Lockhart, J.: We People Here. Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico
Following his monumental work on post-conquest Nahua life throughout the colonial period, Lockhart turns his focus to the moment of contact with the Spaniards. Once again, applying the methods of the New Philology he aims to present the Nahua perspective of the conquest. His main question rests on contrasting Nahua perspective against the Spanish versions contained in Book XII of the Florentine Codex compiled by Bernardino de Sahagún to determine the variations in the histories of conquest contained within the same work, as well as the traits of the Nahuatl language itself. In order to do this comparison, he also includes excerpts from other indigenous-written works that address the topic of the conquest such as the Anales de Tlatelolco, the Codex Aubin, the Anales de Cuauhtitlan, the Historia tolteca-chichimeca and the Letter from Huejotzingo. He begins by providing descriptions of the texts, and then presents the excerpts of the works in Nahuatl and their translation into English. Finally, he briefly comments on each of them as to how these reflect the little-known views of the indigenous people given the nature of their production – the annals were mostly anonymous and unsupervised, unlike the Florentine Codex, which was compiled under Sahagun’s supervision.
Lockhart’s We People Here effectively brings to light the importance of exploring the non-canonical texts of Nahuatl colonial literature within the context of conquest histories. However, he focuses his study to analyzing each document separately, without necessarily delving into the relationship among the texts as a corpus produced within a shared geographical and time context as was the Central Valley of Mexico in the 16th century. The major contributions of this work, however, are several. For instance, it introduces a set of lesser-known documents, such as the annals from Tlatelolco and Cuauhtitlan, the Codex Aubin and the Historia, at the time of its publication (1992). In this Lockhart begins opening the path to the study of annals by providing basic concepts and the context to understand them. Since then, the scholarship on the annals has gradually seen an increase in the last couple of years, and we can now find that many of these have since been published.
“Within perspective of a broad comparability between the two cultures in contact, Nahuatl language texts show us a world of well-defined indigenous concepts, far from identical with their closest Spanish parallels, embodied in special vocabulary; as a corpus these fixed ideas organized sociopolitical, economic and household life (and art as well), often making extensive use of the principles of cellular subdivision, rotation, and numerical ordering” (4).