Here in This Year

Indigenous breadsellers riot over a Spanish monopoly scheme; Spanish authorities plan to remove native people from the city; indigenous people struggle to construct a splendid church; the city's inhabitants fight over elections and witness hangings, epidemics, and eclipses. All this and more a Native American writer of Puebla, Mexico, reported in the late seventeenth century in a set of annals in his own language, Nahuatl, telling his people's local history from the coming of the Christian faith down to his own day. These records were part of a corpus of such annals produced in the Tlaxcala-Puebla region during this period. These writings by native peoples for their own posterity provide the most direct access to the indigenous perspective on the postconquest centuries that we are ever going to find. Here in This Yearfor the first time brings two sets of Nahuatl annalsthe other one being from a more provincial localeto the English-speaking world, presenting the original Nahuatl with facing, very readable translations.

Camilla Townsend is Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (2006) and Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (2004).