For many generations, the Nahuas of Mexico maintained their tradition of the xiuhpohualli. or "year counts," telling and performing their history around communal firesides so that the memory of it would not be lost. When the Spaniards came, young Nahuas took the Roman letters taught to them by the friars and used the new alphabet to record historical performances by elders. Between them, they wrote hundreds of pages, which circulated widely within their communities. Over the next century and a half, their descendants copied and recopied these texts, sometimes embellishing, sometimes extracting, and often expanding them chronologically. The annals, as they have usually been called, were written not only by Indians but also for Indians, without regard to European interests. As such they are rare and inordinately valuable texts. They have often been assumed to be both largely anonymous and at least partially inscrutable to modern ears. In this work, Nahuatl scholar Camilla Townsend reveals the authors of most of the texts, restores them to their proper contexts, and makes sense of long misunderstood documents. She follows a remarkable chain of Nahua historians, generation by generation, exploring who they were, what they wrote, and why they wrote it. Sometimes they conceived of their work as a political act, reinstating bonds between communities, or between past, present, and future generations. Sometimes they conceived of it largely as art and delighted in offering language that was beautiful or startling or humorous. Annals of Native America brings together, for the first time, samples of their many creations to offer a heretofore obscured history of the Nahuas and an alternate perspective on the Conquest and its aftermath.

About the Author
Camilla Townsend is Professor of History at Rutgers University. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico and Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley, among other books.

Reviews
Townsend is an elegant writer, her book a pleasure to read. It covers much ground geographically and chronologically. The analysis of authorship and patterns of expression within this genre alone makes the book worthwhile for Mesoamerican specialists. * SUSAN KELLOGG, Journal of World History *
Townsend breaks new ground with her masterly anthology of accounts seen through the eyes of underdogs and written in the original Nahuatl....All of the annals show the contradictions of endurance and defeat * endurance in the face of disintegration. Highly recommended.CHOICE *
This is a masterful study of Nahuatl-language annals that were authored by Native scholars. These indigenous intellectuals recorded the past for the posterity of their own communities while navigating an evolving Spanish-colonial context. They strove to preserve the legacies and heritage of the Nahua world in order to shore up their towns' autonomy and longevity. Townsend weaves together excerpts, summaries, and astute commentaries about these compelling texts dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all the while infusing the authors' lives with a rich three-dimensional humanity. * Stephanie Wood, author of Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico *
This is the first study to consider as a corpus the fascinating, complex, and rich histories written in Nahuatl by indigenous authors from central Mexico in the century after the Spanish-known by modern scholars as annals. It traces the production of these indigenous histories across time, exploring the authorship of texts long considered anonymous, the particular historical context in which the authors lived, and the historical consciousness and contemporary concerns of Nahua society from the early post-conquest period to the late seventeenth century. This path-breaking contribution lays the groundwork for the study of historical annals and history-making in Mesoamerica for years to come. * Rebecca Horn, University of Utah *
Annals of Native America brings alive, in ways both exacting and exhilarating, the social and linguistic worlds inhabited by the authors of Nahuatl-language yearly accounts in colonial Mexico. By following their trajectory from their inception as documents in Roman script to their manifold transformations in a 'golden age' of native historical writing, Townsend provides a fresh and compelling perspective on the most vibrant set of historical narratives by indigenous scholars in the colonial Americas. * David Tavarez, author of The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico *
Townsend did it once again: masterful research, written in highly accessible and enjoyable language. The book is based on impressive detective work, great intuition and careful analysis to attribute annals to particular authors, as well as reconstructing their lives. We learn of these individuals, their motivations, and the Nahua way of conceiving history. In the process we confront essential questions about the meanings of history, its writing, and the voices that bring it to us. * Caterina Pizzigoni, author of The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico's Toluca Valley *
Townsend shows that prehispanic history keeping always reflected the interests of ruling groups and altepetl, and scholars can interpret these texts...by examining how they reflect Nahua ideas about history, politics, religion, and kinship and also how they portray colonial events, people, and power relations. Townsend does a masterful job of both....Townsend is an elegant writer, her book a pleasure to read. It covers much ground geographically and chronologically. * Susan Kellogg, Journal of World History *


Awards
Winner of Winner of the Howard Francis Cline Memorial Prize of the Conference on Latin American History Winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association Winner of the Arthur P. Whitaker Prize of the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies.



Book Information
ISBN 9780190055523
Author Camilla Townsend
Format Paperback
Page Count 340
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 567g
Dimensions(mm) 150mm * 231mm * 25mm