Tlacaelel Remembered: Mastermind of the Aztec Empire/Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive

Tlacaelel Remembered: Mastermind of the Aztec Empire. By susan schroeder. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. xiii + 218 pp. $35.00 (hardcover).

Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive. By camilla townsend. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. xviii + 318 pp. $29.95 (hardcover).

The books under review represent the dominant contemporary approach to ethnohistorical studies of the Basin of Mexico region of Mesoamerica and its largest indigenous population, "Nahuas." Many readers will know that conglomeration of linguistically and culturally related peoples as "Aztecs." After briefly discussing nomenclature, I describe and evaluate both books in light of that approach, the New Philology, and ask what readers interested in indigenous studies, conquest, and colonialism in other parts of the world might take away from these books.

The term "Aztecs" has been used since the nineteenth century to describe related ethnicities in central Mexico in the two centuries before Europeans arrived who spoke the Nahuatl language; the conquest-based empire created by three predominant ethnicities (Mexica of Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoca of Tetzcoco, and Tepaneca of Tlacopan); or the Mexica of Tenochtitlan and its sister-island city of Tlatelolco. Many ethnohistorians, especially those whose research covers the colonial period, prefer the term "Nahua," popularized by James Lockhart,1 referring to Nahuatl-speaking peoples of the basin region and beyond. Here I use the term "Nahua" in that broad sense and particular ethnonyms for specific ethnicities, which were often coterminous with kingdoms (or city-states) with urban centers and dispersed surrounding populations. Such units were called altepetl, headed by a supreme ruler or tlatoani and constituted key political centers in late preconquest central Mexico.

Hernan cortés and his followers conquered the largest such altepetl, Tenochtitlan, the huey or "great" altepetl in 1519, bigger and more powerful than any other. Susan Schroeder describes how Tenochtitlan came to have great political power by narrating the history of its ruling dynasty through the story of a key political figure related to it, Tlacaelel. This man advised three generations of tlatoani, five in total, but never himself ruled. Half-brother of the first ruler named Moteuczoma, Moteuczoma Ilhuicamina, Schroeder argues that it was Tlacaelel more than any of the five rulers he advised-as cihuacoatl ("female serpent," second-in-command and leading advisor to the...