Susan Schroeder offers a biography of the Aztec (or Mexica) leader who was the son of the emperor Huitzililhuitl (r. 1391–1415), brother of the emperors Chimalpopoca (r. 1415–1426) and Moteuczoma I (r. 1440–1469), and the power behind the throne for much of his long life (1398–1487). When Hernando Cortés, who in 1519 arrived at the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan and marveled at the comportment of a stratified ruling class, a city made rich with the tribute delivered from conquered regions, and spectacular human sacrifices of war captives, he was looking at Tlacaelel's legacy. Despite Tlacaelel's achievements as “principle advisor and ‘second king’” (120) to Aztec rulers, both the Franciscan Juan de Torquemada and the Jesuit Francisco de Clavijero doubted his existence, and the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún fails to mention him.
Schroeder has no doubt of Tlacaelel's existence, and in this book she continues to enlarge her role as chief rescuer of men in the shadows. Her superb 1991 book, Chimalpahin and the Kingdoms of Chalco, her consummate 1997, 2006, and 2010 editions and translations of Domingo de San Antón Muñon Chimalpahin (jointly with other authors) have set the work of this Nahua historian as fundamental to our understanding of sixteenth-century New Spain. Schroeder has also defended his authorial rights and clarified the originality of his work (he was once assumed to be the copyist of the Nahuatl history the Crónica mexicayotl rather than its author).
In her most recent book, she meticulously reconstructs the arc of Tlacaelel's life—a very long one—against the backdrop of the consolidation of the Mexica state. In the early fourteenth century, the Mexica were little more than a wandering (and often despised) band, but by the close of the fifteenth they controlled much of central Mexico. Schroeder argues that the Mexica triumph can be largely credited to Tlacaelel, who as a young man led Mexica armies to defeat the Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco, a first stop on the road to power. She also lays at his doorstep the 20-year war waged against Chalco, in which “methodical” Mexica warriors behaved with “no compunction” (88) against Chimalpahin's homeland. With his brother, Moteuczoma I, Tlacaelel extended militaristic discipline to the population of the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan, “imposed[ing] rigid new ordinances . . . designed to regulate everything from courtly attire and civil deportment to education and priestly activities” (101). As he grew older, he no longer led Mexica armies onto the field but directed them from the palace. Schroeder also argues that he was a chief kingmaker, promoting his great-nephews Axayacatl (r. 1469–1481), Tizoc (r. 1481–1486), and Ahuitzotl (r. 1486–1502) to the reed throne of Mexica monarchs.
Torquemada's dismissal of Tlacaelel's existence was predicated on his having found no mention of him in the sources he used to write his Monarchia indiana. That so little substance remained in the late sixteenth century, when Torquemada was writing, offers some indication of the scarcity of sources that a modern historian like Schroeder confronted when reconstructing this leader's life. Pre-Hispanic sculptural narratives that are securely contemporary with Tlacaelel are scarce. And archeological material is largely outside the scope of this book. As a result, Schroeder draws heavily on the Dominican Diego Durán, Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc, a scion of the Mexica ruling family and, of course, Chimalpahin.
Her debt to Chimalpahin runs through the book, not only in her use of his chronicles, but also in the application of his historical method. With small revision, what Schroeder says of Chimalpahin is also largely true of herself: she “examined numerous sets of pictorial annals and was . . . familiar with the written and oral histories that were known” (7). She also traces Tlacaelel's story beyond his lifetime, documenting the lives of his children and grandchildren (and beyond), a number of whom were rich and powerful through the sixteenth century.
That a well-informed and well-connected writer like Torquemada came up empty-handed when fishing for Tlacaelel may tell us as much about the Mexica notion of selfhood as it does about the limits of the archive. In fact, pre-Hispanic elites have rarely been successfully captured in biographies, due in part to biography's claim on its subjects: modern readers expect the genre to offer not only res gestae, but also a narrative that attends to the ticking clockwork of the psyche. Schroeder refrains from the dramatic psychologizing of other writers: R. C. Padden's vivid characterization of Tlacaelel as a “brilliant psychopath” comes to mind (18). But this leaves the reader with little rationale for Tlacaelel's ignition of the near-endless wars of conquest, nor for the frenzied human sacrifices of the late fifteenth century, climaxing with the 80,600 victims that Durán and Chimalpahin report were dispatched at the dedication of the Aztecs’ main temple in 1487. A book so solidly founded in the accounts of Chimalpahin and Durán can offer only the latter's explanation of this leader's actions as due to possession by the devil, coupled with a “taste for human flesh” (104).
That Tlacaelel's reasons cannot be addressed, even though he and his trajectory can be identified and followed, points to a misfit between the genre of a traditional biography—and the modern notion of self that undergirds it—and a Mesoamerican subject, like Tlacaelel. Historians have coined the term “mythistory” to describe the Mesoamerican concept of the past, and perhaps we need an equivalent term to describe the Mesoamerican concept of the self. To begin fashioning it, we might consider how little Mexica sources reveal about the what we today call the inner self, not because it did not exist, but because other elements of selfhood, including fame, public comportment, and visible display, were deemed more important to the construction of the self, particularly in the ruling class. And elite people in Mesoamerica did not always stay human—the conflation of Tlacaelel with the deity Cihuacoatl may be neither a confusion on the part of the sources, nor the result of the former acting as “a cross-dressing deity impersonator” (32), but instead may be showing us another manifestation of rulers in Mesoamerica dissolving themselves into divine beings, as seems to have occurred among the Maya.
Mesoamerican selves were lodged in Mesoamerican cultural matrices. Some of the events that Durán ascribes to Tlacaelel's cannibalism may have had little to do with personal appetite. The Mexica state, like other Mesoamerican states before it, was aggressively expansionist and depended upon spectacular violence—the public sacrifice of captives in particular—to commemorate its achievements and inaugurate important stages in its development. Leaders like Tlacaelel would accept this vision of the state and act on it. They were hardly in a position to reject it: what person thinks (or acts) beyond the contours of cultural practice?
Schroeder offers the history of the Mexica rise to power through the singular lens of Tlacaelel's biography. Her clear narrative and her meticulous exposition of sources will make this a volume valuable in both undergraduate and graduate classrooms as well as a handy reference on the specialist scholar's shelf. Read alongside other biographies of powerful leaders, it might also provoke discussion on the nature of the self, and its public expression, in Mesoamerica.
