Drinking from the collective wells of ethnohistory, anthropology, and linguistics, Kelly McDonough provides a well-written, compelling work that challenges both past and present assumptions concerning the roles of Nahuas (and indigenous peoples in general) as intellectuals. While studies over the past thirty years have illustrated the ability of Nahuas to engage the written word to promulgate their own interests, and while contemporary anthropological and linguistic studies of the Nahuas emphasize modern oral sources, a gap exists in the historiography connecting the two. McDonough's work effectively bridges the gap by illustrating the presence of Nahua intellectualism and writing genres from the colonial period to today. Overall, the work provides an important and engaging addition to the historiography that forces readers to reevaluate the often overlooked role of the Nahua intellectual throughout Mexican history and, perhaps especially, in the present day.

McDonough structures her argument around five chapters, organized in an astute way to illustrate reflections of the past in the present. Each chapter provides both a study of a Nahua intellectual to highlight broader historical themes and a modern commentary from contemporary Nahua intellectuals, all skillfully translated by McDonough. Chapter 1 brings to light the important work of Antonio de Rincón, the indigenous Jesuit priest who in 1595 composed the first Nahuatl grammar written by a native. In its discussion regarding the ordinations of native and mestizo priests, the work rightly mentions the impact of “heightened racial prejudices in New Spain” (p. 45) as an impediment in forming a native clergy, although the conservative stance of the Dominicans, particularly that of Alonso de Montúfar who presided over the First and Second Mexican Provincial Councils, surely played an important role as well. Significantly, McDonough illustrates the major contribution of Rincón's grammar in explaining the pronunciation of various Nahuatl words and how such affected meaning. The chapter's accompanying narrative employs a statement from a Nahuatl-speaking researcher at the Zacatecas Institute for Teaching and Research in Ethnology (IDIEZ) to reveal the important role the institute plays in restoring legitimacy to speaking Nahuatl in a modern Mexican climate that looks down upon doing so.

Chapter 2 highlights the seventeenth-century work of don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza in compiling a Nahuatl history of his community, Tlaxcala. In particular, the chapter emphasizes the efforts of the Tlaxcalan nobles in maintaining and reasserting their rights and privileges through public performances in an increasingly hostile colonial world. The subsequent narrative brings this theme of maintenance and reassertion to the present through the Nahuatl words of the scholar Refugio Nava Nava. Chapter 3 suggests a reexamination of the nineteenth-century Nahua scholar, politician, and attorney Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca to recognize his role as a defender of native rights at a time when the term “native” had disappeared from the rhetoric of citizenship. A plea to prevent the disappearance of the Nahuatl language today then follows, in a poetic Nahuatl passage written by Victoriano de la Cruz Cruz of the University of Warsaw, Poland.

Chapter 4 examines doña Luz Jiménez, a twentieth-century Nahua woman who served as a model for the artist Diego Rivera and others; she was a teacher, and an informant for reputable anthropologists and linguists including Fernando Horcasitas. McDonough argues that her “intellectualism was grounded . . . in the local reality of her community and her lived experience, and bolstered by the fact that she was capable of sharing this knowledge with outsiders” (p. 134). Significantly, this chapter reveals doña Luz's insights into the assimilative education forced upon Nahuas, and complements that with similar ones derived from recent Reading Circles conducted with native speakers at IDIEZ, and that of Sabina Cruz de la Cruz, a contemporary Nahua scholar.

Ildefonso Maya Hernández is the subject of the final chapter, which employs his play, Ixtlamatinij (The Learned Ones), first performed in 1987, to highlight again the past and present discrimination against spoken Nahuatl and “Indian-ness.” Overall McDonough's work exposes its readers to myriad disciplines and time periods to reveal in a very real way the life and tenacity of Nahuatl and its speakers, and the important role they played and continue to play as intellectuals.