In 1479 (the year 13-Reed), some men from the towns of Chalco-Amaquemecan and Tlamanalco went for the first time to sing in Mexico-Tenochtitlan: the Mexica (Aztecs) held hegemony in the area, including Chalco. The song they sang was a war song called the “Song of the Woman Warrior.” They played it for the tlatoani, or ruler, Lord Axayacatl (ca 1469-1481), performing it in the patio outside his house of women. Unfortunately, the performance got off to a rather slow start. A man from the area of Tlamanalco in Chalco, one who had never played the drums before or directed a song, made a very bad showing.

The indigenous historian Chimalpahin seemed quite certain that events on a certain day in 1479 had unfolded as he described them, though he wrote over a century later and saw it all through the refracting lens of the intervening Spanish conquest. Posterity has been the more inclined to believe him since there exists a song amongst those collected in the sixteenth century under the auspices of the Franciscans entitled “The Song of the Women of Chalco” (Chalca cihuacuicatl) in which the singer addresses Axayacatl as the conqueror of Chalco and as her own lord and master. But what can we in the twenty-first century make of these two sources? We might pursue a number of interpretive avenues. In this article I will ask specifically what we actually know about the fifteenth-century performance event, and what, if anything, we can glean from the song concerning the lives of the Nahua women in that nearly untranslatable category whom we know in English as “concubines.”

The Nahua concept of heaven was one of the central issues that the missionary friars confronted as they attempted to reconcile Christian and Nahua thought in the early sixteenth century. The Nahua believed in the existence of both celestial heavens and subterranean hells, as possible destinations for individuals after death. The celestial realms, of which there were thirteen, were in general pleasant places. The subterranean realms were unpleasant. Unfortunately for the friars, the mechanisms whereby one could come to enjoy or suffer in these realms depended not on the quality of one’s life, but rather on the particulars of one’s death, the date of one’s birth, and other features of one’s existence. For instance, those who died by water, or lightening, were consigned to the heaven of the god of rain, Tlaloc. For the Nahua this post-mortem existence was corporeal, although the nature of one’s body might change in the process. The Nahua did not have any easy equivalent for the Christian soul. This essay will look particularly at the Nahuatl word for the sky, ilhuicatl, and how it functioned in both pre-Columbian thought and in the works written after the conquest with greater, or lesser, degrees of Christian input.

Sometime after the summer of 1703, a strange traveler journeyed to several Zapotec-speaking communities nestled in the rugged geography of Villa Alta—an alcaldía mayor northeast of Oaxaca City in New Spain. He wore a pectoral ornament around his neck—a gift from the Benedictine friar Ángel Maldonado, a newly appointed bishop who had arrived in Oaxaca in July 1702—and was received throughout Villa Alta with “great noise and expressions of joy.” Upon his arrival in each locality, he would gather the townspeople and proclaim an offer of amnesty from the bishop: in exchange for registering a collective confession about traditional ritual practices at the administrative seat of San Ildefonso, and turning in their ritual implements—such as alphabetic ritual texts and wooden cylindrical drums—each Zapotec community would receive a general amnesty from ecclesiastical prosecution for idolatry.

One of the central problems of Spanish missionary activity in the New World was the translation of Christian concepts into native languages. The following document, housed in Rome’s Jesuit archives (ARSI), highlights both the concern and the controversy surrounding this issue in the audiencia of New Granada (modern-day Colombia). On 25 August 1606, audiencia president Juan de Borja issued a decree requiring all members of New Granada’s clergy to provide religious instruction in the Chibcha language. The recent arrival of a small group of Jesuits had intensified a long-standing debate over how best to explain the mysteries of the Christian faith in early-colonial New Granada. Almost three decades earlier, in 1580, the oidor Pedro de Zorrillo, complained to the Council of the Indies that the natives of New Granada were as ignorant (in spiritual matters) now as they had been before the conquest. This ignorance, according to Zorrillo, was the result of the recalcitrance of local priests, most of whom stubbornly refused to learn native languages. Few priests spoke Chibcha and therefore taught the doctrina in Spanish or in some cases, Latin, which the Indians simply repeated like parrots, “como papagayos.”