Lockhart, J: The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries
James Lockhart’s seminal book on Nahua people of the colonial period makes use of documentary sources written in Nahuatl in order to elucidate on their social and cultural history. His work concentrates in how the Nahua people’s social, cultural, and political organization, family structures, forms of living, religion, language and written expression transformed throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as evidenced through their written production. Lockhart, with his mastery of the written Nahuatl language of the colonial period effectively delivers his findings in terms of the content, albeit with register that at times seem to lack conciseness. Divided into eight chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, render the work overwhelming in addition to the great amount of detail that the historian presents in his analysis. Nonetheless, because of these features, The Nahuas After the Conquest’s major contribution rests on its usefulness as a reference for anyone looking for a foundation of colonial Nahua history and culture. Moreover, his methodology is very representative of the practice of the New Philology, which the author began developing during the 1970s. Ultimately, Lockhart’s foundational book serves to challenge the traditional views that for long prevailed in the general and academic view of the inferior indigenous culture in the face of the dominant Spanish counterpart. The post-conquest period, Lockhart reveals, did not merely signify the erasure of indigenous Nahua ways of life and knowing but the ability of the people to maintain them within the context of a foreign system.
“In the central areas, contact was relatively close from the beginning, and with a quickly and steadily expanding Hispanic sector, it grew ever closer in a cumulative trend covering centuries. Another important defining characteristic of the Spanish American central areas… is the widespread interaction of indigenous and intrusive cultures on the basis of coincidences that allowed the quick, large-scale implantation among the indigenous people of European forms, or what appeared on the face of it to be such. Only in areas resembling central Mexico were large and lucrative encomiendas possible, only there could hundreds of rural parishes be set up and independent Indian municipalities on the Spanish model be made to function. In many ways, the Europeans and indigenous peoples of the central areas had more in common than either did with the other peoples of the hemisphere” (5).