The Aztecs at Independence

Nahua Culture Makers in Central Mexico, 1799–1832

Miriam Melton-Villanueva

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780816546978, 9780816533534
• eBook ISBN: 9780816534630
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Nahuatl-speaking women and men left last wills in their own tongue during an era when the written tradition of their language was generally assumed to have ended. Describing their world in testaments clustered around epidemic cycles, they responded to profound changes in population, land use, and local governance with astonishing vibrancy.

The Aztecs at Independence offers the first internal ethnographic view of these central Mexican indigenous communities in the critical transitional time of Independence. Miriam Melton-Villanueva uses previously unknown Nahuatl-language sources—primarily last wills and testaments—to provide a comprehensive understanding of indigenous societies during the transition from colonial to postcolonial times. The book describes the cultural life of people now called Nahuas or Mexicas in the nineteenth century—based on their own words, their own written records. The book uses previously unknown, unstudied, and untranslated indigenous texts to bring Nahua society into history, fleshing out glimpses of daily life in the early nineteenth century. Thus, The Aztecs at Independence describes life at the most local level: Nahua lineages of ritual and writing, guilds and societies, the people that take turns administering festivals and attending to the last wishes of the dying.

Interwoven with personal stories and memory, The Aztecs at Independence invites a general audience along on a scholarly journey, where readers are asked to imagine Nahua concepts and their contemporary meanings that give light to modern problems.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Inside the Altepetl of San Bartolomé
• 2. Spanish-Language Texts by Nahua Escribanos
• 3. The Escribanos Who Still Wrote in Nahuatl
• 4. Nahuatl Formulas over Time and in Other Altepetl
• 5. Death Rites, Local Religion, and Women on Church Grounds
• 6. Household Ritual
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1. Testament List from the Independence Archive with Reference Codes
• Appendix 2. Notaries of the Independence Archive by Altepetl
• Appendix 3. Sample Testaments
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author