The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico

Educated, often noble Nahua men became extraordinarily influential cultural mediators in New Spain. They worked as translators, city council members, and church officials, and they often represented their communities and their culture to Spanish and creole officials. Moreover, some of these individuals contributed to the production of knowledge in the colony as painters of pictorial maps and codices and as writers of annals histories and Nahuatl grammars. In her unique, interdisciplinary study, Kelly S. McDonough defines these individuals as Nahua intellectuals (ixtlamatinih/tlamatinimeh) and connects their work to the endeavors of their brethren of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to create an innovative portrait of Nahua intellectual production in Mexico across the centuries. McDonough structures her work around profiles of five Nahua thinkers and writers but also includes short contributions from contemporary indigenous intellectuals and reflections on her work with Nahuatl speakers at the Zacatecas Institute...