This volume evolved over more than a dozen years from the collections of documents that we assembled for undergraduate students in courses on colonial Mexican and Latin American history. Such collections began with documents translated from Nahuatl by James Lockhart, which we three were required to read as graduate students at UCLA. In fact, all three of us took his upper-division class on the Indians of colonial Mexico in the spring of 1988. The collections grew as we added materials that we had found and translated for use in our doctoral dissertations and other projects, and as we began to teach our own courses. We continued to swap materials, exchange ideas, and discuss approaches to using such documents in the classroom. Eventually, we three editors and authors combined our efforts and contributed equally to this volume.

We are thus very grateful to James Lockhart for the various roles he has played in the evolution of this project. First, he introduced us to the labor and pleasure of translating and analyzing native-language texts for the purposes of writing history. Second, he generously allowed us to use his course reader for our classes and now is allowing us to use his original transcriptions and translations of several Nahuatl-language documents, which we have left unaltered or have modified only slightly because we do not pretend to be able to produce better translations.