This extraordinary book is the perfect complement to Charles Gibson’s landmark study, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule (Stanford, 1964). Each covers roughly the same topic, geographical area, and time span, yet each uses entirely different sources, resulting in almost no overlap.
James Lockhart has assembled a large corpus of what he calls “mundane” documents in Nahuatl, mostly from the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, but with significant accretions from other repositories. These are wills, instruments of land transfer, petitions, local government records, and the like, written by native scribes in Spanish characters, beginning in the 1540s and continuing until the late eighteenth century. Also considered are the pictographic manuscripts and annals in preconquest style from this area, a smaller and more dispersed corpus. Lockhart has subjected this material to scrutiny and has drawn from it an immense amount of detail, arranged with subtlety under various headings, with the intention of providing a comprehensive history of these people from their own viewpoint, as a corrective to the one-sided approach of those who have relied on Spanish sources.
The colonial period, by Lockhart’s reckoning, falls into three stages of progressive acculturation. In the first, from the arrival of the Spaniards to ca. 1545-50, the tribute and labor of the native states (altepetl) were assigned to Spanish encomenderos, leaving in place the native rulers; and missionary friars began the work of conversion to Christianity. In stage 2, from ca. 1545-50 to ca. 1640-50, Indian labor was removed from the encomienda and controlled by royal magistrates, altepetl government was transferred to Spanish-style cabildos, great monastery complexes were built, pictographic writing was largely replaced by alphabetic Nahuatl with Spanish loanwords, and European culture infiltrated in various other ways. In the final phase, the altepetl were fragmented, Indians could work where they pleased and began to speak Spanish, and the Virgin of Guadalupe became a symbol of Mexican unity.
The contemporary Nahuatl record, with a few rare exceptions, such as a unique house-by-house census taken in the Cuernavaca region ca. 1540, does not begin until the mid-sixteenth century. Thus the details of what happened to the people of central Mexico in those terrible three decades after the conquest (millions marched to Motines, Nueva Galicia, Sinaloa, Yucatán, and elsewhere, never to return; then the cocoliztli of 1545-48 killed perhaps four out of five; and cattle swarmed over the milpas) are still to be pieced together out of the archives.
Sometimes Lockhart’s conclusions do not square with the evidence. I find nothing in his sources to substantiate the claim that “the Spaniards retained the basic settlement pattern the Nahuas had already established” (p. 434). The congregaciones of the sixteenth century, which gathered dispersed peasants into nuclear pueblos around the monasteries and other doctrinal centers, are recognizable in the core of many central Mexican towns today. In some areas, indeed, the people fled the congregaciones and returned to live next to their old milpas, a case of deculturation.
Let not these few discordant notes obscure my admiration for this work. It is a fine example of innovative ethnohistoriography.
