Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and His Legacy

Edited by Galen Brokaw and Jongsoo Lee

The University of Arizona Press

Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl is one of the most controversial and provocative Mexican chroniclers from the colonial period. A descendant of both the famous Prehispanic poet-king Nezahualcoyotl and Hernán Cortés’s ally Cortés Ixtlilxochitl, he penned chronicles that rewrote Prehispanic and colonial history. Traditionally known as a Europeanized historian of Tetzcoco, he wrote prolifically, producing documents covering various aspects of pre- and postconquest history, religion, and literature.

His seventeenth-century writings have had a lasting effect on the understanding of Mexican culture and history from the colonial period to the present. But because Alva Ixtlilxochitl frequently used Tetzcocan oral traditions and pictorial codices of his ancestors’ heroic achievements, scholars have long said that his writings exhibit a Tetzcocan bias that distorts representations and understandings of Prehispanic Mexican history and culture.

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and His Legacy is a collection of essays providing deeper perspective on the life, work, and legacy of Alva Ixtlilxochitl. The contributors revise and broaden previous understandings of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s racial and cultural identity, including his method of transcribing pictorial texts, his treatment of gender, and his influence on Mexican nationalism. Chapter authors coming from the fields of anthropology, history, linguistics, and literature offer valuable new perspectives on the complexities of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s life and his contributions to the history and scholarship of Mexico.

The concise and informative overview of the historiography surrounding the study of Alva Ixtlilxochitl demonstrates the effectiveness of the historian’s siren song over the years to those interested in both the man and his writings. The volume’s contributors—adept and skilled in their own fields of study—offer new insights that often confirm existing theories and expand (sometimes controversially) present understandings.’—Latin American Research Review

‘A series of well-researched, very well thought-out academic analyses from several disciplines about the work of the seventeenth-century Mexican historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl of Texcoco.’—Juan J. Daneri, East Carolina University

A timely contribution to an increasing interest in Latin American indigenous intellectualisms and literacies.’—Kelly McDonough, author of The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico

This multidisciplinary study explores the multiple identities and evolution of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (c. 1578–1648) through his life and work.’—CHOICE Connect

Galen Brokaw is an associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Montana State University. He is author of A History of the Khipu.

Jongsoo Lee is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of North Texas. He is the author of The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl: Pre-Hispanic Politics, Religion, and Nahua Poetics.

1 Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and Colonial Indigenous Historiography from the Conquest to the Present
Jongsoo Lee and Galen Brokaw
2 The Identities of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl
Gordon Whittaker
3 Ixtlilxochitl’s Ethnographic Encounter: Understanding the Codex Xolotl and Its Dependent Alphabetic Texts
Jerome A. Offner
4 Colonial Writings and Indigenous Politics in New Spain: Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Chronicles and the Cacicazgo of Teotihuacan
Jongsoo Lee
5 Constructed Discourse in Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Chronicles
Heather Allen
6 Voice in Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Historical Writings
José Rabasa
7 Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Marina and Other Women of Conquest
Susan Kellogg
8 Alva Ixtlilxochitl and the Guadalupe Legend: The Question of Authorship
Amber Brian
9 Credible, Accurate, and Approved: Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and Mexico’s Patriotic Historiography
Pablo García Loaeza
Chronology
Glossary
Contributors
Index

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