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Nahua Horizons: Writing, Persuasion, and Futurities in Colonial Mexico investigates how Nahuas conceptualized their futures in the early colonial period. Scholar Ezekiel G. Stear delves deeply into canonical texts such as the Florentine Codex and the Crónica mexicayotl as well as understudied texts such as the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, the Tira de Tepechpan, and the Anales de Juan Bautista. The study does more than describe how Nahuas conceived of their own futures: it also shows their specific plans for moving into the coming years.

The book examines how Nahua writers in Central Mexico and other Mesoamerican voices in colonial Spanish America played an active, decisive role in shaping culture, using writing to persuade their communities to mold their own destinies, even amid colonial upheaval. This work opens up new directions for research and teaching, shifting inquiry from how Nahuas preserved cultural continuity to how they envisioned their roles as pathfinders toward times to come.

Nahua Horizons challenges the notion that the Spanish erased Nahua culture. The book emphasizes the ways people kept sovereignty over the futures they envisioned for themselves and their communities. Stear’s bold new approach follows the paths that Nahuas forged ahead into unknown times.

The first century of Spanish colonization in Latin America witnessed the birth of cities that, while secondary to great metropolitan centers such as Mexico City and Lima, became important hubs for regional commerce. Santiago de Guatemala, the colonial capital of Central America, was one of these. A multiethnic and multicultural city from its beginning, Santiago grew into a vigorous trading center for agrarian goods such as cacao and cattle hides. With the wealth this commerce generated, Spaniards, natives, and African slaves built a city that any European of the period would have found familiar.

This book provides a more complete picture of society, culture, and economy in sixteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala than has ever before been drawn. Robinson Herrera uses previously unstudied primary sources, including testaments, promissory notes, and work contracts, to recreate the lives and economic activities of the non-elite sectors of society, including natives, African slaves, economically marginal Europeans, and people of mixed descent. His focus on these groups sheds light on the functioning of the economy at the lower levels and reveals how people of different ethnic groups formed alliances to create a vibrant local and regional economy based on credit. This portrait of Santiago also increases our understanding of how secondary Spanish American cities contributed vitally to the growth of the colonies.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European powers vied for control of the land and resources in the Caribbean and Latin America. Colonies made Spain rich through gold, silver, and gems looted from the Native cultures, along with rare and exotic goods such as tobacco, sugar, and dyewood, and even humble products such as hides. In rapid turn, other European monarchies and merchants sent out colonizing expeditions to the region to exploit the resources of the New World, but creating permanent footholds was perilous. All European settlements founded in the New World faced a variety of challenges, including food supply, inconsistent support from Europe, leadership, ignorance of the area colonized, irrational expectations, religious discord, relations with Native peoples, and violent national rivalries. Colonies that succeeded and those that failed faced the same challenges, although in differing degrees and circumstances. The margin between survival and disaster was always small—there were few chances to succeed and the risk of failure was never far away. 
   In Neither Hee Nor Any of His Companie Did Return Againe: Failed Colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America, 1492–1865, historians David MacDonald and Raine Waters examine the European, and later American, failures to establish permanent settlements in the region. Beginning with Columbus’s ill-conceived ventures, the authors discuss the efforts, from German claims in Venezuela and Scottish attempts in Panama to defeated Confederates fleeing to Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere. For each colony, the primary source information is contextualized and evaluated. Along the way, the authors determine commonalities across these ill-fated colonies as well as underscore the fact that while Indigenous peoples of the region often vigorously resisted predatory European colonization, their numbers were decimated by relentless warfare, slave raids, and European diseases. As Indian populations declined, colonists imported African slaves in large numbers. The brutal treatment of slaves resulted in those who escaped creating their own settlements that existed in a state of endemic warfare with European colonists. An important contribution to Atlantic World studies, this volume reveals the fine line between colonies that thrived and those that failed.

The discovery of the New World was initially a cause for celebration. But the vast amounts of gold that Columbus and other explorers claimed from these lands altered Spanish society. The influx of such wealth contributed to the expansion of the Spanish empire, but also it raised doubts and insecurities about the meaning and function of money, the ideals of court and civility, and the structure of commerce and credit. New World Gold shows that, far from being a stabilizing force, the flow of gold from the Americas created anxieties among Spaniards and shaped a host of distinct behaviors, cultural practices, and intellectual pursuits on both sides of the Atlantic.

Elvira Vilches examines economic treatises, stories of travel and conquest, moralist writings, fiction, poetry, and drama to reveal that New World gold ultimately became a problematic source of power that destabilized Spain’s sense of trust, truth, and worth. These cultural anxieties, she argues, rendered the discovery of gold paradoxically disastrous for Spanish society. Combining economic thought, social history, and literary theory in trans-Atlantic contexts, New World Gold unveils the dark side of Spain’s Golden Age.