The Conquest All Over Again: Nahuas and Zapotecs Thinking, Writing, and Painting Spanish Colonialism

The Spaniards typically portrayed the conquest and the fall of Mexico Tenochtitlan as Armageddon, while native peoples in colonial Mesoamerica continued to write and paint their histories and lives, often without any mention of the foreigners in their midst. Their accounts took the form of annals, chronicles, religious treatises, tribute accounts, theater pieces, and wills. Thousands of documents were produced, almost all of which served to preserve indigenous ways of doing things. But what provoked record keeping on such a grand scale? At what point did pre-contact sacred writing become utilitarian and quotidian? Were their text documentaries a form of boosterism, even ingenious intellectualism, or were they ultimately a literature of ruin? With an examination of what they themselves recorded and why they did so, this volume addresses key aspects of indigenous perspectives of the conquest and Spanish colonialism.