Historians in recent decades have rightly pointed out that our reading and writing of the past reflects our current context, methodologies, and historiographical approaches. Consequently, we might ask: do these methods and tools also inform our view of the future? Ezekiel Stear’s Nahua Horizons: Writing, Persuasion, and Futurities in Colonial Mexico joins this conversation by analyzing Nahuatl-language pictorial and alphabetic texts through the lenses of Indigenous futurism, a contemporary Indigenous method first elaborated by Grace Dillon in 2012. This approach seeks to decolonize the stories told about Indigenous communities by considering alternative futurities in the present. In his book, Stear argues that “Nahuas in the colonial period used culturally specific tools of persuasion in texts to convince their Indigenous readers to act for the benefit of their communities despite the hardships of colonialism” (5). This concern for future conditions is what Stear calls “Nahua futurisms.” In this way, Nahuas writing about their past in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries found ways to “look beyond the losses of the Spanish inflicted” and create “future-oriented writing projects” that would preserve Nahua knowledge for subsequent Nahua readers (6).

Stear’s analysis in each chapter draws attention to Nahua futurisms found within a range of significant colonial Nahua materials: the Lienzo de Quahquechollan (c. 1530), the Tira de Tepechpan (c. 1590s), notably Books 10 and 11 of the Florentine Codex (1540s-1570s), the Anales de Juan Bautista (1574), and the Cronica Mexicayotl (1609). To this important end, Stear contends that Nahua authors used these sources to document Indigenous histories, foodways, and lifeways, hoping subsequent generations of Nahuatl speakers would remember and enact them (5). A compelling example of this pedagogical aim is the creation of the Cronica Mexicayotl through the collaboration of Fernando Tezozomoc (?-1606) and Domingo Chimalpahin (1579-1660). Chimalpahin was a lower-level Nahua noble from Amacameca, who traveled to Mexico City to meet Tezozomoc, the Mexica noble and grandson of Moteuczoma Ilhuicamina, whose wealth and privilege had been declining under Spanish pressures (150). Stear explains that “Serving as a bridge between ancestors and those who will live after them [as the text begins], the Cronica Mexicayotl opens with a call for future Mexica readers to keep their ways…[it] gathers strength as an example for the young regarding the Mexica’s intergenerational migration, culminating with the founding of their capital, Tenochtitlan” (153). As Chimalpahin sat in the company of Tezozomoc to learn the histories of the Mexica, one cannot help but conceive of Nahua historiographies and future-oriented possibilities.

Beyond the chapters exploring sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Nahua conceptions of the future, Stear’s insightful explanation of futurist methodologies—including Nahua modes of persuasion—is particularly captivating. His embrace of Indigenous methods leads to compelling reconsiderations of colonial Nahua authors’ intellectual aims, demonstrating that our approach to the past inherently shapes our understanding of the present and future.