Painting colonialism with words: the Aztecs recording and resisting Spanish rule a generation after conquest
Creators: name: Mendoza, Celso Armando
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: In 1564, the Mexica, better known today as the Aztecs, faced the greatest challenge to their survival and integrity as a people since the Conquest of 1519-1521. For the first time, the colonial administration of New Spain (Mexico) decreed that they, young and old, were to pay a tribute in silver money, which the Mexica said they could not afford to do. A massive outpouring of resistance erupted in Mexico City, ranging from open revolt to simply refusing to pay the tribute, which triggered a concomitant wave of colonial repression. Thousands of protesting Indigenous people were jailed in what may have been the first institution of mass incarceration in the colonial Americas. Several of them were sold into indentured servitude. These events and others were recorded by a group of Indigenous painter-scribes (tlacuiloque) in a little known Nahuatl-language text called the “Annals of Juan Bautista” (or AJB), named (ironically) for the Spaniard who bought, labeled and then lost the notebook in which their record was later copied. Though largely known for containing the earliest mentions of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the AJB is most valuable for providing an Indigenous perspective on a key moment in the history of the colonial Americas – a generation after the initial war, when the conquest was made truly complete, and the local people had to face genuine Spanish domination. As most Nahuatl histories (annals, codices, or xiuhpohualli) were written long after Spanish rule had become an unquestionable reality, this is the only source that gives us a look into the thinking of an Indigenous ethnic group debating and discussing the implications of permanent foreign rule. Some modern scholars, looking primarily at accounts of the conquest, have thought the Indigenous felt victimized; others, mainly working with texts composed later in the more stable years of the colonial period, have argued that they barely allowed colonialism to touch their inner core. I show through a close study of what the Indigenous wrote on the matter that both were true at the same time. True, they were a resilient people who were not demoralized by their subjugation, and continued to fight on as best as they could. At the same time, those who lived within a generation after the conquest really did believe that the Spanish colonial regime was an oppressive, unjust dystopia in comparison with the more harmonious preconquest period. The dissertation is about what we can learn from this extraordinary source, not simply in the history it records, but also in the history of its production, which I trace and deduce. A man from a subsequent generation of painter-scribes in the 1580s, whom I conclusively identify and whose life I sketch out, copied it into the aforementioned Spanish notebook originally meant to record the names of those who refused to pay. This shows not only the historical connection between painters and history-keeping in Indigenous culture, but also that the text was so potentially controversial and subversive that it had to be hidden within a Spanish notebook.