Numerous studies on the chronicles of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and his main themes, Tetzcoco and Nezahualcoyotl, have been published in the United States during the past 20 years. With The Legacy of Rulership in Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl's “Historia de la nación chichimeca,” Leisa Kauffmann adds one more important study to this scholarship. As the author mentions in the introduction, this book examines one of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's chronicles, Historia de la nación chichimeca, with an innovative theoretical framework. Most of the scholars who have studied the chronicles focus on the process and purpose of Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Europeanization and Christianization of pre-Hispanic history. Kauffmann, however, argues that the chronicler was a bicultural and bilingual historian of colonial society and that thus his works should be studied as hybrid or diglossic texts that move between European humanist and pre-Hispanic indigenous traditions.
The Legacy of Rulership consists of four...
