Recent narratives of the colonial experiences of the indigenous peoples of Mexico often draw upon modern ethnographies to articulate claims of cultural continuity, diminish the significance of historical circumstances to privilege the agency of indigenous communities, or fail to connect their indigenous subjects to regional trends and neighboring peoples of European descent. Through interrogations of diverse sources and qualified conclusions, the works of Amos Megged and Edward W. Osowski amend these deficiencies and present a promising avenue for historical examinations of Mesoamerican communities. In Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica, Megged utilizes pictographic and alphabetic sources from the mid-sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries to investigate Nahua assertions of authority as expressions of social memory and religious conception. This ambitious study engages primordial titles of the mid-seventeenth to late-eighteenth centuries to reveal the extent of native resilience and cultural continuity. Megged argues that, despite the transformation in the religious elements and social memory of indigenous communities during the colonial era, central pre-Columbian themes, cosmological beliefs, and indigenous practices survived acculturation through the particular oral, pictorial, and performative forms of indigenous social memory. Cultural memory shaped the processes, formulas, and contents through which Mesoamerican societies articulated their identity and authority within changing colonial contexts. This analysis emphasizes fluid and fragmented native cosmological conceptions to frame changes in social memorialization as indigenous processes that minimize the impact of European culture. Despite occasional discussions of ritual and cosmology, the focus upon the role and significance of social memory prioritizes linguistic forms and practices over analyses of religious performance and belief.

Although Indigenous Miracles similarly examines the colonial experiences of the indigenous people of Mexico and recognizes the significance of indigenous pictographic texts, Osowski integrates sophisticated analyses of ritual, architecture, and communal activity to explore the cultural interactions and negotiations of colonial New Spain. This mature analysis synthesizes institutional history and ethnohistory to simultaneously reflect indigenous perspectives and present New Spain as a single religious society, indivisible into distinctly indigenous and Spanish spheres. This integrative approach illuminates ritual performances and symbolism as means through which indigenous communities expressed legitimacy and their leaders exercised political authority within colonial society. His analysis demonstrates that colonial religion was a motivation and medium for cultural dialogue and hybridity between Spanish and native cultures. By concentrating upon Christological rather than Marian symbols and miracle traditions, the study avers that native authorities were able to retain indigenous traits and create a religious culture that originally bolstered the Spanish monarchy but transformed into a counter-hegemonic expression of indigenous concerns. While Indigenous Miracles does not adequately examine the complexity of local contexts, when combined with the more focused, ethnolinguistic work of Megged, it illustrates a productive window into the lives of the native peoples who molded the history of colonial Mexico. The publications of Megged and Osowski employ fresh sources and careful methodologies to respect the perspectives of indigenous subjects within engaging studies of colonial experiences of the native communities of New Spain.