UC Berkeley

My dissertation examines the writings of don Domingo Chimalpahin, a Nahua intellectual who produced a large body of written texts in Nahuatl and Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My study reframes his work as an Indigenous intellectual project that safeguards the history of Cemanahuac—the Nahua Indigenous world—and preserves for future generations of Nahuas and their descendants the possibility to reclaim their history, government institutions, and land. As such, the archive Chimalpahin compiles and produces forces us to rethink Indigenous intellectual production during a critical time in which the very existence of Indigenous peoples of New Spain was at risk. My dissertation argues that Chimalpahin continues and expands the tradition of an earlier generation of Nahua tlacuiloque—scribes—who painted and wrote in Nahuatl for Nahua readers of the future. My study illustrates that Chimalpahin transcends the altepetl-centered histories of his predecessors and refutes Spanish historiography by revising the narratives of Spanish authors while putting Indigenous history in global context. This intellectual project, I show, entails an alternative political and cultural history rooted in the perspective of an Indigenous commoner.

My dissertation contributes to scholarship on colonial Latin America by focusing on a time period often neglected or seen as uneventful. Most specifically, it centers on Indigenous voices to illuminate an alternative intellectual project of self-preservation and self-determination that challenges the views of Spanish intellectuals and Indigenous authors appealing to the Spanish Crown as well as Christian friars writing about the history of New Spain.