Among primary materials relating to the history of Mexico, documentation in Nahuatl comprises a special category. Though Nahuatl is a living language, spoken by thousands, one of the facts of life in our profession is that few native Nahuatl speakers ever become historians. An additional effort is required, by an Eduard Seler or a Robert Barlow or an Arthur J. O. Anderson, if materials in Nahuatl are to be applied to scholarly ends. We have become more familiar in recent years with the literary and philosophical qualities of Nahuatl writing in the work of Angel María Garibay K., and Miguel León-Portilla. Good progress has been made in translating major Nahuatl texts, particularly the Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún, by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. And the remarkable work of Pedro Carrasco is casting an ever clearer light on the organization of the Nahuatl-speaking societies of conquest times. In Europe and America, the new generation of students, more than its predecessors, seems to be aware of the applicability of existing Nahuatl studies and the need for new ones. The demand and the opportunity are obvious, and we can expect to see steady advances in the years to come.
The present important volume both calls attention to the opportunity and prefigures the advance. It is an anthology of Nahuatl documents drawn principally from the McAfee Collection of UCLA and the Ramo de Tierras Collection of Mexico’s National Archive, relating to the municipalities, estates, lands, and occupations of the Nahuatl-speaking Indians of Mexico. The thirty-six items range from Soconusco to Durango, and from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Each is printed in Nahuatl and English, with explanatory annotations. Introductory articles discuss the ethnohistorical, linguistic, documentary, and other implications. The emphasis is both cautionary (“we wish to underline the speculative nature of the rendition of many passages,” p. 40) and optimistic with respect to the new information forthcoming on Indian lives and internal community relations. New information is indeed abundant in the documents presented, particularly for individual Indians of the sixteenth century.
I should like to make two further observations. One is that while these materials are, in a sense, “beyond” the codices, it would be a mistake to suppose that we are much farther advanced in codical studies than we are in the type of document represented here. The second is that we have a real need now for systematic toponymic research. In the Nahuatl world, every field seems to have a different name, and in these texts it is sometimes the case that the translators cannot tell if they are dealing with a placename or simply with another noun. A dictionary, or index, or central card file of Mexican placenames would provide a beginning toward a solution for this persistent problem.
