In 1977, Miguel León-Portilla, then the most important scholar of Mesoamerica in Mexico and the world, wrote a review in The Americas about a recent publication by his colleagues in the United States. The reviewed book, the multi-authored Beyond the Codices: The Nahua View of Colonial Mexico (1976), presented translations and studies of little-known documents written in the Indigenous language of Nahuatl. León-Portilla told readers that this book was the “kind of publication [that] arouses particular interest,” since it brought scholarly attention to a class of documents that have been “little explored or totally neglected,” even as it complemented his own work.Footnote 1 Since the 1950s, León-Portilla and his colleagues in Mexico had been using spectacular Nahuatl manuscripts such as the Florentine Codex to rewrite the history of precolonial Mesoamerica and the Spanish military conquest of the region. There had yet to be sustained research, however, into the more mundane Native-language documents presented in Beyond the Codices, especially not to reconstruct Indigenous life under Spanish rule. By studying testaments, court cases, municipal records, and petitions, León-Portilla hypothesized that “our knowledge of [Nahuatl] will thereby become broader and deeper,” and “our vision of colonial Mexico will no longer be derived solely from Spanish testimonies.”Footnote 2 The eminent Mexican scholar concluded his review by applauding the scholars responsible for Beyond the Codices: Arthur J.O. Anderson, Frances Berdan, and James Lockhart.
It is the final author who has become most associated with the U.S. school of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory. In the words of John F. Schwaller, a longtime contributor to and editor of The Americas, Lockhart was the “leading scholar of early colonial Mexico,” responsible for training “a whole generation of scholars competent in Nahuatl and other native languages of Mesoamerica.”Footnote 3 Lockhart “initiated the practice of utilizing the native language documentation to better reconstruct the history of the early colonial period,” Schwaller later explained. The methodology and subfield created by Lockhart, termed the “New Philology” by its adherents, helped inaugurate a “revolution in historiography” in the 1990s that transformed the writing of early Mexican history.Footnote 4 There are few Mesoamericanists today who would disagree that Lockhart’s contributions were groundbreaking and field-defining.
Yet as León-Portilla’s review suggests, the New Philology “revolution” did not emerge ex nihilo out of an intellectual vacuum. Even before Beyond the Codices, colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory had served as a central pillar in the historiography of Latin America. It is no surprise then that the field has been well represented within the pages of The Americas, a flagship journal of Latin American history in the United States. The journal has published articles and book reviews from some of the most esteemed Mesoamericanists in the world. Through a chronological study of the rich “vault” of The Americas, this essay delivers a quantitative and qualitative survey of the development of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory in the United States, of equal interest to practitioners of the field and instructors of Latin American history.Footnote 5
My primary goal in writing this essay was to use The Americas’s extensive archive of publications to assess the revolutionary impact of the New Philology: to demonstrate how increased attention to Indigenous-language sources has changed the writing of Indigenous history in early Mexico and Central America. But as I began to collect and analyze data from the journal’s many issues, other themes emerged. The national academies of the scholars who published in the field in The Americas was one topic of interest, and the close relationship between studies of Mexican and Central American evangelization and studies of the region’s Indigenous peoples was another. As a journal founded and operated by the Academy of American Franciscan history, with the stated goal of bringing awareness to the scholarship within Latin American to U.S. audiences, The Americas is uniquely well suited to analyzing these trends.Footnote 6 It was also fascinating to observe the growth in female contributors to the field across the decades. While this essay does not and cannot treat these topics with equivalent attention as it does the use of Indigenous-language sources, I would be happy to share my dataset with other scholars upon request to aid in their own historiographic research.
The following section explains my methodology for recording and tracking publications in The Americas and presents my principal findings. Subsequent sections discuss the chronological development of the field through relevant publications in the journal. I periodize this development in broad strokes: the beginning of the journal in 1944 through the end of the 1970s, when Beyond the Codices was published; the 1980s through the 1990s, the period in which the New Philology emerged; and finally, the 2000s and the 2010s, as the New Philology became integrated into colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory. In my brief conclusion, I consider scholarship published from 2020 through 2024. These sections feature statistical analysis of my data alongside considerations of the conversations featured in the journal that shaped the field. Through a study of 131 articles and 346 reviews written in the Americas, across 80 years, 81 volumes, and 324 issues, this essay accounts for the growth and transformation of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory as a remarkably generative field within the broader historiography of Latin America.
Methodology and Principal Findings
I collected my dataset manually by combing through each issue of The Americas and reviewing every publication to determine whether they fit within the parameters of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory. The diverse terminology used to describe the field over the years rendered keyword searches insufficient for locating relevant publications. Though I originally planned to only collect articles, cursory glances at the vigorous debates about the field in the book review section of the journal made me realize this project would be incomplete if I neglected these publications.Footnote 7 To retain consistency in the publications in my dataset, I developed a working definition of my object of study. What did I mean by “colonial” and “Mesoamerican,” and more troubling, what exactly was “ethnohistory?” Defining these three terms allowed me to create a uniform set of questions that I applied to every publication I reviewed, as is discussed below.
The adjective “colonial” functions in this essay as a temporal signifier, denoting the period of Mesoamerican history that falls between the earliest sixteenth-century Spanish forays into the region and the achievement of independence from Spain by Mexico and Central America in the early nineteenth century. Some scholars critique the use of the term to label this period, and these critiques have merit.Footnote 8 Nevertheless, I continue to use the word “colonial” because it best reflects the terminology used by contributing authors in The Americas. I include within these temporal parameters any historical study of precolonial Mesoamerica that relies primarily on texts written under Spanish rule. This is especially relevant to the study of the imperial state led by the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, commonly known as the Aztecs. The Mexica were one of many Nahuatl-speaking Nahua peoples who once predominated in central Mexico. The historical study of the precolonial Mexica and other Nahuas is so closely related to the historiography of the colonial period that it would severely misrepresent the field were it to be excluded.Footnote 9 I thus framed the first question I asked when collecting publications in the following way: “Does at least half of this publication consider the colonial era, or does at least half of this article or book depend on sources created in the colonial era?”
“Mesoamerican” functions here as a geographic signifier. I use Paul Kirchhoff’s classic definition of Mesoamerican as a definable cultural area that stretches from central Mexico through most of Central America, with one significant derivation.Footnote 10 I include in my dataset publications that consider northern Mexico, usually defined as part of Aridoamerica due to its dryer climate and resulting differences in Indigenous subsistence strategies and cultures in comparison with Mesoamerica. My reasoning for this is partially historical, based on the enduring connections between the Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and Aridoamerica,Footnote 11 and partially historiographic, based on the inclusion of Mexico’s north within the broad narrative of Indigenous Mexican history.Footnote 12 I do not include studies of what is today the U.S. Southwest, even though this region is part of Aridoamerica and was once the northern frontier of New Spain and then the Mexican nation. This choice was made because most scholars of the U.S. side of Rio Grande work within the framework of Borderlands history, which just centers this region rather than viewing it as an extreme fringe of Mesoamerica. Here the historiographic reasons outweigh the historical ones. With this in mind, the second question I asked when collecting publications was “Does at least half of this publication analyze the region of Mesoamerica or northern Mexico within my target chronology?”
The noun “ethnohistory” functions in this essay as a thematic signifier, rather than as a methodological signifier, to indicate the identity of its subjects. This distinction merits some discussion. The term first emerged in the United States to describe the union of historical and anthropological methodologies, developed as an applied field to present cases before the mid-century Indians Claim Commission. In the 1950s, the field was institutionalized through the formation of the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE) and Ethnohistory, the organization’s flagship journal.Footnote 13 Best understood as a “super-discipline” rather than simply interdisciplinary, ethnohistorians apply the analysis of documentary evidence to people traditionally studied exclusively through anthropology, and liberally borrow from the various subdisciplines of anthropology to craft emic narratives of their subjects.Footnote 14 Most subjects of ethnohistorical analysis have historically been the Indigenous cultures of the Americas. As a methodology, however, ethnohistory is applicable to a wide variety of peoples and settings.Footnote 15 Still, among most scholars and Latin Americanists, “ethnohistory” continues to function as synonym for “Indigenous history of the Americas” that benefits from both economy of words and an indication of its methodology;Footnote 16 thus my choice to use “ethnohistory” as a thematic rather than methodological signifier. When collecting publications, I did not ask whether an author’s methodology was sufficiently ethnohistorical (a near-impossible metric to determine). Instead, I asked, “Is at least half of this publication dedicated to the analysis of one or multiple Indigenous cultures within my target geography and chronology?” Scholarship on Afro-descended cultures within Mesoamerica, a rich and thriving field in The Americas, Ethnohistory, and elsewhere, is thus not represented in my dataset.Footnote 17
The limitations in my criteria were influenced by the uniquely expansive archive produced by Indigenous Mesoamericans during the colonial period. Some texts within this archive are pictorial and glyphic, while others are written alphabetically in Spanish and Native languages: Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya, Mixtec, K’iche’ Maya, Kaqchikel Maya, Zapotec, and more.Footnote 18 In the introduction to the Handbook of Middle American Indians: Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources (1972), a publication responsible for defining colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory, Howard F. Cline argued that the abundances of documentary evidence produced by Indigenous actors distinguishes Mesoamerican ethnohistory from the broader literature on the Indigenous Americas.Footnote 19 The high percentage of this archive that was written in Indigenous languages makes it even more unique; hence my decision to organize this essay around scholars’ usage of Indigenous-language sources.
If a publication met the criteria established by the three questions listed above, I collected it in my dataset and recorded relevant information according to eight different analytical categories related to the publication and its author(s). In the case of book reviews, I recorded analytical information for book authors as well as reviewers.Footnote 20 See Table 1 for the analytical information I tracked in my dataset.Footnote 21
Analytical Categories Recorded in Dataset
Once my data collection was complete, I organized my publications by decade so that I could better analyze chronological trends in publications in the field at The Americas. Figure 1 shows the total number of publications of articles and book reviews within the field of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory between 1944 and 2019, while Figure 2 shows the number of these publications that analyze Indigenous-language sources. The graphs show that between the 1980s and the 1990s, the period when the New Philology emerged, there was a 43% increase in total publications and a 50% increase in articles alone. This marks the highest percentage increase across two consecutive time periods in these categories in the history of The Americas. The trend corresponds directly with a much more dramatic growth in the number of these publications that cite Indigenous-language sources: a 200% increase from the 1980s to the 1990s. The total number of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory publications continued to climb in the 2000s before stabilizing in the 2010s, while the number of these publications that cite Indigenous-language sources continues to soar higher each decade. Before the 1980s, in contrast, there was little correlation between the total number of publications and the number of these publications to cite Indigenous language sources.
Total Journal Publications in Colonial Mesoamerican Ethnohistory
Source: All data here and in following graphs and tables comes from The Americas back catalog.
Publications that Cite Any Indigenous-Language Source
Figures 1 and 2 offer clear quantitative evidence of the revolutionary impact of the New Philology on the writing of early Mesoamerican history, as described by Schwaller at the beginning of this essay. Yet as the pre-1980 data illustrate, the analysis of Mesoamerican-language sources to tell colonial history did not begin with Beyond the Codices in 1976. Nor can the dramatic growth in research in this field at The Americas be entirely explained by the work of James Lockhart and his students. As Miguel León-Portilla’s review suggests, the New Philology was influenced by other intellectual trends that preceded and coincided with it. In what follows, I discuss the development of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory at The Americas in the phases outlined above.
Colonial Mesoamerican Ethnohistory Before the New Philology: 1944–79
Founded in 1944, The Americas first defined itself as “a Review of Inter-American Cultural History.”Footnote 22 As another Latin American history journal explained, it sought to promote “lasting understanding between the Americas” by publishing articles about Latin America and by bringing scholarship produced in Latin America to U.S. audiences.Footnote 23 This broad scope distinguished The Americas from the organization that founded it, the Academy of American Franciscan History, created a year earlier to promote research into the Order’s history in the Western Hemisphere.Footnote 24 Because The Americas’ editorial board was originally composed entirely of Franciscans from the Academy, however, it was only natural that many of the journal’s early publications focused on the Franciscan’s Christian mission in the early Americas.Footnote 25 Of the 15 articles I collected for the 1940s, only 2 did not have evangelization as their primary subject. Studies of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory thus first emerged in The Americas as a subsidiary of a broader interest among contributors in the evangelization of Mexico and Central America by the Franciscans, other Catholic orders, and the secular clergy.Footnote 26
The demographics of the contributors to the journal during its first 6 years look strikingly different than they do in later years. This decade featured the highest number of total contributors who were members of religious orders or the secular clergy (see Figure 3). It also featured the highest proportion of contributors who were members of academies beyond the United States (see Figure 4). Finally, all the contributors (article authors, book authors, and reviewers) I recorded in this decade were men.Footnote 27 These trends can partially be explained by the dominance of men of the cloth in The Americas’s early years. The 15 article writers included 3 Franciscans closely affiliated with the Academy and The Americas, 1 Dominican (David Rubio) who served as an advisory editor, and 2 members of the secular clergy. Further, 2 of the 14 reviewed books were written by Franciscans and 10 of the 13 book reviewers were Franciscans, most of them members of the editorial board. The high number of international contributors cannot solely be attributed to the Franciscan’s global connections, since many contributors were unaffiliated with the Order. Instead, they reflect The Americas’s early success in their stated goal of bringing scholarship from Latin America to U.S. audiences.
Contributors by Membership in a Religious Order and/or the Secular Clergy
Contributors by Membership in U.S. and Foreign Academies
Representative articles from this period include Mexican historian Eduardo Enrique Rios’s “The Franciscan Contribution to Mexican Culture,” which emphasized the importance of the Franciscan-led evangelization to Mexican history.Footnote 28 Most of these articles tended to focus on the lives and actions of the evangelizers; see, for instance, the January 1949 special issue of The Americas on fray Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop of Mexico and a Franciscan, which featured six articles and one book review celebrating the achievement of the friar.Footnote 29 Beyond their thematic focus of evangelization, articles and book reviews from the 1940s are united by their regional focus on central Mexico. All of the articles are either about central Mexico or heavily focus on central Mexico’s relationship with other regions in Mesoamerica, while a little more than 50% of the reviewed books consider central Mexico exclusively.
While there are some mentions of Nahuatl and other alphabetic Indigenous-language sources in these publications, these sources were rarely subjected to any significant analysis.Footnote 30 The only article that I judged constitutive of Indigenous-language research was Robert H. Barlow’s brief 1945 “Some Remarks on the Term ‘Aztec Empire,’” but as Barlow explains in his introduction, the goal of this piece was to “see what [the Mexica’s] conquerors did call the Empire they overthrew,” rather than to examine the Nahuatl meaning of the term “Aztec.”Footnote 31 Still, the authors, editors, and readers of The Americas were not unaware of the work being done with Nahuatl sources. In 1946, editor-in-chief Francis Borgia Steck took space in a review to “direct attention to the series of critical studies that the accomplished Nahuatl scholar, Canon [Ángel] M. Garibay, published last year.”Footnote 32 The publication referred to was Épica náhuatl (1945), and the scholar was León-Portilla’s mentor, widely recognized as the forefather of modern Nahuatl studies. It would be multiple decades before The Americas’s preferred topic within colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory, evangelization, became entwined with the study of Nahuatl documents.
Contributors to the journal in its early years were much more interested in Maya-language research (see Figure 5). Two articles published side by side in the same April 1952 edition of the journal articulated the close connections between the missionizing project and creation of Maya-language documents, which positioned The Americas as a natural home for this scholarship. In what was originally an address delivered to the Academy in 1951, France V. Scholes described the Franciscans in Central America as “colonial linguists,” who operated as both evangelizers and ethnographers of their charges.Footnote 33 Afterwards, the pathbreaking anthropologist Ralph L. Roys (reviewed favorably in a previous issue of the journal) described the missionary linguistic material created by Franciscans in Yucatán as documents “of inestimable scientific value.”Footnote 34 Book reviews in Mesoamerican ethnohistory for the 1950s reflect this high appraisal: 9 of the 23 reviews for the decade considered books dealing with the Maya region, and all but one feature substantial analysis of Maya-language sources. Five of these reviews were dedicated to work by Adrián Recinos, an esteemed Guatemalan statesmen and historian who created the first modern translations of such important K’iche’ and Kaqchikel texts as the Popol Vuh, the Title of the Lords of Totonicapan, and the Annals of Cakchiquels.Footnote 35 Two more books by Roys were also reviewed, including a book coauthored with Scholes reviewed by Recinos.Footnote 36 In total, there are 14 articles and reviewed books for the decade that cite sources written in Yucatec, K’ich’e, and/or Kaqchikel Maya, making this decade an extreme outlier. As Figure 5 illustrates, the 1950s offer a quantitative Maya preview of the deluge of Nahuatl-centered publications that would appear in the 1990s and beyond.
Publications that Cite Sources Written in Specific Indigenous Languages
Qualitatively, however, the discourse surrounding this early Mayanist literature was much less revolutionary. Reviewers often reflected on the lack of Indigenous-language material left by Mesoamerican peoples, rather than the richness of this archive. They also commonly described what remained as primarily of value to anthropologists interested in reconstructing precolonial culture, rather than historians interested in studying change over time. Roscoe R. Hill, for instance, began his review of Recinos’ English translation of the Popol Vuh by describing the text as the “most outstanding” of the “few written accounts” left by Indigenous people, and then framed its importance as primarily related to “the cosmogonical concepts and ancient traditions of this aboriginal people.”Footnote 37 Such framing limited the ability of these sources to impact the wider Latin Americanist historiography, but there are some exceptions. Anthropologist Arthur J.O. Anderson, then at work on his monumental project to translate the Florentine Codex into English alongside Charles Dibble, remarked in one review that some of these Maya texts were “written in support of titles or claim to land or to noble lineage.” They were thus “to all intents and purposes, historical.”Footnote 38 This attention to the colonial context of Indigenous-language writing, and the different genres in which Native authors wrote, prefigured Anderson’s analysis with Frances Berdan and James Lockhart in Beyond the Codices.
While men continued to dominate the writing of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory at The Americas, women began to contribute to discussions in the field in the 1950s (see Figures 6a and 6b). The fascinating lives of several these early female ethnohistorians merit discussion. Fanchon Royer, the only female article author published before the 1960s, is most famous as Hollywood’s first female film producer. After an adulthood conversion to Catholicism, she moved to Mexico and dedicated her life to the history of the Franciscan Order.Footnote 39 Maud Worcester Makemson, an astronomer who worked with NASA, is another remarkable case. Makesmon held a lifelong interest in archaeoastronomy, which led to her translation of the Yucatec Chilam Balam of Tizimin, reviewed favorably in The Americas.Footnote 40 A final notable contributor was Frances Gillmor, best known as a folklorist among the Navajo, who wrote a literary biography of the Nahua ruler Nezahualcoyotl titled The Flute of the Smoking Mirror (1949). Gillmor became fascinated by Nahua ethnohistory and began taking classes in archaeology and Nahuatl from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She went on to earn a PhD from the university in 1957. In the same year, Ángel María Garibay and his student León-Portilla founded UNAM’s Seminario de Cultura Náhuatl, one of the most crucial organs for the promotion of Mesoamerican ethnohistory in the world.Footnote 41 Royer, Makemson, and Gillmor all took circuitous paths to the study of Mesoamerican ethnohistory, paving the way for later generations of women in the field as gender parity gradually increased.
Contributors by Gender, Total Number
Contributors by Gender, Percentage
The 1960s saw a shift in the colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory published in The Americas due to the rising influence of social history. Dissatisfied with political, military, and intellectual histories that focused on elite actors and formal institutions, social historians endeavored to study a much broader swathe of society, seeking to uncover patterns in the lives of ordinary people from the ephemeral sources they left.Footnote 42 Less than 33% of the articles I collected in the 1960s focused on evangelization, reversing the emphasis from earlier decades. Authors turned away from the chronicles left by conquistadors and evangelizers and toward legal and notarial records. Ethnohistorians influenced by social history used these sources to explore how Spaniards acquired and used Indigenous land and labor. Three articles, for instance, discussed the Marquesado del Valle de Oaxaca, the seignorial estate awarded to Hernando Cortés in 1529. Though the conqueror of course played a role in these studies, their focus was the economic activities of the mostly Indigenous laborers within the Marquesado.Footnote 43 Other articles considered Indigenous interactions with important colonial institutions and industries. Richard E. Greenleaf, for example, published an article on Indigenous people caught within the web of the Inquisition, his scholarly specialty, and another on urban textile workshops.Footnote 44
The impact of social history on the contributions to the field in The Americas can be observed quantitatively as well as qualitatively. I recorded 16 articles for the 1960s, all but one of which was written by a historian based in the United States (see Figures 1 and 4). Such trends were undoubtedly linked to the considerable rise in U.S. academic interest in Latin American history in the 1960s, created in large part due to the Cuban Revolution.Footnote 45 Domestic scholarship would never again be so over-represented among article authors.
Despite this increase in gross publications in colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory, there was little analysis of Indigenous-language sources by historians based in the United States. Consider Charles Gibson’s magnum opus The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule (1964), one of the first systematic explorations of a Mesoamerican people’s history in the colonial era. Still a touchstone in Nahua studies, Anderson reviewed it as “a masterly study of three centuries of acculturation,” and it is one of the earliest works described explicitly as “ethno-historical” in The Americas.Footnote 46 Though Gibson marshalled a staggering amount of archival evidence to support his study of Indigenous history within the Valley of Mexico, he made comparatively little use here of the Nahuatl cabildo records he had analyzed in his earlier monograph on Tlaxcala.Footnote 47 The journal also reflects very little of the Mayanist scholarship that was so popular in the previous decade. The reason for this was likely lack of need rather than interest. Social historians from the United States enjoyed access to a largely untapped cache of Spanish-language legal and notarial records, and they would continue working with this material for decades more until they turned to Indigenous-language sources.Footnote 48 Still, the goals and methodologies of the social historians would have a profound impact on the New Philology when it emerged years later.
The 1960s also saw the blossoming of Nahuatl studies in Mexico, much of it evolving out of the Seminario de Cultura Náhuatl and other institutions at UNAM. Three book reviews in The Americas offer commentary on the emergence of this school. The first was for León-Portilla’s La filosofia náhuatl estudiada en sus fuentes (1956), the “principal merit” of which, per Franciscan reviewer Santiago Campero, was that its “author has used original Nahuatl sources and has used them well.”Footnote 49 Anderson offered a similar glowing review of The Broken Spears (1962), the English translation of León-Portilla and Garibay’s Visión de los vencidos (1959). He described its contents as “Nahuatl literature in the light of the trauma of the conquest,” making clear these sources’ importance to historians as well as anthropologists.Footnote 50 In the review of the final book within this cohort, Cuentos indígenas (1965) by sociologist Pablo González Casanova, reviewer Mickey Gibson remarked that “there has never been anything by North American scholars to compete in depth and quality to the Serie de Cultura Náhuatl” published by UNAM.Footnote 51 By the end of the 1960s, practitioners of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory in the United States readily admitted that they were behind the Indigenous-language scholarship of their colleagues in Mexico.
Contributing scholars to the field in The Americas and other U.S. journals would gain a veritable institution of their own to boast of soon enough: The Handbook of Middle American Indians (HMAI), discussed briefly at the beginning of this article. Funded by Washington D.C.’s National Academy of Sciences, the HMAI intended to fill in the gap left by the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (1907) and the Handbook of South American Indians (1946–59).Footnote 52 The HMAI differed from its predecessors, however, in its inclusion of four volumes dedicated to ethnohistory, collective titled the Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources (1972–5). As these volumes’ collective editor Howard F. Cline explained, he and his colleagues did not mean to create a survey of the field but “to provide the means by which ethnohistory could be written.” By reviewing the “great corpus of material, almost unique to Middle America, of works primarily in the native tradition,” the HMAI’s Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources hoped to attract prospective scholars to the field of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory.Footnote 53 As one reviewer in The Americas explained, the project illuminated “relationships of oral, pictorial, and textual sources” that comprised Mesoamerica’s colonial archive, and showed the world that this was a “most important corpus.”Footnote 54 Beyond the Codices and the New Philology would not have been possible, or at least would not have been possible to appreciate to the full extent that they were, without the Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources.
The HMAI became an important resource for ethnohistorians in The Americas and elsewhere to articulate the definitions and goals of their field. In a 1978 article by Greenleaf titled “The Mexican Inquisition and the Indians: Sources for the Ethnohistorian,” for instance, the historian borrowed Cline’s description of the field from the Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources and assessed the potential for Inquisition records to “reveal the extent of Indian resistance or accommodation to Spanish Catholic culture.”Footnote 55 Other scholars in the journal took inspiration from the HMAI to interrogate their sources with a more critical eye. J. Benedict Warren’s analysis of the authorship of the Relación de Michoacán from the beginning of the 1970s was archetypal, as was a publication in the journal by León-Portilla at the end of the decade that evaluates the sources used to create the Monarquía indiana.Footnote 56 Research into colonial Mesoamerican history gained a more sophisticated archival perspective in the 1970s.
That León-Portilla would publish an article in The Americas is unsurprising, given the fact that his scholarship had become well-known by Latin Americanists around the world. James D. Riley, for instance, described the Mexican scholar as the “dean of Nahuatl Studies” in his review of an edited volume to which León-Portilla contributed.Footnote 57 The celebrated Andeanist John V. Murra noted that Nathan Wachtel’s The Vision of the Vanquished, on the Spanish conquest of Peru, shows its clear influence from León-Portilla through the monograph’s title.Footnote 58 In the 1980s, Benjamin Keen invoked the Mexican scholar’s research to critique a book for its insufficient attention to Indigenous history.Footnote 59 The scholar’s review of Beyond the Codices in 1977, cited at the beginning of this essay, showcases the authority with which León-Portilla discussed all things Nahua on a global stage.
However, as the publication of Beyond the Codices demonstrates, scholars of Nahuatl in the United States were also gaining confidence. In his 2003 retrospective on the New Philology, Matthew Restall described the publication of Beyond the Codices as an “academic call to arms,” attracting graduate students to the study of more mundane Indigenous-language sources such as those Anderson, Berdan, and Lockhart had presented to the world.Footnote 60 These three scholars were far from alone. Also illustrative is The Americas’s review of El Teatro náhuatl (1974), by the Mexican scholar Fernando Horcasitas, a close collaborator of León-Portilla. Charles Dibble, who earned a PhD from UNAM in 1942 but spent most of his career working in the United States, celebrated Horcasitas’s work while subtly challenging some aspects of the scholar’s argument. “Some texts we have adjudged as prehispanic in content,” Dibble suggested, “may contain subtle hispanic influences.”Footnote 61 By pointing to the colonial context of Indigenous-language texts, Dibble pinpointed one of the chief concerns the New Philology would raise in years to come.
The Rise of the New Philology: 1980s–90s
The impact of Beyond the Codices on publications in The Americas and elsewhere was not immediate. Mundane Indigenous-language documents needed to be located and translated, after all, and graduate students needed to be trained to read and analyze them. In the meantime, publications in colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory became increasingly sophisticated even as the gross volume of articles reached their nadir in the 1980s (see Figure 1). This quantitative trend is likely explained by the turn to diverse topics among scholars of colonial Latin America rather than any distancing by the journal from Indigenous Mesoamerica. As historian Robert W. Patch explained, Indigenous ethnohistory was commonly viewed as “part of the expanding social history of Latin America,” which complemented research in the experiences of women and the Afro-descended.Footnote 62 Scholars often judged the unique value of ethnohistory as a methodology in terms of its capacity to correct historical myths and misunderstandings. By striving to “depict the [N]ative point of view,” geographer W. George Lovell argued, scholars of the Indigenous Americas “produce fewer academic fictions than they used to.”Footnote 63 This framing introduced changes to the way scholars approached their sources and the preexisting historiography, features that would be inherited by the New Philology.
Ethnohistory’s more combative flavor can be observed in the articles and reviews published in the 1980s. In 1982, the Australian historian Inga Clendinnen published “Reading the Inquisitorial Record in Yucatán” in The Americas, which engaged directly with Greenleaf’s 1978 article, cited above. Clendinnen questioned what kind of “ethnographic fact” we might take from records such as those produced by the Franciscan Diego de Landa at the Mani Inquisition, in which Maya people confessed to idolatry under threat of torture. She cautioned ethnohistorians to not take these records at face value, and to always consider the context in which Indigenous sources were created.Footnote 64 Book reviewers were more direct in their criticism. In 1983, Susan Kellogg, who would later make ample use of Nahuatl sources in her studies of law and women in colonial Mexico, informed readers of The Americas that an award-winning book “suffered from a lack of knowledge about Indian cultures and languages.” As a book of European intellectual history the monograph succeeded, Kellogg suggested, but if it purported to be a work of ethnohistory, it failed to meet the standards set by the field.Footnote 65 Now that scholars were more widely aware of the depth of Mesoamerica’s Indigenous archive, ethnohistorians refused to allow their peers to ignore these sources. Citing the HMAI, for example, anthropologist Susan T. Evans blisteringly critiqued one book she was reviewing as “much less useful to scholars who wish to pursue ideas which are based on documented resources,” rather than “guesswork.”Footnote 66
James Lockhart also took to the review section of The Americas to define the boundaries of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory, and in particular to define the unique subfield he was developing with his graduate students at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). In two book reviews in the 1980s, Lockhart insisted that the study of Indigenous-language texts had the capacity to be even more transformative than was yet understood. In his 1984 discussion of León-Portilla’s edited volume Native Mesoamerican Spirituality (1980), Lockhart argued that “[Indigenous-language] texts have depths as yet unfathomed,” adding that “quick advances are being made in the field.”Footnote 67 Four years later, Lockhart took the occasion of J. Richard Andrews’ and Ross Hassig’s translation of the writings of Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón to elaborate his historiographic vision. From the work of Charles Gibson, he began, we learned that “Nahua people and culture survived on a large scale.” The task of historians of the Nahuas after Gibson should be to assess the mundane sources Nahuas left in their own language, which Lockhart distinguished from the “lavishly illustrated codices speaking directly to preconquest times.”Footnote 68 Here the historian stated the intended goals of early New Philology, composed largely of Lockhart and his graduate students.
The first of this generation was S.L. Cline, who published her dissertation in 1986 as Colonial Culhuacan, 1580-1699: A Social History of an Aztec Town. Cline’s monograph established much of the hallmarks of Lockhart’s school of central Mexican ethnohistory. Her study offered a highly focused study of a single Nahua community on the basis of a close examination of a distinct corpus of Nahuatl manuscripts, made available for readers through the publication of transcriptions and translations on facing pages. Cline published the Nahuatl testaments that were the basis of her dissertation two years earlier in a separate book co-edited with León-Portilla, which helped establish that the translation of these documents was just as significant a scholarly endeavor as their historical analysis.Footnote 69 In the preface to her monograph, Cline explained that these sources allowed her to explore “the dynamics of a colonial Indian society in its complexity,” including women and non-elites, making her work relevant to social historians of colonial Latin America as well as ethnohistorians of the Indigenous Americas.Footnote 70 Cline’s monograph was reviewed favorably in The Americas by J. Benedict Warren, who called it “very gratifying” to read history that so utilized Nahuatl sources. Warren ended his review with the wish that “more young scholars will accept the challenge of learning the [N]ative languages” of Mesoamerica.Footnote 71 As subsequent volumes of ethnohistory would illustrate, this wish was granted.
As stated above, the 1990s saw a 43% increase in publications in The Americas dealing with colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory, and an even more significant increase of 200% in publications that analyzed Indigenous-language sources (see Figures 1 and 2). 93% of the latter cited Nahuatl-language sources, most of them exclusively (see Figure 5). These statistical trends can be attributed largely to the work of James Lockhart and his collaborators and students. 6 of the 15 articles and 19 of the 51 book reviews collected for the decade were either written by members of the Lockhart school or reviewed a book written by one of these scholars.Footnote 72 The New Philology, as Lockhart’s school came to be known, thus made up roughly 40% of the publications in colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory in the journal for the decade. It included early publications by students of Lockhart who would soon become central figures in the field: Cline, Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, Robert Haskett, Rebecca Horn, Matthew Restall, and Lisa Sousa.Footnote 73 According to a 1997 article in The Americas written by Restall, the most prolific of Lockhart’s students, the “field has come into its own” with the “ethnohistorical boom” created by the New Philology’s analysis of Indigenous language sources.Footnote 74 Restall was even more jubilant in a review published in the following year: “there can be no doubt that colonial Mesoamerican studies has entered a golden age.”Footnote 75
The unique perspective offered by the New Philology is best represented by the debate organized by the Conference on Latin American History between Lockhart and the French historian Jacques Lafaye on the quincentenary of 1492, later published in The Americas. The debate was titled “A Scholarly Debate: The Origins of Modern Mexico – Indigenistas vs. Hispanistas,” and Lockhart was to represent the indigenista perspective by emphasizing the Indigenous rather than the Spanish heritage of modern Mexican culture.Footnote 76 Lafaye, taking on the role of the hispanista, began by arguing that we should celebrate the construction of New Spain alongside the evangelizers’ “utopian aspiration to Justice” even though both resulted in a modern Mexico where “genuine Indian cultures and beliefs have broadly disappeared.”Footnote 77 Lockhart responded to Lafaye by rejecting the terms of the debate as “childish clichés.” His opponent’s assumption that colonization irrevocably transformed Indigenous society was contradicted by Lockhart’s identification within Nahuatl sources of “continuities projected forward from pre-Conquest times.” Frameworks that imagined a violent clash between the Spanish and Indigenous worlds, moreover, should be replaced with one constructed around the “vast subterranean process of cultural contact” between ordinary Indigenous and Spanish people that gradually created cultural change among all parties.Footnote 78 This emphasis of slow change across generations of contact rather than sudden change achieved after the initial Spanish military conquest would become a key feature of the New Philology’s vision of colonial Mesoamerica.
The Americas became a favored journal for this “ethnohistorical boom” due in part to the increasing association between Indigenous-language research and studies of evangelization. This research began beyond Lockhart’s immediate circle, when the anthropologist Louise M. Burkhart published The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (1989). This field-defining monograph used Nahuatl-language sources to reframe evangelization as a negotiation between friars and their Indigenous charges. Almost immediately, Lockhart’s students drew connections between their scholarship and Burkhart’s, often using The Americas to do so. Burkhart was cited extensively in Wood’s article on Nahuatl testaments, and then reviewed in glowing terms by Schroeder and Restall, the latter of whom explicitly included Burkhart in the New Philology.Footnote 79 The relationship between the Lockhart school and the historiography on evangelization is most visible in a January 1994 special issue of The Americas dedicated to the memory of the Franciscan Antonine Tibesar, a former editor-in-chief of the journal. In the four articles dedicated to the Catholic Church in Mexico, two were written by Lockhart’s students (Schroeder and Haskett) while two others were written by the senior historians of Mexico’s evangelization, Richard E. Greenleaf and Stafford Poole.Footnote 80 The latter, a Vincentian friar, had begun to study Nahuatl with Lockhart and his students at the age of 60.Footnote 81 In his contribution, Poole described how the work of Lockhart and Burkhart demonstrated that evangelization necessitated the translation of Christianity into Nahua terms, turning the historiography of the Mexican Church on its head. “Perhaps we are still only on the threshold of these studies,” Poole ended his article by musing.Footnote 82 Research into these texts would increase dramatically in the next decade, proving Poole correct.
Scholars within the New Philology noted the “Nahuacentrism” of the field, where ethnohistorians mostly focused on Nahuatl to the exclusion of other languages (see Figure 5). This phenomenon was matched by a 52% increase in the number of publications in the 1990s that considered central Mexico exclusively (see Figure 7). In his 1997 article, Restall explained these trends as stemming from the massive size of the Nahuatl colonial archive compared with those in other Indigenous languages, which can partially be explained by its use as a lingua franca even in non-Nahua majority regions.Footnote 83 Historical research using sources spoken in Indigenous languages from beyond central Mexico were only “just beginning” in the 1990s, as anthropologist John K. Chance explained in one review.Footnote 84 In a later historiographic article, Restall typified the New Philology in this period as expanding geographically (to include Oaxaca and Yucatán) and linguistically (to include Mixtec and Yucatec Maya).Footnote 85 In later years, it would become increasingly common for ethnohistorians in The Americas to consult sources written in different Indigenous Mesoamerican languages side by side.
Publications by Geographic Focus
The 1990s were also notable statistically for featuring the highest number and proportion of female article authors in my dataset: 7 out of 15, or roughly 47% (see Figures 6a and 6b). Surprisingly, this number dropped over the next two decades, even as the total number of female contributors in the review section of The Americas increased. There was a similar decrease in the percentage of female authors who published articles in Ethnohistory during approximately the same period, after peaking in the 1990s.Footnote 86 The 2020s may tell a different story of gender parity, however, as is discussed below.
Lockhart’s students frequently used book reviews in The Americas in the 1990s as an arena to establish new standards for analyzing Indigenous-language sources. Their critiques were often just as cutting as the ethnohistorians cited above in the 1980s. Wood, for instance, criticized the work of French historian Serge Gruzinski for his “occasional psychohistorical wanderings.” She then challenged Gruzinski’s claim that the Nahuas responded to colonization with “apathy, withdrawal, and deep culturation,” even when his sources demonstrated the opposite.Footnote 87 Cline took similar issue with Inga Clendinnen’s classic Aztecs: An Interpretation (1992), explaining that the author’s prose slipped into “a kind of post-Modernist rococo” at key junctures. She also critiqued Clendinnen for overemphasizing the centrality of human sacrifice to Mexica society, which Indigenous-authored sources disputed.Footnote 88 Scholars within the New Philology were committed to using their Native-language sources to banish unexamined clichés in colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory.
Publications by Lockhart and his students were also much remarked on in the reviews of The Americas. Ethnographer James Taggart described Lockhart’s 1994 magnum opus The Nahuas After the Conquest as “the definitive post-conquest history of the Nahuas,” and praised the work for “[helping] to correct a distorted picture” of Mexican history on the basis of the overreliance on Spanish documents.Footnote 89 Another reviewer described his translations of Nahuatl accounts of the Spanish military conquest as a “magnificent example of the ethnohistorian’s art.”Footnote 90 Books by Cline, Frances Berdan, Horn, and Restall were given similar praise by John F. Schwaller, who was transitioning from his training in the history of the Mexican Church to a new focus on the Nahua reception of evangelization.Footnote 91 Other reviewers invoked Lockhart’s emphasis of Native cultures’ “resilience and persistence” in the face of colonialism to critique more traditional depictions of “obliteration under the shock of conquest.”Footnote 92 The reception of the New Philology at The Americas was thus overwhelmingly positive.
However, this school of Mesoamerican ethnohistory was not without its critics. In an otherwise glowing review of Schroeder’s Chimalpahin and the Kingdom of Chalco (1991), J. Benedict Warren suggested that the use of Nahuatl terms sometimes made the monograph complicated to follow.Footnote 93 A more extreme version of this critique was leveed on the Dutch Nahuatl expert Rudolph van Zontwijk, whose monograph was described as “difficult to read” and “only for dedicated Nahua ethnohistorians.”Footnote 94 Kevin Gosner’s review of Restall’s monograph The Maya World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550-1850 (1999) cut deep as well. Though Gosner described the book as “ambitious and provocative,” his review challenged the very foundations of the New Philology. The “central premise” of Restall’s study, Gosner explained, was that we must view the colonial Maya without giving undo focus to the colonial state. This was undermined (per the reviewer) by the fact that the Maya texts Restall depended on were themselves produced by the “interface between colonial authorities and local Maya.” Moreover, the author’s almost exclusive focus on Yucatec Maya texts “[limited] his treatment of some critical historical issues.”Footnote 95 Reviews such as these were decidedly in the minority, and Gosner’s critique was counterbalanced by an earlier review of The Maya World by Schwaller that was extremely positive.
Nevertheless, Gosner presented familiar critiques that scholars within the New Philology would grapple with in the years to come. Even in positive reviews in The Americas, ethnohistorians who worked with Indigenous language sources were often pushed to broaden their arguments to make them relevant to wider audiences.Footnote 96 These scholars needed to figure out how to make their Indigenous-language evidence legible to scholars without significant linguistic training, and they needed to demonstrate that their use of Indigenous-language sources did not isolate them from the larger scholarship on colonial Latin America. Ethnohistorians would rise to meet these challenges in the first decade of the 2000s and beyond.
After the Boom: The 2000s and the 2010s
In the 2000s the numbers of publications in colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory at The Americas continued to increase, as did the number of those articles to cite Indigenous language sources (see Figures 1 and 2). Though the New Philology could still be identified as a distinct school, its borders became less clear as more ethnohistorians outside of Lockhart’s orbit began to utilize his methodologies in their own research.Footnote 97 The 2000s also featured a new focus among scholars within and without the New Philology as they became increasingly interested in questions of culture and Indigenous perspectives, which lay beyond the more material concerns of social history. As Wood put it in a review of two publications by her colleagues, ethnohistorians now worked “to understand the meaning of the changes and continuities in [N]ative people’s lives.”Footnote 98 This development occurred in parallel with the growth of the New Cultural History, though ethnohistorians often distanced themselves from this emerging field.Footnote 99 The Americas’s publications in colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory in the 2000s saw scholars engage in deeper analyses of the metaphysical and cultural worldviews of their subjects.
Inspired by Burkhart’s work, the study of Mesoamerican evangelization received particularly rich treatment in the first decade of the millennium. Six of the eight articles dedicated to the topic in the 2000s incorporate Indigenous-language analysis, mostly in Nahuatl but with key contributions discussing Mixtec and Zapotec sources. Schwaller, then serving as the official liaison between the editorial board of The Americas and the American Academy of Franciscan History, explained this development in a special issue of the journal dedicated to the Franciscans published in April 2005. He acknowledged that scholarship concerning the Franciscans and the Church in colonial Latin America had declined in the late twentieth century as historians “rightly turned to [N]ative and subaltern peoples” with the growth of social history. Yet because of Burkhart’s reframing of evangelization as a “moral dialogue,” research into the colonial Catholicism had been reinvigorated in the 1990s.Footnote 100 Schwaller’s 2006 article on the concept of heaven in Nahuatl texts is a particularly illustrative example of the productive cross-fertilization of Indigenous-language research and studies of evangelization.Footnote 101 The joint construction of “the Christian message using a non-Western way of thinking” became a favored way to explore Indigenous worldviews, to borrow Franciscan historian Francisco Morales’s description of the moral dialogue between the friars and the Nahua neophytes.Footnote 102
Gender was another way that historians probed the interiority of Indigenous colonial experiences. Much of this literature was indebted to Burkhart’s earlier studies of gender roles and sexuality in the process of evangelization. A representative example is Sousa’s 2002 article on the invocation of the devil by Zapotec, Mixtec, and Nahua defendants to explain sexual impropriety and other misdeeds.Footnote 103 Other scholars took advantage of the unique possibilities presented by some Nahuatl sources to consider precolonial modes of gender and sexuality. Two articles published side by side in the January 2006 issue of the journal, for instance, analyzed the same Nahuatl song to consider the interplay between polygamy and politics before colonization.Footnote 104 Though the first article (by Kay A. Read and Jane Rosenthal) and the second article (by Camilla Townsend) focus on distinct aspects of the texts, both are united by their exploration of how gender was experienced and reproduced under the Mexica empire. Townsend’s careful considerations of precolonial ideas of gender were also influential in the monograph she published that year, reviewed favorably by Restall: Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (2006).Footnote 105 By showing how the Spanish invasion of Mexico appeared from the perspective of an Indigenous woman, Townsend demonstrated the potential for ethnohistorians to rewrite Mexican history beyond the realm of Indigenous studies. Here she contributed to another innovative subfield spawned by the New Philology: New Conquest History.
Explicitly revisionist and not limited to Mesoamerica, New Conquest scholars worked to correct triumphalist understandings of the military invasions and expeditions that established Spanish rule across the Americas. This scholarship extended the revisionist impulse of the New Philology to Spanish documents at the same time that it marshalled Indigenous language sources for novel purposes. Above all was the quest to find new protagonists through which this history could be told.Footnote 106 Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudjik’s edited volume Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (2007) is paradigmatic of the New Conquest History for its emphatic push to recognize the importance of Indigenous agency in Spanish expansion. As Townsend indicated in her review, the goal of the contributors to Indian Conquistadors was not to demonstrate that Indigenous people wielded equivalent power to Spaniards, but to give these actors “credit for their adroit maneuverings in difficult and sometimes desperate situations.”Footnote 107 New Conquest History functioned as a crucial rejoinder to critiques of Indigenous-language ethnohistory as too inward-looking to contribute to broader conversations within Latin American historiography.
As ethnohistorians in the United States became increasingly confident in their work with Indigenous-language sources, it became much less rare for them to critique the work of the field’s forefathers. A two-part exchange published in the April 2009 issue of The Americas dramatically illustrated this phenomenon. It began with Schwaller’s publication of a research note that challenged a key translation from León-Portilla and Garibay’s pathbreaking Visión de los vencidos (1959). Schwaller contended that Garibay had misinterpreted the word omitl (bones) as mitl (arrows or spears), an error that was magnified when the phrase containing the mistranslation was used for the English title of the book: The Broken Spears (1962).Footnote 108 In León-Portilla’s response, also published in The Americas, the Mexican scholar held firm that his mentor’s interpretation was correct, arguing that the o- which preceded mitl in the text was in fact the demonstrative on with its final consonant elided. The famed Mexican scholar ended his response by asking, “should we offend Garibay’s memory by attributing to him a flagrant misreading[?]”Footnote 109 By appealing to the wisdom of his mentor, León-Portilla implicitly challenged the authority of more recent ethnohistorians. Today most Nahuatl scholars agree that Schwaller was correct in his identification of the “most famous line in Nahuatl” as a mistranslation, and they do so without fear that this acknowledgement disrespects the great contributions made by either Garibay or León-Portilla.
This debate was about more than linguistic precision. The line in question originates from a Nahuatl description of the Mexica capital following the Spanish conquest in 1521. León-Portilla’s interpretation renders a translation of “broken spears lie in the roads,” while Schwaller’s interpretation renders “broken bones littered the road.” As Schwaller argues, the first interpretation conjures the notion of a heroic struggle of a defeated people, which accords with the original Spanish title of the book, Visión de los vencidos. The emphasis is quite different in Schwaller’s translation. Instead, it foregrounds the “cold, harsh reality of war”: the violent trauma of conquest as vividly remembered by those who survived it.Footnote 110 The debate was thus a question over how the Nahuas of the early modern era would be remembered. Would historians describe them as warriors who waged a doomed resistance against the Spaniards, or as a people who survived the horrors of conquest and colonial rule? This question still animates discussions of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory today.
In the 2010s, the “ethnohistory boom” at The Americas showed signs that it was slowing down. The number of book reviews, which had always increased at a much higher rate than the articles, decreased slightly from the previous decade, while the number of articles increased (see Figure 1). The number of articles and reviews that featured Indigenous language analysis, however, both continued to expand prodigiously, though at a slower rate than before (see Figure 2). For the first time in the journal’s history, a majority (58%) of the publications in colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory at The Americas cited Indigenous-language sources. Compare this with 46% in the 2000s; 41% in the 1990s; 20% in the 1980s and 1970s; 18% in the 1960s; 37% in the 1950s; and 7% in the 1940s.
By the 2010s, it was clear that the New Philology had become a foundational part of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory. This can partly be explained by other scholars internalizing the convictions advanced by Lockhart in the 1990s, and partly by natural academic reproduction. Lockhart’s students had become senior scholars who mentored their own graduate students, many of whom published articles in The Americas in the 2010s.Footnote 111 Lockhart’s academic grandchildren belonged to a new class of ethnohistorians trained after the development of the New Philology in the 1990s. For these scholars, Indigenous-language research was no longer revolutionary; it was expected.
Evangelization continued to be a favored topic among ethnohistorians at The Americas, as did gender and the New Conquest History. A new subfield to emerge within Nahuatl studies during this period concerned Native elites and intellectuals: the people who wrote the Indigenous-language sources that had transformed the field. Some ethnohistorians, such as Peter Villella and Bradley Benton (both trained by Kevin Terraciano at UCLA) used the methodologies of genealogy and prosopography to explore how noble families wielded writing alongside other strategies to lead their communities and safeguard their elite privileges.Footnote 112 Others, such as Kelly McDonough, Townsend, and Garry Sparks, considered the historical forces that shaped Native historiography and the lives of Indigenous intellectuals.Footnote 113 As one reviewer noted, the latter group included many scholars who worked outside of history departments, reflecting an “interdisciplinary orientation [that] bridges the study of colonial literature and history.”Footnote 114
Historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars were not the only scholars to use Indigenous-language sources. The decade also saw a marked increase in colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory publications in The Americas written by art historians. Their contributions doubled from the 2000s to the 2010s (see Table 2). This was far from the first time the discipline was represented in the journal’s conversations surrounding Indigenous Mesoamerican history. Works by the pathbreaking art historian Elizabeth Hill Boone had been reviewed in the 1990s, the same decade that Dana Leibsohn described a monograph by Jeanette Favrot Peterson as a “call for art historians of colonial Mexico” to employ an “interdisciplinary perspective” influenced by the work of Lockhart and Burkhart.Footnote 115 By the 2010s, studies that blended art historical analysis with Indigenous-language research had “reached a very high level of sophistication.”Footnote 116 The results of these studies could be extraordinary. As Laura Matthew eloquently wrote at the end of her review of Barbara Mundy’s The Death of Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (2015), the author had succeeded in using “the attentiveness of her discipline to image, color, and materiality” to write a “first-rate political and environmental history.”Footnote 117 Colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory grew more interdisciplinary in the 2010s, enriching the study of the Indigenous past.
Contributors by Discipline
AA: article authors; articles written by at least one author of given discipline. BA: book authors; book reviews of at least one book by author of given discipline. BR: book reviews; book reviews by reviewer of given discipline
In the 2010s criticisms of the New Philology and the scholarship it influenced as isolated from broader discussions of Latin American history remained, though their tenor had changed. Consider John Tutino’s praise for another book on Mexico City’s environmental history: Vera S. Candiani’s Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City (2014). Tutino acknowledged that “studies of viceregal power” had lost favor to more bottom-up approaches to colonial Mexico. These included “analyses of Indigenous republics, often grounded in Native language sources…innovative works on ethnic identities and gender relations…inquiries into Indigenous religious adaptations…essential work on how Native people and communities used the courts to defend their interests.” The greatest value of Candiani’s work, in Tutino’s opinion, was that it so vividly highlights the “constant interaction” between Spanish authority and the internal dynamics of Indigenous communities.Footnote 118 Neither histories of the colonial state nor of Mesoamerican societies would be complete without the other. Tutino suggested that Candiani’s monograph “should lead us toward more integrated histories of New Spain.”Footnote 119 Ethnohistorians of Mesoamerica are still called to prove the relevance of their research beyond the realm of Indigenous studies, especially when they consider Indigenous-language sources impenetrable to scholars without significant linguistic training. The difference between the 1990s and the last ten years is that practitioners of the discipline now possess a variety of proven methods to connect Indigenous ethnohistory to the broader study of colonization.
Conclusion: The Future of Colonial Mesoamerican Ethnohistory at The Americas
This essay was written in the summer of 2025, roughly halfway through the third decade of the twenty-first century. My analysis of The Americas ended with the fourth issue of volume 81 of the journal, published in October of 2024. I decided not to include much of the publications I collected from the 2020s in my analysis above for several reasons. Because this decade is incomplete, it would have skewed most of my visualizations of my dataset if I had included the publications from the 2020s. They all would have shown a decline in the total number of articles published that does not match the actual rate of articles published per year. In addition, I judge it premature to offer a retrospective on any scholarly conversations happening in the journal that are less than 5 years old.
In this conclusion, however, I will consider these data and conversations briefly to offer some predictions concerning the future of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory at The Americas. I begin with an estimation through the 2020s of the total number of publications in the field, the number of these publications to feature Indigenous-language texts, and the Indigenous languages cited across the decades (see Figures 8a, 8b, and 8c). This simple projection was created by doubling all relevant statistics from the 20 issues I consulted in the 2020s to account for the full 40 issues published each decade.
Publications in Colonial Mesoamerican Ethnohistory, Projected through 2029
Publications that Cite Any Indigenous-Language Source, Projected through 2029
Publications that Cite Sources Written in Specific Indigenous Languages, Projected through 2029
These graphs suggest a stabilization in the number of articles and reviews published in colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory at The Americas, but continued growth in the number of those publications to cite Indigenous language sources. If these projections hold, 76% of all articles and reviews published in the field in the 2020s will cite Indigenous-language sources. This is an astonishingly high number, but considering the meteoric growth since the 1990s, it is not an entirely inconceivable one. The estimated growth comes wholly from the review section of the journal, and as Figure 8c suggests, largely from research that considers Nahuatl-language sources. The projections suggest that just over two-thirds of all publications in the colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory to cite Indigenous-language sources in the 2020s will cite Nahuatl sources, a slight increase from the previous decade. For ethnohistorians at The Americas, Nahuatl remains the most favored “‘linguistic key’ for opening historical chests full of important insights,” to use Justyna Olko’s metaphor from her review of Ben Leeming’s Aztec Antichrist: Performing the Apocalypse in Early Colonial Mexico (2022).Footnote 120 Another notable trend from this decade is that thus far, women have outpaced men as article authors six to four (see Figures 6a and 6b). If this trend holds in the latter half of the decade, it would be the first time that women authored a majority of The Americas’s articles in colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory in the journal’s history.
The most striking theme to emerge in the publications from the 2020s is the emphasis put on contemporary Indigenous engagement with the centuries-old texts left by their ancestors. Eugene Berger, for instance lauded the value of a translation of Nahuatl plays by Burkhart for both scholars and “contemporary Nahuatl speaker[s].”Footnote 121 Ethelia Ruiz Medrano also made note of the importance of Allen J. Christen’s publication of the Title of Totonicapán for contemporary K’iche’ Maya speakers, as well as the author’s reliance on K’iche’ ritual specialists and other Indigenous collaborators for his translation and study.Footnote 122 Barbara Mundy began her 2020 article in The Americas with a brief commentary on this theme. Latin American historiography has now “granted [I]ndigenous peoples agency during and beyond the colonial period,” she wrote, largely through the influence of the New Philology and New Conquest History. “Indigenous communities’ response to such an unrequested grant is the new chapter in this history,” Mundy concluded, though she declined to speculate on what that new chapter would hold.Footnote 123 Instead, Mundy suggested that the path forward for colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory should be charted by Indigenous scholars; people such as Eduardo de la Cruz, a Nahua scholar whose Native-language publication was cited by Olko in a book review;Footnote 124 or Daisy Ocampo, a Caxcan historian whose comparative history was described as a call for “investigaciones transindígenas que podrán crear espacios de diálogo y comunión intercultural.”Footnote 125 In years to come, I expect more contributors to The Americas to come from Indigenous communities across Mesoamerica.
I also expect contributions to the journal’s conversations about colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory to continue to be submitted from around the world. Partly to make this project more manageable, I set out to write an essay about the development of this field in its U.S. incarnation exclusively. In practice this proved impossible. Within the pages of The Americas and elsewhere, the study of Indigenous Mesoamerica in the United States developed in close dialogue with scholars based around the world, especially in Mexico. To visualize this global scholarship, I created three maps that display the national academies of all article authors, book authors, and book reviewers across the journal’s 80-year history as of 2024 (see Figures 9a, 9b, and 9c). May the founders of The Americas rest easy knowing their journal still serves as a space of productive international intellectual exchange.
National Academies of Article Authors
National Academies of Book Authors
National Academies of Reviewers
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