"Earth is no one's home": Nahua perceptions of illness, death, and dying in the early colonial period, 1520-1650
Creators: name: Malanga, Tara
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2020

description: After the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors to mainland Mexico, the first epidemic of smallpox ravaged the native peoples of the city of Tenochtitlan – present day Mexico City – and the surrounding towns in the year 1520. This was the first experience the Nahuas, or Aztecs, had with infectious, epidemic disease but it would not be the last. In the following one hundred years, the population of Mexico, as well as the rest of the Americas, would see an unprecedented demographic collapse of about 90%. This dissertation traces Nahua perspectives of disease, death, and dying through time from the early sixteenth-century to the mid-seventeenth century. By focusing on sources written by the Nahuas living in Central Mexico at the time, it argues that the primary concern of the writers when considering death and dying was to remember the dead and to tell the stories of those who came before them. While it has been posited that the Nahuas had a concept of the afterlife akin to the Christian Heaven, the sources make it clear that they did not. The only afterlife that was universally understood to exist was the one that existed in the memory of the people that remained on earth. Using sources written by Nahuas it is clear that the epidemics and the demographic collapse resulted in heightened fear and anxiety regarding death, exactly because they did not believe in a universal afterlife independent of the memories of those living on earth. Therefore, this became the most important tenant of their new faith in a Catholic Heaven, that it was not attained or guaranteed without the prayers and memories of those still on earth. This dissertation utilizes a variety of sources and genres in order to understand changing perspectives through time. Part I focuses on the songs and prayers that were written down very early in the colonial period and which give the best possible insight into preconquest thoughts and ideologies. Here the sources suggest a departure from the idea that the Nahuas as eager to die and join their fellows in paradise, as some have suggested. Instead the Nahua warriors fought valiantly and died bravely in order to be remembered well and have songs sung and tales told about them. In Part II, the Nahua historical annals show that before the conquest and during it there was great care taken to remember the brave and to honor the bodies of those who were slain. Then, in the midst of the colonial epidemics, the terror and sadness is evident as the annalists wrote down the names of those who had died and lamented that they were the last of a given noble line and that it may be that everyone would die. Lastly, in Part III, the Hispanicized records of the Nahuas are examined to show that even as the people accepted and took part in new Catholic traditions and beliefs, they still saw remembrance and memory being of paramount importance, the only sure way of living on after death. This dissertation, then, demonstrates the importance of studying the sources written by the Nahuas themselves, in order to understand the devastation of the epidemics in a way that Spanish language sources and demographic statistics cannot.