Anales de Tecamachalco (Anonymous, c. 1590)
Metadata: Celestino Solís, E. & Reyes García, L. Anales de Tecamachalco. 1398-1590. Mexico D.F. and Puebla: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Gobierno del Estado de Puebla, and Fondo de Cultura Económica, S.A. de C.V. 1992. The original document is found in the Genaro García Manuscript Collection as G2 Ms. Benson Latin American Collection, UT Austin.
The Anales de Tecamachalco were written at the end of the 16th century, and cover the period between the years 1398-1590 in the valley of Puebla. According to Celestino Solís and Reyes García (1992), some of the names that appear in the manuscript could indicate the possible authors: Toribio Pérez, Martín de Molina, Joaquín Genaro y Miguel de San Francisco, noblemen who likely wrote the Anales in Nahuatl using the Latin alphabet on European paper. The information the scribes recorded includes meteorological phenomena, religious topics, agricultural practices, government, territory, demography, diseases, social conflicts and the local economy.[1]
Located 120 miles from Tenochtitlan, Tecamachalco was one of many tributaries to the Mexica empire, and its annals were written towards the end of the sixteenth century. These two factors may account for the fact that its authors make no mention of Moctezuma, Cortés, or any interactions between the two parties at the time of the conquest, compared to the other four sets of annals. This seemingly lack of interest is relevant to the project for the purposes of comparison, and to elucidate further the different histories on the conquest that originated in later decades.
[1] Previous work on the Anales includes García Icazbalceta (1892): Spanish translation of an extract from the original; a translation by Vicente de Paula Andrade; a partial translation covering years 1520-1558 (Spanish); a partial translation of the years 1399-1549 into Spanish by Galicia Chimalpopoca in Handbook… vol. 15:371); paleography and morphological translation into Spanish by Antonio Peñafiel (1903), re-edition in 1981.
