Nahua Writing at a Moment of Crisis: Domingo Chimalpahin and the Cemanahuac Archive in Colonial Mexico

Nahua Writing at a Moment of Crisis examines the writings of Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, one of the most significant Nahua historians writing in Nahuatl in early-seventeenth-century New Spain. This study analyzes Chimalpahin’s historical texts alongside the works of peninsular Spanish, Indigenous, mestizo, and castizo writers and Christian friars to emphasize his implicit and explicit critiques of Spanish rule. In his Nahuatl texts, Chimalpahin refutes Spanish historiography of the pre-Hispanic past, highlights colonial violence, and disavows the idea that Mesoamerican society was inevitably destined to perish.

This book reframes Chimalpahin’s oeuvre as an Indigenous intellectual project that safeguards the history of the Nahua Indigenous world and offers Nahuas and their descendants the possibility to reclaim their Indigenous history, land, and government institutions. Nahua Writing at a Moment of Crisis further suggests that Chimalpahin’s archive advances an alternative intellectual history rooted in the perspective of an Indigenous commoner; it is a project of self-preservation and self-determination at a critical moment for the survival of the Nahua peoples of New Spain. By framing Chimalpahin’s work as a forward-looking endeavor, this study compels us to reconsider Nahua intellectual production at the turn of the seventeenth century as a starting point from which to imagine alternative futures that support Indigenous struggles for land and self-determination.