This edited volume, consisting of nine independently authored essays, serves as a comprehensive introduction to the growing body of scholarship on Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl. Alva Ixtlilxochitl was a mixed-race historian (a castizo, or child of a mestiza mother and a Spanish father, rather than a mestizo) working during the first half of the seventeenth century. He is best known for writing several histories of the pre-Hispanic past and the conquest era, and for collecting an archive containing both pictographic texts and written documents that ultimately made its way into the library of don Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, who along with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is widely recognized as one of the major intellectuals of seventeenth-century Mexico. The current volume provides a state-of-the-art summary of recent scholarship by a new generation of scholars whose interdisciplinary orientation bridges the study of colonial literature and history.
Alva Ixtlilxochitl, based in Tetzcoco and with a disputed familial claim to the cacicazgo of Teotihuacan, was clearly a member of the colonial elite. Sigüenza y Góngora's recognition of his historiographical significance was echoed by nineteenth and twentieth century scholars such as William Prescott and Edmundo O'Gorman. More recently, countervailing tendencies have emerged in terms of the assessment of his historiographic legacy. In the final decades of the twentieth century, intellectuals such as Enrique Florescano condemned the supposed “European” nature of his entire epistemology, demonstrated by his writing in Spanish for Spaniards, his employment of the indigenous past to fit Christian narratives, and other instances of his “thought like Spaniards” (13). At the same time, others, such as Rolena Adorno, David Brading and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, defined his work as a more complex representation of incipient creole nationalism (14–15).
Building on these latter insights, the current collection of articles is unified in its frank recognition of the complexity of what is frequently termed “colonial discourse,’ the heterogeneous mix of linguistic and visual practices deployed in colonial societies undergoing syncretic transformations amid the redefinition of old cultural patterns. Historians tend to appreciate terms like “colonial discourse,” “heterogeneous,” and “syncretic” (when they do) as only general approximations to widely varied lived experiences. From this perspective, historical truths, or at least truth claims based on archival evidence, emerge from the careful analysis of texts and contexts. Such an approach lends itself to a more nuanced view of the contribution of the fluently bilingual, Nahuatl/Spanish speaking colonial intermediary Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, who emerged from the uncertainty of conquest and colonization into a position of considerable authority.
It is difficult to do justice to a multiauthored text in the space of a short review. This volume makes several contributions and all the articles are of high quality. In their introductory chapter, editors Brokaw and Lee expertly provide biographical details, historical context, and a summary of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's scholarly production (see also the Chronology and Glossary, 283–294). Notable insights include their stress on how the colonial context influenced Alva Ixtlilxochitl's treatment of pre-Hispanic themes, his important role as an interpreter of indigenous pictorial texts, and the ways in which political considerations infuse the construction of archives as well as their interpretation.
Gordon Whittaker demonstrates the complexity of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's individual process of identity construction, while Jerome Offner explicates the power dynamics that structure contending Nahua and Spanish forms of historiography in early colonial Mexico. Jongsoon Lee contributes an additional essay exploring the politics of the cacicazgo of Teotihuacan and how Alva Ixtlilxochitl's struggle to maintain legal control of this institution influenced his historical writings. Heather Allen introduces the concept of “constructed discourse” (153) to question insufficiently rigorous assumptions of “authenticity” in texts claiming an “indigenous” status. José Rabasa draws upon Jacques Derrida to contend successfully that Alva Ixtlilxochitl provides “a story of cultural survival yet also the supersession of the pictographic histories and Nahuatl accounts he used in writing a history in Spanish” (179). In what is arguably the best chapter in the volume, Susan Kellogg situates Alva Ixtlilxochitl's representations of women within the history of gender in “the broader Basin of Mexico and beyond” (209). Amber Brian provides another superb essay on Alva Ixtlilxochitl's relationship to the legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Pablo García Loaeza concludes with an expert summary of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's at times recognized and at times underappreciated contribution to criollo historiography.
In sum, this volume is an innovative collection of articles that will be required reading for specialists and of interest to graduate and advanced undergraduate classes on Spanish colonial historiography.
