Meta-summary

 This project presents five sets of Nahua annals produced in the 16^th century by anonymous authors in the Central Valley of Mexico: the Anales de Tlatelolco (1540-1560), the The Historia tolteca-chichimeca (1550-1560), the Anales de Cuauhtitlan (c. 1570), the Codex Aubin (c. 1576), and the Anales de Tecamachalco (c. 1590). This geographical region creates its own spatial corpus as it had the most contact with Spaniards, making it a central element to – though not the focus of – the production of annals. Nahua annals paint yet another picture of the events, which is influenced by their own experiences as political-ethnic entities in the Central Valley of Mexico before, during, and after the Spanish invasion. Barbara Mundy's chapters "The City in the Conquest's Wake" and "Huanitzin Recenters the City" from The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan helped me think about my project in terms of the way Nahua people in Tenochtitlan dealt with the aftermath of the conquest. These chapters opened windows to yet more interpretations and sources of information in order to elucidate on the meaning of the conquest through indigenous practice and thought during the 16th century. 
 
Along with recording information about meteorological phenomena, and the succession of a given local tlahtoani “ruler”, the authors of the annals also provide accounts on the Spanish arrival to their own or neighboring cities, as well as military confrontations with them. This specific event created a series of disruptions in the cultural, political, military, and religious realms of indigenous people, of which the aftermath throughout the colonial period has been extensively studied. The way indigenous people deal with this moment of rupture is present in the discourse created by the annals, and as they show, their experiences and remembrances of the conquests in their diverse manifestations become an opportunity to read beyond the main storylines.
 
The secondary sources in this project serve three different purposes. The first purpose is to situate my project within the New Conquest History. Wood’s Transcending Conquest (2003), Schroeder’s compilation The Conquest All Over Again (2011), Restall’s “The New Conquest History” (2012), and McDonough’s The Learned Ones (2014), in their approaches to the ways indigenous peoples make sense of, and navigate the Spanish colonial system through their writings, help guide my project in order to present a fresh outlook on the Nahua experience of the conquest.
 
The second purpose is to contextualize the annals genre. The works focused on or referencing this corpus, such as Lockhart’s The Nahuas After the Conquest (1992) and We People Here (1993), and Townsend’s Here in This Year (2010) provide the necessary information to understand the genre. Lockhart’s work is of great importance given its treatment of the Nahuatl language, its different written genres – among them the annals – and the social and historical context of Nahua written expression. Furthermore, Townsend’s analysis serves as point of comparison to the group of annals in this project, as well as highlighting the importance of turning to this genre in order to understand Nahua thought in depth.
 
Lastly, the third purpose is to find the theoretical and methodological tools for approaching the conquest in the annals. Clendinnen’s “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’” (1991) is useful for her focus in the power of the narrative in conquest accounts. In addition, Megged and Wood’s Mesoamerican Memory (2012) for the ways in which memory is manifested in documents written by indigenous peoples (especially the annals since their production went unsupervised by Spanish religious authorities). Lastly, McDonough’s “‘Love’ Lost” (2015) serves as a methodological guide through her approach to the work of 17^th century Tlaxcalan annalist Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, in which she integrates the notion of “trans-indigenous optics” (Allen, 2015) to explore the social relationships among indigenous peoples during the colonial period.
 
The annals show that the  so-called conquest carried out by the Spaniards, which they present in their letters and chronicles, is not the same as the one that the indigenous people recorded. As the New Conquest scholarship has revealed, the conquest was not a homogeneous experience for indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. The record in the annals of the Central Valley of Mexico reveals that for some groups the event was something that seemed as common as any other conquest carried out by neighboring cities, as if they were already familiar with the process, like Cuauhtinchan and Tecamachalco reveal. Even for others, like Cuauhtitlan, the war fought in Tenochtitlan appears to be more of a non-consequential or distant event. The exception is Tlatelolco. Their role as the sister-city of Tenochtitlan accounts for a more detailed narrative of the events of the conquest, in which violence, internal conflict and uncertainty are present.
 
The conquest in the sense that the Spaniards depict it is not the same as the indigenous people perceived it as shown in their written testimonies. With the above in mind, one question left to answer is: can we really talk about a “conquest” when, writing about it during the first 50-60 years after the events, the people who likely experienced it or were present at the time do not think about it as such? 

1. Anales de Tlatelolco (Anonymous, 1540-1560)
2. Historia tolteca-chichimeca (Anales de Cuauhtinchan. Anonymous, 1550-1560)
3. Anales de Cuauhtitlán (Anonymous, c. 1570)
4. Codex Aubin (Anonymous, c. 1576)
5. Anales de Tecamachalco (Anonymous, c. 1590)
6. Clendinnen, I: “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of México"
7. Lockhart, J: The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries
8. Lockhart, J.: We People Here. Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico
9. McDonough, K.: The Learned Ones. Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico
10. McDonough, K.: “‘Love’ Lost: Class Struggle among Indigenous Nobles and Commoners of Seventeenth-Century Tlaxcala”
11. Megged, A. & Wood, S.: Mesoamerican Memory. Enduring Systems of Remembrance
12. Restall, M.: “The New Conquest History” in History Compass 10:12
13. Schroeder, S. (Ed): The Conquest All Over Again. Nahuas and Zapotecs Thinking, Writing, and Painting Spanish Colonialism
14. Townsend, C.: Here in This year. Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley
15. Wood, S.: Transcending Conquest. Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico