In Moctezuma's Children, Donald E. Chipman offers a case study of the ‘principal heirs’ of Moctezuma II, namely, Isabel, Mariana and Pedro Moctezuma, who were officially recognised as such first by Hernán Cortés, and later by the Spanish crown. After the fall of Tenochtitlán, Charles I/V granted Cortés a series of titles accompanied by a number of political offices with important powers. One such office was that of repartidor, allowing Cortés to distribute encomiendas; the receipients included the three descendents of Moctezuma II. Isabel received the Tacuba encomienda while Mariana received Ecatepec. These rich encomienda grants allowed Cortés to contract marriage for the women to elite Spanish men. Pedro Moctezuma received the Xochimilco encomienda. In the heart of his study Chipman traces how the principal heirs and their descendants repeatedly interacted with the colonial court system, including, in Pedro Moctezuma's case, a visit to Spain, at times to defend, and at other times to expand, their holdings and titles. Chipman concludes that ‘Moctezuma II's heirs provide an excellent example of Indian accommodation and Hispanization’ (p. 147).

This is a clearly written narrative history, and Chipman adheres closely to the lawsuits and other legal proceedings that he uses to construct his main arguments about the accommodation of the legally recognised Moctezuma heirs to Spanish colonial rule. The legal sources, marriage records, and petitions for titles that form the basis of the study, however, provide little insight into the day to day social realities of life for Isabel, Mariana and Pedro Moctezuma and their descendants, much less any information about their actions beyond using the colonial legal system to defend their encomienda holdings and titles from outsiders and from internal family conflicts. Chipman's work would have been strengthened, moreover, if he had contextualised the lives of these important post-conquest indigenous elites within the large and rich ethnohistorical literature that analyses indigenous elites and their social, economic, religious and political lives more broadly, and as a way to move beyond accommodation/resistance frameworks of analysis.