Townsend, C.: Here in This year. Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley
Camilla Townsend presents the paleography and translation of two sets of annals from the Tlaxcala-Puebla valley written in Nahuatl during the seventeenth century. This serves as an introduction to the genre of Nahua annals that has been explored only during the last couple of decades. Townsend sets out to explore at a comparative level the histories of Tlaxcala and Puebla once the Spanish colonial system had taken root throughout central Mexico. Because Tlaxcala and Puebla are unique cities in their relationship with the Spanish sphere – the former became an ally during the conquest and received privileges as a ciudad de indios (i.e. exemption from the encomienda system), and the Spaniards founded the latter – the histories presented by the annals’ writers become even more intriguing. Townsend sets out to deliver her introduction to the annals first by contextualizing the documentary corpus with a political history of the region comprised by Tlaxcala and Puebla. She then fully delves into the genre by addressing their characteristics such as organization by year, their similarities and possible ties to the pre-conquest tradition of the xiuhpohualli or “year-count” (11).
A key feature that Townsend points out is that the annals were produced without the supervision of Spanish friars – unlike renowned works such as the Florentine Codex, compiled and supervised by Bernardino de Sahagun with the assistance of Nahua informants and scribes. She also provides a description of the specific features of the Tlaxcala-Puebla group of annals, and finalizes the introduction with the histories of two characters: don Manuel de los Santos Salazar, a descendant of the Tlaxcalan nobility, and don Miguel de los Santos, governor of Puebla, whom might be potentially connected to the creation of the annals. Moreover, Lockhart contributes to this work by offering the technical aspects of the language used in these documents. He briefly explains contact language phenomena in Nahuatl, as well as the variant of the language in which the texts are writing (eastern Nahuatl), and the kind of vocabulary and discourse used in the annals. The contribution Townsend makes to the study of Nahuatl texts is her focus in such a complex genre as the annals. Through their study she aims to provide yet another look toward Nahua life in the colonial period, given that the characteristics of their production account for a potentially different discourse than in documents created under Spanish supervision, or that served a particular legal or religious purpose.
“… studying the indigenous annals, beyond enhancing our understanding of indigenous experience, may help us as scholars at some point to shed our own parochialism, to understand the ways in which the figures we study are both the same as and different from other peoples in somewhat comparable situations – were agriculture has fully taken hold but well defined nations-states have not yet emerged. The annals genre as it existed in early medieval Europe, for example, and the pre0coloial Marathi texts of India, are in some ways breathtakingly similar to the tradition that seems to have existed in Mexico… The Nahuas become more interesting, not less so, when they take their lace o the state of the worlds’ peoples” (3)