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A dialogue, which opened between the friars and the Indigenous people, even if politically and socially asymmetrical, not only rendered an exceptional documentation of intercultural contact but also made possible the production of a large corpus on native cultures. It also put in motion an active exchange among intellectuals from different ethnic backgrounds and affiliations.

A post-Colegio generation of Indigenous writers and of ethnically mixed intellectuals emerged at the end of the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth century who were connected to the intellectual Franciscan–Jesuit circle on native research. Most of the writers belonged to the noble elite from Central Mexico and went to great efforts to show their Christianity while glorifying the pre-conquest past of their own altepetl. These individuals included genealogical accounts in their histories to authenticate their nobility, on the one hand as a hallmark of an authority to write the local history of the ethnic group; on the other as a vehicle to claim economic and social privileges in the colony. Two of the most famous Indigenous writers of this generation were the nobleman Don Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc, commonly known as Tezozomoc, and Don Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, or Chimalpahin for short. Although Tezozomoc was not mentioned in any source as a student of the Colegio, he belonged to the educated Nahua elite. He was the brother-in-law of the famous student Antonio Valeriano and a document known as Tlalamatl Huauhquilpan recognizes him as a nahuatlato or Nahuatl interpreter (Cortés 2011 ).⁵

He wrote two historical narratives on his altepetl Mexico-Tenochtitlan. The so-called Crónica mexicayotl (1609) is attributed to him since he appears as the narrator in the introduction. Written in Nahuatl, the Crónica mexicayotl is a compilation of oral, pictographic, and written accounts. The Crónica mexicayotl follows the pre-conquest style of the annals and addresses directly the Mexica-Tenochca, instructing them in the importance of remembering their past and taking pride in their heritage. That he wrote his Crónica mexicana (ca. 1598) in Spanish in the format of a European chronicle is a possible indication that the intended audience was colonial officials. Perhaps the production of this chronicle had some connections with the Tovar circle of research. Tovar finished his history, ordered by Enríquez Almanza, in 1578, but nine years later, after the original was lost, he rewrote it from memory and with the help of the Historia de las Indias de Nueva España of his relative, Diego Durán (Garibay 1954, 2: 275). Today we have two manuscripts of Tovar’s rewritten history: the Códice Ramírez and the Códice Tovar. Duran’s and Tovar’s historical narratives on the Mexicas’ past are closely related to Tezozomoc’s Crónica mexicana for which Robert Barlow suggested the possibility of a primary text he called Crónica X. We know that Durán’s Historia was a source for Tovar’s and, later, for Acosta’s. Although there is a relationship between Durán’s work and Tezozomoc’s Crónica mexicana, there is no information on the particulars of such a correlation.⁶ Unlike Chimalpahin, who states that he knew Tovar when Tovar was a member of a cathedral chapter under Chimalpahin’s patron Don Sancho (Schroeder 1991, 15), Tezozomoc’s chronicles are very limited in information about his sources and acquaintances. However, his relation to individuals connected to the Colegio, his noble status, and the production of his two chronicles suggest that Tezozomoc moved with ease in this educated circle. We owe to the Chalca author a rare glimpse of Tezozomoc in the colonial society. In his Diario, Chimalpahin describes that Tezozomoc was being carried on a litter representing his grandfather Moctezuma Xocoyotl, perhaps, in a procession during a carnival festivity (Annals of his Time, 67).

Chimalpahin’s education was independent of the Colegio, but he was acquainted with a Nahua intellectual circle (Anderson and Schroeder 1997, 6) as he mentions them in his works. In his dual role of author and copyist he wrote in Nahuatl eight Relaciones, a Diario, the Anales Tepanecas, a Crónica mexicana, and other works. He also contributed to the Crónica mexicayotl, and wrote in Spanish a Historia mexicana and a Conquista de México. This last narrative is Chimalpahin’s version of the second part of Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia de las Indias, known as La crónica de la Nueva España (1552) (Schroeder 1991, 21).⁷ His contribution to the ethnohistory of pre-conquest and colonial Mexico has been recognized to be second only to that of Sahagún’s. But unlike Sahagún’s works, his histories furnish a firsthand, personal perspective of the Indigenous world (Schroeder 1991, xv). His Relaciones seem to have been the result of compilations ordered by the viceroy Antonio de Mendoza to one of his relatives. However, it was not until 1620 that an uncle asked him to finish the work (Schroeder 1991; 9). Unlike Tezozomoc, Chimalpahin was of a lesser social status but he did the best he could to present himself as a reliable writer. The circumstances of his life as a copyist are not known, but he wrote the largest and most distinguished corpus of annalistic history known to have been produced by a Nahua of any time period (Lockhart 1992, 387).

A connection between Tezozomoc and Chimalpahin is revealed in the Crónica mexicayotl. Since the earliest manuscript is in Chimalpahin’s handwriting, it is believed that he was the copyist but he also included some parts of his own (Anderson and Schroeder 1997, 8). However, recent research has raised interesting theories that seem to suggest that the Crónica mexicayotl could indeed have been a version of his Crónica mexicana.⁸ History for Tezozomoc and Chimalpahin is viewed as the work of a collective effort from different genres and modes. Tezozomoc’s role in this Crónica seems to be that of the main authority who, by his prestige and nobility, has the recognition to authenticate all the sources and testimonies he presents. That some were still orally transmitted or pictographically represented is revealed in the constant use of sensory verbs such as “hear” and “see.” Since local histories focus on the unique qualities of the individual’s altepetl, for Chimalpahin the Mexica’s account needed to be edited. An ancient rivalry and resentment toward the Mexicas by the Chalcas is revealed in his “correcting” the Mexicas’ story with that of his own altepetl Chalco-Amaquemecan, which he constantly exalts in his histories (47–9). When it came to defend one’s altepetl, as was the case of the Tlatelolcans in Book XII, Chimalpahin’s interaction in this text is another example of local histories competing against each other.

A sense of urgency to keep to tradition while securing vestigial positions of high status within the colonial system is perceived in the Indigenous written histories (Anderson and Schroeder 1997, 6). By the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Tezozomoc and Chimalpahin wrote, colonial society was becoming more complex. The European presence was strengthening and mixed ethnic groups were growing while Indigenous people were declining in great numbers owing to epidemics. Noble Indigenous people were losing their status through the infiltrations of macehuales (non-noble Indigenous people) who were becoming señores principales (Gruzinski 1993, 64–65).

Social and demographic changes would also open the domain of local native histories to secondary-status nobles, such as Chimalpahin, or to non-noble Indigenous people and mestizos. The writer Cristóbal Del Castillo, whom Jesuit Horacio Carochi (1579–1662) identifies as a mestizo, might fall into these categories. If indeed he was a mestizo, unlike other mestizos, who wrote in Spanish, he writes both Historia de la venida de los mexicanos y de otros pueblos, and Historia de la conquista in Nahuatl, and there is not enough information about this writer to know to what social class he belonged (Navarrete Linares 2001, 76). He neither identifies himself as belonging to a particular altepetl, nor traces his genealogy as a source of authority as other Indigenous and mestizo writers do. Although he writes about the Mexicas, he does not provide information to conclude that he belonged to that altepetl (Navarrete Linares 2001, 76–77). Unlike Tezozomoc or Chimalpahin, whose role is to authenticate the ancient word, Del Castillo’s Historia seems to be the interpretation of an outsider who had access to the oral, pictographic, and written corpus of the Mexicas’ collective memory. Because his Historia shares some dates and events with that of Sahagún’s Book XII of the Florentine Codex, and because there is evidence in his text that he knew the Coloquios, it is probable that he was in close contact with the Franciscans, and most likely, he received his education in one of their institutions (Navarrete Linares 2001, 64–77). However, that he is mentioned by the Jesuit Carochi is an indication that his Historia became part of the manuscripts collected by the Jesuits’ circle initiated by Tovar.

From the middle of the seventeenth century (ca. 1662) to 1692, the noble Nahua Tlaxcalan from the Quiahuiztlan region, Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza (1600?–1689?), wrote his Historia cronológica de la noble ciudad de Tlaxcala. Written in Nahuatl and mainly in the annals format, this narrative is yet another case of historiographic production on local histories by a Nahua noble author. Zapata y Mendoza, who held several administrative positions, even that of governor, delivers a chronological account on Tlaxcala’s pre-Hispanic past (ca. 1310) as well as first-hand accounts on colonial Tlaxcala to 1689 (Lockhart 1992, 391; Townsend 2016). In his Historia cronológica Zapata y Mendoza mentions important intellectual Tlaxcalans such as Tadeo de Niza and Diego Muñoz Camargo. However, Zapata y Mendoza wrote only in Nahuatl using exclusively Indigenous sources. The xiuhpohualli or annal tradition in the Tlaxcalan/Puebla region is “genetically related” since they borrowed material from each other (Townsend 2016, 137). It seems that Zapata y Mendoza also collected his sources by interviewing friends and neighbors, during his trips to Mexico City or from his own archives (ibid). As did other writers of xiuhpohualli or annals, he begins by naming elected officials but he also includes quotidian events, processions, political events and everything that was important or significant to notice and record (Townsend 2016, 138). With the stories Zapata y Mendoza brings together, he leaves testimony of the Tlaxcalan origins and their rights. “His writings provided a window into the world of Indigenous ‘negotiation with domination’ and paint a dynamic picture of how Tlaxcalan elites…shaped and responded to the rapidly changing social and political landscape of colonial Mexico” (McDonough 2014, 63).⁹

Although we have no evidence that Zapata y Mendoza’s Historia was produced within the Franciscans or Jesuits circles, the amendments and interventions by another Nahua author, who had been a cacique and was later a secular priest, Don Manuel de los Santos y Salazar (?-1715), certainly put the Historia within an intellectual ecclesiastical circle by an ordained Nahua. An acquaintance of Zapata y Mendoza, Santos y Salazar was from Quiahuiztlan, also a region from Tlaxacala. An intellectual himself, Santos y Salazar had already written Cómputo cronológico de los indios mexicanos, a history about early Tlaxcalans based on printed works. Santos y Salazar was also involved in the production of the drama La invención de la Santa Cruz por Santa Elena and did the compilation for the making of a traditional calendar wheel, used later by criollo intellectuals during the eighteenth century (Historia cronológica, 1995, 20). He was, with other of his contemporaries, from the Jesuit circle, a precursor of native historiographic tradition which later flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Within the group of the post-Colegio generation who wrote pre-conquest local histories are bicultural individuals, almost all of them mestizos, who were descendants of the Indigenous nobility of the most powerful city-states. They also focus on the local history of their Indigenous side, emphasizing a pre-conquest prestige. But their historical narratives follow Western historiographical conventions in which they show a more profound command of European and Indigenous systems than their Indigenous counterparts. These go-betweens appropriate their maternal local histories, “creating a new locus of enunciation where different ways of knowing and of individual and collective expressions meet” (Mignolo 2001, 13).

From the Acolhua region were the castizo (offspring of a mestizo and a Spaniard) Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and the mestizo Juan Bautista de Pomar. The latter, a descendant of Texcocan nobles, wrote the Relación de Texcoco in 1582 as an extension of a 1577 Texcocan Relación geográfica. His Relación is an extensive document that includes Aztec deities and aspects of pre-conquest culture. Alva Ixtlilxochitl, whose family was from San Juan Teotihuacan but who descended from the pre-Hispanic Texcocan lords, Netzahualcoyotl and Nezahualpilli, wrote extensively about the history of Texcoco. Although he includes information about other important cities such as Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan, his chronicles describe Texcoco as the strongest city. He begins with Netzahualcoyotl’s reign (1472) and the Texcocans “as the legitimate heirs of the Chichimec leader Xolotl” (Brokaw and Lee 2016, 10). He was probably a student of the Colegio de Tlatelolco during the last years of the institution (Garibay 1954, 2: 228). Even though Ixtlilxochitl writes in Spanish, mainly for the European reader, he was actively involved with the Texcocan Indigenous intellectuals and had access to their sources. He mentions prominent Indigenous nobles as some of his sources (ibid.). Similar to the Peruvian mestizo Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Ixtlilxochitl presents Texcoco as a pre-Christian civilized altepetl using equivalences taken from Christian and European history to understand Texcoco’s past. Ixtlilxochitl “punctuate[s], on the one hand, the plurilingual and multicultural character of colonial situations and, on the other, illustrate[s] how such written practices collided with the Renaissance philology of language and writing held by missionaries and men of letters” (Mignolo 2001, 204).

In the past decade, the figure of Alva Ixtlixochitl has generated renewed interest. Perhaps the discovery of three volumes of the Sigüenza y Góngora collection in England, with originals from Alva Ixtlilxochitl, invigorated interest in this native writer. Repatriated to Mexico in 2014, the three volumes now renamed Códice Chimaláhin contain Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s magnum opus, the History of the Chichimeca Nation, and other of his writings. This discovery was precious indeed since Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s works had been published using copies made when the Italian Lorenzo Boturini was researching native writers during the eighteenth century.¹⁰ Interest in Alva Ixtlilxochitl during the last decade is also evident in the publication of compilations, monographs, and special journal numbers in his honor.¹¹ Research has focused on the production of his narrative; for instance, on the way he uses linguistic styles and discourses to convey different political or individual agendas (Allen 2016, 154–158; Costilla Martínez 2019, 92); on the complexities of translating both from Nahuatl to Spanish and from pictographic sources to alphabetical writing (Whittaker 2016, 40–56; Offner 2016, 96–99); and on his motives for praising Texcoco as the highest civilization (History of the Chichimeca Nation, 2016, 5). Scholars have also studied how Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles have influenced the creation of a Mexican, criollo historiography (Brokaw and Lee. 2016, 3–6; Villella 2016, passim; Brian 2016, passim), and a French and Anglo-American interdisciplinary scholarship on Mexico (History of the Chichimeca Nation, 2016, 13–19). We owe Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s exaltation of Netzahualcoyotl for his reputation as a wise, refined poet and Texcoco as the “Athens” or “Rome” of Mesoamerica (García Loaeza 2016, 257–273; Brian 2016, 96–106). Alva Ixtlilxochitl and his family would be active compilers of Indigenous research in the Tovar–Jesuit circle, which was later entrusted to the erudite Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora.

If in Ixtlilxochitl his Indigenous background serves as a locus of enunciation, for the mestizo Don Diego Muñoz Camargo, it serves as his identification with his Spanish side. He wrote Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala, which originated on a relación geográfica on the Tlaxcala altepetl. He presented this chronicle himself to the Spanish King Felipe II. Muñoz Camargo kept a copy of his Descripción and amended it to produce Suma y epíloga de toda la descripción de Tlaxcala (1588–1590) and the Historia de Tlaxcala (Costilla Martínez 2019, 14). Perhaps Relación de la grana cochinilla and Historia natural are fragments from his Historia (Hernández 2011, 307). His Historia de Tlaxcala, or the expanded version of the Descripción, is written from the point of view of an outsider. It becomes a sort of “ethnographic discourse” in which pre-conquest Tlaxcalans with their “idolatry” are compared to Jews (Velazco 2003, 127). However, his Historia¹² also reveals a political purpose for his contemporary Tlaxcalans. The services of the Tlaxcalan nobility to the Crown plus the prestige of never having been conquered by the Aztec empire are underlined in this history.

Knowledge of alphabetic writing, if not with the sophistication of the gramáticos and the intellectual elite, had been spreading to the Indigenous population since the early sixteenth century. Classical Nahuatl, as developed by friars and educated Nahuas, was limited to the special education for natives, which declined during the seventeenth century. However, Colonial Nahuatl, which includes various dialects with spelling variations, coexisted with Classical Nahuatl and survived. The mundane documents produced by Colonial Nahuatl have been an extremely useful source to delve into the realities of Indigenous life in colonial times. They present the dynamism and creativity of the preservation of local Indigenous collective memory in wills and land tenure titles called Títulos primordiales and Códice Techialoyan. They are mentioned here because Títulos, purporting to authenticate the right to altepetl’s territory and belonging to popular culture, incorporate Indigenous genres (songs, huehuetlatolli, annals) in the production of local history. From the middle of the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, Títulos continued the memory of the Indigenous nobles and writers and what they perceived of importance for their altepetl by developing quite a different approach and relationship to the past (Gruzinski 1993, 130).