After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest

Following Hernando Cortés’s conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the Aztec empire became the center of the largest European colony in the Americas. It has long been assumed that Indigenous people’s personal experiences of this cataclysmic era are inaccessible. Spanish records do not reflect how Nahuas and other Indigenous peoples spoke privately about the great changes, and accounts written in Indigenous languages mostly date from the latter half of the sixteenth century.

Through close readings of Nahuatl sources, the contributors to After the Broken Spears illustrate that records of Indigenous experiences of the early colonial period are both more abundant than first appear and more richly detailed than ever imagined. Nahuatl songs, annals, tall tales, and legal documents offer a comprehensive vision of how Mexico’s Indigenous people lived through the years after the conquest and negotiated the creation of their new world. Often originally circulated as oral accounts, these stories were later copied into Nahuatl script by those determined to preserve their people’s history. Interspersed between the main chapters are commentaries written by contemporary Indigenous Mexican scholars, highlighting how historical themes relate to the present day. Just as their ancestors did five hundred years ago, these writers negotiate the ramifications of the Spanish conquest for their communities. After the Broken Spears offers fresh perspectives on a critical transition period in Mesoamerican, Mexican, and colonial history.

About the Editors

Camilla Townsend is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University and the author of numerous acclaimed books, including Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (OUP, 2019), which won the Cundill History Prize, and Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (OUP, 2016), which won the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association and the Howard Francis Cline Memorial Prize of the Conference on Latin American History.

Josh Anthony is a PhD candidate in History at Rutgers University and the Richard S. Dunn Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former Rockefeller Brothers Curatorial Research Fellow at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library.