Benjamin D. Johnson's book, Pueblos within Pueblos, is a much-needed study for the central, Nahuatl-speaking, area of Mesoamerica, examining the history before and after the arrival of the Spanish of the ward or locality known either as the tlaxilacalli or calpolli. The author brings a fresh eye to ethnohistorical and archaeological perspectives that have focused since the early 1990s on the central place of the city-state or kingdom, altepetl in Nahuatl, on the political development and organization of the late Postclassic Basin of Mexico region. Building upon, but greatly extending, the contributions of the late Fred Hicks on tlaxilacalli, Johnson makes three main arguments.

First, he asserts that “an uncanny symmetry between two Mexican empires” (the Aztec Triple Alliance and Spanish; p. 4) existed and simultaneously facilitated domination by those empires and provided pathways to undermining such efforts. A second argument, the most significant historiographically, questions the accepted notion that tlaxilacalli were simply parts or segments of a larger whole, the altepetl (city-state), manipulated by those units and their rulers without agency on the part of local leaders and the populace of those localities, ideas associated with Pedro Carrasco and James Lockhart. Commoners, the macehualtin (the plural of macehualli, a term that means vassal), played a key role in alliance and empire building, with the third argument being that the histories of these units, and the people who constituted them, are knowable in precise ways, given the rich documentation from early in the colonial period, particularly for the Acolhuacan region.

But before examining these arguments and how they are supported across the introduction, the six chapters (organized chronologically and thematically), and the conclusion, let us consider what the tlaxilacalli was. Examining the etymology of Nahuatl words often provides a clear definition, but such is not the case for tlaxilacalli. That is because the etymology, other than the word for house, calli, remains unknown. Together with a word with which tlaxilacalli is sometimes used interchangeably, calpolli (big house), this local network of human-to-human interaction and human-to-local ecology has been defined predominantly as a territorial, tribute and labor, or socioreligious unit. Arguing strenuously that conflating the word tlaxilacalli with the Spanish term barrio or English neighborhood is a mistake that pervades Mesoamerican scholarship, Johnson's readings of evidence from court cases, codices, and archaeological studies show that such units could encompass people, space, ethnicity, local histories, and spirituality. They lasted for centuries, through the rise and fall of multiple imperial powers and had a fundamentally communal and independent nature.

The six main chapters demonstrate this idea. Chapter 1 traces how tlaxilacalli came into existence through what the author argues in his often clever prose was a “colonization scheme” (p. 40) in the Acolhua region, as both remnant Tolteca and migrant Chichimeca populations spread across the area, changing a more nucleated settlement pattern to a more dispersed one. Leadership at the tlaxilacalli and altepetl levels was exercised by noble teuctlatoani and tlatoani, respectively, as detailed in Chapter 2, which covers the development of the Acolhua polity centered on the altepetl of Tetzcoco. Tlaxilacalli also had commoner officials as explored in Chapter 3, which analyzes the history of a particular tlaxilacalli, Cuauhtepoztlan, delineating its internal leadership structure from the ground up. Johnson describes the tepixque who oversaw groups of houses to the calpixque who administered the tlaxilacalli, especially tribute collection, and interacted with noble leaders, the teuctlatoani and pipiltin (nobles), of the region's noble houses, the tecpan (lord's place). Chapter 4 covers religious commitments of early colonial tlaxilacalli, which served both as points of remembrance and worship of local Nahua deities and key units for the Catholic missionization project that began in the 1540s in this area. Those same units would sometimes anchor rebellions against the authority of church representatives as happened during a 1550s rebellion against Augustinian friars who ministered to the tlaxilacalli of the altepetl of Teotihuacan.

The next two chapters, 5 and 6, chart the declining political and economic power of altepetl nobles who, across the 1590s to 1690s, relied ever more on the Spanish legal system to press or defend their claims to property and position. At the same time, local units, while continuing to struggle with ecological decline and transformation, disease, and labor exploitation, nonetheless survived as political and religious units that defined and protected landholdings, water rights, and communal identities against higher authorities—indigenous and Spanish—and against other tlaxilacalli. They anchored local worship and fiesta circuits, where sequential celebrations for Holy Week predominated among the tlaxilacalli of the countryside, who persistently asserted their autonomy. Many became independent of the altepetl to which they had previously been subject.

This is a sophisticated, very well-researched, and well-written book, primarily intended for a Mesoamerican-specialist audience. Both graduate and knowledgeable upper-division undergraduate students, however, will benefit from reading it. Its thorough use of the Acolhua-related documentary base, its insights based on archaeological and artistic evidence, and its reorienting of a Nahua-related philological scholarly paradigm towards a bottom-up approach all make the book valuable. It sometimes smooths over differences in terminology for the unit Johnson always refers to as “tlaxilacalli,” asserting that calpolli and tlaxilacalli were synonymous when the documentary evidence suggests the terms may well have had different semantic ranges as close readings of the Florentine Codex and Chimalapahin's relaciones suggest, and as Luis Reyes and Susan Schroeder both argued. And perhaps tlaxilacalli were not always quite as autonomous as Johnson suggests; these were often subordinate units whose leaders answered to leadership from above, even if local actors sometimes rebelled against their subject status.

But Pueblos within Pueblos provides a corrective to interpretations that see Nahua political structure as rigid, static, and segmentary when it was actually fluid, dynamic, and messy. For those wishing to consider late prehispanic and early colonial Mesoamerican political organization in more locally and regionally specific ways, this book is the place to start. Showing that fragmentation was just as important as imperialism in understanding that organization over the largo plazo is Benjamin Johnson's most lasting contribution.