Nahua Singers
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- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication date:
- 23 July 2026
- 27 August 2026
- ISBN:
- 9781009694506
- 9781009694490
- 9781009694476
- Dimensions:
- (229 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.695kg, 406 Pages
- Dimensions:
- (229 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.542kg, 406 Pages
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Book description
In Nahua Singers, Peter Bjorndahl Sorensen provides a more than 300-year long history of the Aztecs from their departure from the Seven Caves (Chicomoztoc) to the close of the sixteenth century-centering Indigenous voices as they narrate their own past. Nahua singers preserved their histories in the form of popular song lyrics that have long been misunderstood. Sorensen employs a new approach to the lyrics, bringing them to life by spotlighting their performative elements, offering new and accessible translations, and explaining the lyrics' historical significance in a comprehensive yet concise way. Through fourteen complete translations and dozens partly translated, the songs featured cover topics including precolonial kings, the conquest of Mexico, and early examples of the adaption and adoption of Christian imagery.
Reviews
‘Tenochtitlan-Mexico City comes alive in song. Peter Sorensen’s insightful reconstruction of Nahuas’ sonic memory offers a novel rendering of their history. The inclusion of lyrics invites readers to hear Nahuas singing and see the past and their present from their perspectives. The soundscape and landscape of the islands and lakes emerge from the pages.’
Tatiana Seijas - author of American Metropolis: The Making of Mexico City
‘Sorensen has performed a valuable service to students of colonial Mexico, Nahua history, and Nahuatl literature. His respectful thematic and structural analysis of the lyrics of the cantares, thoroughly contextualized in time and place, demonstrates that their singers were not only musicians and poets, but also keepers of memory, preservers of tradition, and painters of civic identity. It therefore offers a new window into the emotional world of sixteenth-century Mexico City, where pride in a powerful heritage collided with a colonial present defined by violent dispossession and upheaval. Sorensen's loving exposition of the cantares highlights the rich poetics that resulted: politically and socially conscious, and marked by a profound appreciation for the fragility of beauty.’
Peter B. Villella - author of Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800
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