The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries

"This book opened up a whole new kind of document and perspective on the Aztecs. The writings of Duran that we talked about were in Spanish. They were written down in Spanish. But the Aztecs spoke a language called Nahuatl. The written version of Nahuatl was limited. You couldn’t write, say, a novel in it, but you could record things about taxes and conquests, as in the Codex Mendoza . The Aztec Empire had scribes. It was a bureaucratic empire. They had people keeping track of taxes and activities and peoples. After the Spanish conquest, the Aztec scribes and nobles quickly saw that the European alphabet was very useful, and they adapted it to the Nahuatl language very shortly after. They started to produce documents in a written form using the European alphabet, but in the Nahuatl language. This was important because, after the conquest, central Mexico was a colony of Spain. It was called New Spain, Nueva España, but there just weren’t many Spaniards. So they relied on local nobles and local officials to administer it, keep the peace and keep records of births and deaths and things that empires like to keep track of. Local officials started writing this stuff down in Nahuatl using the Spanish alphabet. For a long time, scholars didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to these documents. Lockhart really opened this up. He unearthed hundreds and hundreds of them throughout Central Mexico. He got a group of his history students at UCLA working on them, and it delivered a really new perspective. Here’s one example. If you read the Spanish accounts after the conquest about the Aztec empire and society, they say that the colonial nobles did not pay taxes or tribute. They were exempt. That’s the way things were in ancient times, and therefore that’s the way things should be under the colonial period. It’s in all the textbooks on the Aztecs: nobles didn’t pay taxes or tribute. But the administrative documents that Lockhart and his students studied make it quite clear that nobles did pay taxes on a regular basis. So why did these other accounts say that they didn’t? Well, I can just see the nobles interacting with the Spaniards, claiming that in ancient times nobles didn’t pay taxes. They fooled the Spaniards. Perhaps they didn’t fool them entirely. The Spaniards needed these colonial nobles to help organize society and run things for them. So they decided they wouldn’t make them pay taxes and went along with this (false) idea that they hadn’t paid taxes before the Spanish arrived. Until the work by Lockhart and his students, we had no idea of the correct information. The documents analysed by Lockhart and his analysis of them are just full of insights about the way things worked on a local level shortly after the Spanish conquest. It revolutionized our ideas of how local society was organized and how things worked locally because the Spanish language documents just don’t have a lot of the details, and they can’t always be trusted."