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The aristocratic conceit, like the names of men such as don Hernando Pimentel Nezahualcoyotzin, indexes social status in the colonial present to the pre-Hispanic past, the knowledge of which don Hernando and his ancestors had preserved in written form. Reading and writing were exclusively within the purview of the interrelated political and religious elites of the numerous ethnic polities, or, as they were known in Nahuatl, altepemeh literally, "water-mountains," singular altepetl.
In state-sponsored schools, noble and gifted children destined for the priesthood or high administrative office learned to read and write an iconic image script, which modern scholars have often characterized as "picture writing.
Through images, scribes conveyed a wide range of information. Maps, economic records, and transcripts of legal proceedings, too, were part of the pre-Hispanic documentary and scribal repertories. Many Spaniards disparaged central Mexican iconic script, which they called pinturas paintings , but the colonial authorities and some Christian missionaries recognized it as a form of objective record keeping:. In this same way, they wrote and painted the histories of war, of the succession of the principal lords, of storms and pestilence, in what epoch and [under which] lord they happened, and all those who first subjugated this land and ruled it until the Spaniards arrived.
All this they had written in characters and figures. The Crown's and the Church's need for information inspired their representatives in New Spain to seek out paintings. The initial impetus came from the Crown, which sought accounts of pre-Conquest economic, political, and social organization, especially those concerning landholding, slavery, and tribute. Such knowledge permitted the colonial administration to maintain the demands placed on the indigenous masses at pre-Hispanic levels, in theory if not always in practice, and thereby to minimize the risks of rebellion against Spanish authority.
The Church and its missionaries, above all the Franciscans, collected information on pre-Hispanic history, religion, and ritual in order to police the new converts, and in this way to eradicate what they deemed to be paganism and idolatry. Members of central Mexico's indigenous elites transcribed or translated the extant pre-Hispanic paintings for the agents of the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church.
Native aristocrats and painters crafted new iconic-script texts, too: during the military phase of the Conquest in central Mexico, the Spaniards and their allies had destroyed archives in many polities, and the Church's less-enlightened emissaries later burned much of what had been spared. In order to preserve knowledge of the pre-Hispanic past within their families and communities, these lords and painters commissioned and produced iconic-script documents, especially dynastic genealogies, histories, and maps, for themselves as well as for the Spaniards.
In central Mexico, in the Early Colonial Period roughly from to , scions of pre-Hispanic ruling houses—men such as don Hernando Pimentel and his son don Francisco of Tetzcoco—initially served as middlemen between the Spanish colonial state and the indios, or Indians whose labor and tribute sustained it and whose ancestors' labor and tribute had sustained their ancestors. More or less sincerely converted, they chose the way of accommodation, and were at pains to preserve the signs of their origins, the 'paintings' of history and genealogy that legitimized their power.
These documents enjoyed a quasi-legal status in colonial New Spain, and in theory if not always in practice, they served as bulwarks against Spanish—and even native—encroachment on lands, tribute income, and rights. As Elizabeth Hill Boone concludes, "[t]hese are the documents that addressed the realms of Nahua life where the most was at stake.
Thank YOU for the meal!! Gingerich, Willard Show more. But when it came to philosophy itself, Nezahualcoyotl never gave any clear answers to his questions and riddles. Such an assumption presupposes a distinction between pre-Hispanic and colonial indigenous cultures, experiences, perceptions, and societies, however mitigated by demonstrable and extensive continuities from the earlier to the later period. Bookmark: They are interesting to you.
These iconic-script documents preserved not only the "memory of the greatness and exploits of the ancient kings and lords" but also the income, lands, rights, and status of their descendants. Although the secular and the religious formed part of a coherent whole, and augury and liturgy were not separate from history, one can loosely divide central Mexican iconic-script manuscripts into two groups: the ritual, and the historical or mundane.
After Christian missionaries from Europe and Spanish administrators collected originals and requested copies of every type of pre-Hispanic iconic-script manuscript, at least until , when Philip II forbade them to do so. The indigenous had to be more circumspect, even before after all indigenous books and images could harbor memories of pre-Hispanic religion and idolatry, and to possess them could mark a recently converted Indian, a "new" Christian, as pagan, idolatrous, and, as a consequence, seditious.
Thus, to record their past, native patrons looked to the potentially secular genres, a distinction which Christian evangelization and European cultural attitudes had brought into being. Christian subjects of the Spanish king, they had to perceive their own past through different eyes and eventually to represent it in different forms, a process that would ultimately contribute to what Enrique Florescano has characterized as "disindigenization. No pre-Hispanic manuscript from the Valley of Mexico has survived. The Relaciones de Juan Cano represent only one central Mexican historical tradition, that of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, and, as a transliteration from iconic into alphabetic script in tandem with translation from Nahuatl into Spanish, only one of the forms in which memory, knowledge, and the written archive of the indigenous past informed and was informed by cultural, economic, political, and social relations in colonial New Spain.
A historical tradition different from but closely related to that of Tenochtitlan concerns Tetzcoco, in the eastern Valley of Mexico. Tetzcoco, the altepetl of the Acolhua people, was the second city of the Aztec Empire, in size, military might, political importance, and wealth. Later, and for much of the sixteenth century, Tetzcoco was New Spain's second-largest city and largest de jure if not de facto indigenous municipality. Produced circa , the earliest extant Tetzcocan histories are in iconic script, "picture writing," and they manifest different forms of continuity and change from those exemplified by the Relaciones de Juan Cano.
Many of the iconic-script histories from Tenochtitlan form part of larger bilingual manuscripts produced for Spanish patrons and audiences. Conceived and bound in European book format and often painted on European paper, these bilingual manuscripts expressly join indigenous, pre-Hispanic-style "picture writing" to alphabetic-script transliterations and translations into Spanish, frequently accompanied by explanatory annotations.
To varying degrees, bilingual manuscripts also adapt indigenous archival and documentary genres and formats to European ones. In contrast, in conception and design, the early-colonial iconic-script accounts of Tetzcoco's pre-Hispanic past—the Codex Xolotl Plates , the Quinatzin Map Plates , and the Tlohtzin Map Plates —neither transliterate iconic into alphabetic script nor ostensibly adapt indigenous to European genres and formats.
Although other iconic-script manuscripts, most notably, the Codex en Cruz and the Tira de Tepechpan, include references to Tetzcoco's history, the Xolotl, Tlohtzin, and Quinatzin are the only three that focus on Tetzcoco and its royal dynasty: they compose the fundamental pictorial archive from which to reconstruct an Acolhua vision of the pre-Hispanic past.
They appear to be drawn entirely from the symbolic and linguistic worlds of indigenous central Mexico, and they are thus different in form if not intent and effect from don Hernando Pimentel Nezahualcoyotzin's letters to Charles V, the coat of arms granted to don Hernando and the city of Tetzcoco, or the Relaciones de Juan Cano.
Through their formal and narrative choices, the painters and patrons of the Tetzcocan histories identify themselves as aristocratic and indigenous, and thus as legitimate heirs to the patrimony left to them by pre-Hispanic rulers such as Nezahualpilli. After Nezahualpilli's sons and grandsons needed to be or be seen as legitimate heirs—Indians—as well as loyal subjects of the Crown and good Catholics—Spanish. When Nezahualpilli died in , two of his numerous sons, Coanacochtzin and Ixtlilxochitl, apparently vied to succeed him on the throne.
According to some sixteenth-century accounts, Motecuhzoma II Xocoyotzin, the ruler of Tenochtitlan, intervened in the dynastic struggle and placed his nephew Cacama Cacamatzin , the son of Nezahualpilli and Motecuhzoma's elder sister, on the throne. Ixtlilxochitl and Coanacochtzin were considered to be in the legitimate line of succession, but Cacama was not.
Coanacochtzin in the end allegedly supported Cacama, but Ixtlilxochitl rebelled and took control of the northern half of the Acolhua kingdom.
Ixtlilxochitl and Cacama eventually came to an understanding whereby the former would receive tribute from the northern half of the kingdom and the latter would retain the throne in Tetzcoco. When Cuizcuitzcatl arrived in Tetzcoco, his half-brother Coanacochtzin, Cacama's old ally, had him put to death. Between the Spaniards' disastrous flight from Tenochtitlan on the Noche Triste, or Sad Night, 30 June , in the course of which the captive Cacama died, and their final victory over the Aztecs on 13 August , Ixtlilxochitl made his services and the Tetzcocan resources that he controlled available to them.
When Cuauhtemoc was captured at Tlatelolco on that fateful August day, Coanacochtzin was with him, as was Tetepanquetzatzin, the ruler of Tlacopan, for they, too, had fought against the Spanish and their indigenous allies until the bitter end. Ignoring the indigenous word "tlahtoani," the Spaniards imported the Arawak term "cacique" cacica is the feminine form , roughly, "chief," from the Caribbean islands to Mexico and applied it to the colonial-era descendants of pre-Hispanic ruling families, specifically, the ones who, like don Pedro, were heirs to the primary position in the family.
Derived from cacique, the term " cacicazgo " refers to the inherited position or office and its perquisites, including patrimony in the form of land and tribute payments inalienable from the office. In his groundbreaking study, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule , Charles Gibson suggests that the decision on the part of the Spaniards to use the term "cacique" and its derivatives facilitated the social shifts in and among indigenous communities after the Conquest.
Families and individuals without a claim to tlahtoani status and towns that were not altepemeh in the pre-Conquest era took advantage of the new terminology and the looser criteria it entailed to obtain the privileges of ruling families and fully independent communities. Don Jorge Alvarado Yoyontzin, another of Nezahualpilli's sons, succeeded as cacique-governor of Tetzcoco, but died in after only one year in office. Don Pedro Tetlahuehuetzquititzin, don Jorge's brother, succeeded him. Don Pedro died in , at which point don Pedro's half-brother don Carlos Ometochtzin Chichimecatecatl appears to have claimed the cacicazgo.
At this point, the last of Nezahualpilli's sons to rule Tetzcoco, don Antonio Pimentel Tlahuiloltzin, succeeded as cacique-governor and continued in office until his death in Charles V's and Philip II's correspondent, don Hernando Pimentel Nezahualcoyotzin, the son of don Pedro de Alvarado Coanacochtzin, one of those executed in Honduras, succeeded his uncle don Antonio and was the last of Nezahualpilli's descendants to be cacique and governor simultaneously.
While the office of cacique remained hereditary and, ideally, passed from one generation of the direct descendants of pre-Hispanic rulers to the next, that of governor was increasingly, and eventually exclusively, in the viceregal gift, open even to those who by birth could not have succeeded to a cacicazgo. In separating the hereditary office from the actual, day-to-day, governance of indigenous municipalities, and municipal lands from the royal patrimony, the Crown and its colonial administrators sought to curtail the economic and political power of the indigenous aristocracy.
Don Hernando's son don Francisco claimed the cacicazgo after his father's death, but met with opposition from the other potential heirs; he did, however, later serve as governor of Tetzcoco. After don Francisco and Pomar handled the financial affairs and land transactions of the Tetzcocan cacicazgo in order to save its properties from confiscation because of municipal tax arrears, for which the "palace" was held responsible. Other members of the family under the leadership of a don Pedro de Alvarado sued in for the return of the monies collected by don Francisco and Pomar from the rental of patrimonial properties.
This don Pedro de Alvarado was a grandson of Nezahualpilli, but how they are related is not known. He was not, it seems, descended from don Pedro de Alvarado Coanacochtzin, the grandfather of his adversary don Francisco. In these ever-more-frequent suits and countersuits between contentious heirs, as well as between native inhabitants and Spanish colonists, pre-Hispanic and pre-Hispanic-style indigenous pictorial genealogies, histories, and maps could, and often did, buttress litigants' claims. As Boone trenchantly observes, "[t]he Spanish authorities wanted ancient documents, and ancient meant pictorial.
To possess pictorial histories was to possess the material legacy of the past and, for the indigenous aristocracy, the freedom if not always the linguistic and cultural wherewithal to move between the colony's two republics.
The creation, elaboration, interplay, and conflict of indigenous, or Indian, mestizo, and Spanish interests complicated the debates among Nezahualpilli's litigious heirs. In addition to descent in the line of succession, culture and ethnicity became touchstones of "indigenousness," and thereby of the legitimacy of one's claims on the cacicazgo. Because of conquest, colonization, and the ambivalent social experience and divided or multiple economic and political loyalties of the indigenous aristocracy, however, culture and ethnicity were fluid and provisional, not fixed and innate.
It is in this complex colonial present, and not in an idealized, unsullied, and static pre-Hispanic past that we must place the iconic-script histories of Tetzcoco and its royal dynasty. Only a reading informed by this context can convey anything approaching the full richness and subtle meaning of these texts. Don Carlos had allegedly advocated for ancestral custom: "Let us follow the ways our forebears had and followed, and in the way that they lived, let us live. To assume a direct connection between the various efforts on the part of Nezahualpilli's sons and grandsons to secure or control patrimony at least after and the Codex Xolotl, the Quinatzin Map, and the Tlohtzin Map necessitates a reading of the manuscripts as something other than and supplementary to pre-Hispanic indigenous history conveyed in pre-Hispanic indigenous form and style.
The patrons' and painters' perspectives on and representations of "time before" had to accommodate Catholic and Spanish sensibilities, especially when expressed in traditional and therefore potentially suspect forms, as in the case of the three iconic-script manuscripts. The present study seeks, first, to analyze the Xolotl's, the Quinatzin's, and the Tlohtzin's forms and messages, and, second, to investigate the concerns of the manuscripts' patrons as well as the ways in which they shaped such forms and messages.
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