortés did not have a unique vision of conquest procedure, and handfuls of vastly outnumbered Spaniards did not bring down great empires with stunning rapidity. Conquest realities were more complex--and far more fascinating--than conventional histories have related, and they featured a more diverse cast of protagonists-Spanish, Native American, and African. This updated edition of a key event in the history of the Americas critically examines the book's arguments, how they have held up, and why they prompted the rise of a New Conquest History.
Download or read book Historia de la Conquista de M xico written by James Lockhart and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians are concerned today that the Spaniards' early accounts of their first experiences with the Indians in the Americas should be balanced with accounts from the Indian perspective. We People Here reflects that concern, bringing together important and revealing documents written in the Nahuatl language in sixteenth-century Mexico. James Lockhart's superior translation combines contemporary English with the most up-to-date, nuanced understanding of Nahuatl grammar and meaning. The foremost Nahuatl conquest account is Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex. In this monumental work, Fray Bernardino de Sahag�n commissioned Nahuas to collect and record in their own language accounts of the conquest of Mexico; he then added a parallel Spanish account that is part summary, part elaboration of the Nahuatl. Now, for the first time, the Nahuatl and Spanish texts are together in one volume with en face English translations and reproductions of the copious illustrations from the Codex. Also included are five other Nahua conquest texts. Lockhart's introduction discusses each one individually, placing the narratives in context.
Download or read book Cacicas written by Margarita R. Ochoa and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term cacica was a Spanish linguistic invention, the female counterpart to caciques, the Arawak word for male indigenous leaders in Spanish America. But the term’s meaning was adapted and manipulated by natives, creating a new social stratum where it previously may not have existed. This book explores that transformation, a conscious construction and reshaping of identity from within. Cacicas feature far and wide in the history of Spanish America, as female governors and tribute collectors and as relatives of ruling caciques—or their destitute widows. They played a crucial role in the establishment and success of Spanish rule, but were also instrumental in colonial natives’ resistance and self-definition. In this volume, noted scholars uncover the history of colonial cacicas, moving beyond anecdotes of individuals in Spanish America. Their work focuses on the evolution of indigenous leadership, particularly the lineage and succession of these positions in different regions, through the lens of native women’s political activism. Such activism might mean the intervention of cacicas in the economic, familial, and religious realms or their participation in official and unofficial matters of governance. The authors explore the role of such personal authority and political influence across a broad geographic, chronological, and thematic range—in patterns of succession, the settling of frontier regions, interethnic relations and the importance of purity of blood, gender and family dynamics, legal and marital strategies for defending communities, and the continuation of indigenous governance. This volume showcases colonial cacicas as historical subjects who constructed their consciousness around their place, whether symbolic or geographic, and articulated their own unique identities. It expands our understanding of the significant influence these women exerted—within but also well beyond the native communities of Spanish America.
Download or read book Explorations in Ethnohistory written by H. R. Harvey and published by Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Native Conquistador written by Amber Brian and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many years, scholars of the conquest worked to shift focus away from the Spanish perspective and bring attention to the often-ignored voices and viewpoints of the Indians. But recent work that highlights the “Indian conquistadors” has forced scholars to reexamine the simple categories of conqueror and subject and to acknowledge the seemingly contradictory roles assumed by native peoples who chose to fight alongside the Spaniards against other native groups. The Native Conquistador—a translation of the “Thirteenth Relation,” written by don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl in the early seventeenth century—narrates the conquest of Mexico from Hernando Cortés’s arrival in 1519 through his expedition into Central America in 1524. The protagonist of the story, however, is not the Spanish conquistador but Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s great-great-grandfather, the native prince Ixtlilxochitl of Tetzcoco. This account reveals the complex political dynamics that motivated Ixtlilxochitl’s decisive alliance with Cortés. Moreover, the dynamic plotline, propelled by the feats of Prince Ixtlilxochitl, has made this a compelling story for centuries—and one that will captivate students and scholars today.
Download or read book Handbook to Life in the Aztec World written by Manuel Aguilar-Moreno and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes daily life in the Aztec world, including coverage of geography, foods, trades, arts, games, wars, political systems, class structure, religious practices, trading networks, writings, architecture and science.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Latin American Law in Global Perspective written by Thomas Duve and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 1048 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the precolonial period to the present, The Cambridge History of Latin American Law in Global Perspective provides a comprehensive overview of Latin American law, revealing the vast commonalities and differences within the continent as well as entanglements with countries around the world. Bringing together experts from across the Americas and Europe, this innovative treatment of Latin American law explains how law operated in different historical settings, introduces a wide variety of sources of legal knowledge, and focuses on law as a social practice. It sheds light on topics such as the history of indigenous peoples' laws, the significance of religion in law, Latin American independences, national constitutions and codifications, human rights, dictatorships, transitional justice and legal pluralism, and a broad panorama of key aspects of the history of statehood and law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
