The University of Arizona Press
March 12, 2025
Nahua Horizons: Writing, Persuasion, and Futurities in Colonial Mexico investigates how Nahua writers in Central Mexico and other Mesoamerican voices in colonial Spanish America played an active role in shaping culture, using writing to persuade their communities to mold their own destinies, even amid colonial upheaval. This work opens up new directions for research and teaching, shifting inquiry from how Nahuas preserved cultural continuity to how they envisioned their roles as pathfinders toward times to come.
Today, the author answers five questions about his work.
What inspired you to write this book?
In part, I wrote this book to offer a fresh approach to how Nahua culture has survived and adapted over the centuries. The conventional buzz words of “mestizaje” and “syncretism” did not sit right with me. They lack the aspect of individual agency. For years, these terms have been the one-size-fits-all approach to describing how Mexico became Mexico. Yet from my own readings, the time I have spent in Mexico, and the meaningful relationships I have there, I knew those generic approaches were insufficient. The many inspiring individuals I have met, from Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, led me to research the lives of past individuals, who, despite the odds, chose to shape their own futures.
Many people have likely heard of the Florentine Codex, one of the more famous documents you discuss. Could you describe the significance of this text to your book?
The Florentine Codex is an expansive and crucial document for understanding colonial Mexico, mainly because it forms a nexus of Nahua-Spanish dialogue at a time of great uncertainty. The Nahua scholars who contributed to the project faced the uncertainty of how their work would allow their ancestral knowledge(s) to endure. That said, the document also conveys processes of Hispanization already well underway during its composition in the 1570s. The Spanish, of course, hoped to gain knowledge from the Florentine Codex for use by colonial administrators and clergy—so, the Codex also conveys a colonizing ethos. That said, my work brings out the fact that Nahua healing practices carry with them the idea that healers would continue their work in the future. Nahua healers who contributed to Books 10 and 11 of the Codex did so with the understanding that they were laying groundwork for the continuation of their practices beyond their own lives.
In this project, one of your goals is to correct the “pervasive presentation of the Nahuas as passive receptors of cultural change instead of active interpreters of events and builders of their own futures.” Why is it important that we shift our perspective on the Nahuas in this way?
The book does call for a shift in the view from Nahuas as passive recipients of cultural accommodation to active generators of cultural change. Nahua futurities work as a counterbalance to a certain theoretical disempowerment in academic and popular discourses. It is true that the military arm of the Spanish invasion looked callously on Indigenous cultures and saw them a source of manual labor. What is more, as multiple epidemics rolled over Central Mexico, religious friars brought a system of knowledge intended to divorce Nahuas from their traditional beliefs. While we cannot overstate the destruction and human suffering the Spanish invasion brought, there is another side of the story. By perpetuating a narrative of Indigenous loss, we run the risk of obscuring the innovative approaches to balanced living that the Nahuas have developed, and continue developing, over the past 500 years. Ironically, the cruelty of European colonization moved the Nahuas to plan for futures despite their losses.
Are there lessons we should take from the ways Nahuas conceptualized their futures?
Two lessons come to mind: first, that Nahuas made strategic use of distance from colonial centers to carve out areas of sovereignty for themselves. The book brings to light the results of deliberations Nahuas made about how to use the Spanish legal system to their advantage, how to make strategic alliances with clergy to further their own goals, and, most importantly, how they used writing as a means to convince their communities that a road worth taking lay ahead.
Along with that realization comes the fact that the future itself is a rhetorical figure. No one speaks to us of any future unless they are trying to get us to think, believe, or do something. The Spanish used religious and juridical rhetoric, along with military force and physical displacement of Indigenous towns to compel cooperation. What amazes me is that in the face of that aggression Nahua writers used tools of persuasion to encourage their people to build, to farm, to heal, to educate, to document, and to celebrate their lifeways.
What are you working on next?
My next project shifts regions but remains in the colonial period. It concerns a cache of letters in my university’s archives from the coastal settlements of Pensacola and Mobile at the end of the Spanish empire. During the early years of the 19th century, anxious Spanish clergy and Spanish military officers wrote to authorities in Habana, Cuba describing the scarcities they experienced as the Spanish Empire declined. At the same time, Pensacola and Mobile became key commercial outposts for the Mvskoke (Creek) people, who were at war with the United States. The Mvskoke traded with the Spanish in their settlements for guns and ammunition for their ongoing fight against U.S. encroachment on their territories. In addition to the letters, I will examine broken treaties and other Mvskoke documents to write a parallel history of the Mvskoke and Spanish up to the U.S. expansion that drove them both from the region. I hope that the study will expand much-needed dialogue between the Mvskoke Nation, those of us who study the Spanish colonial period, and scholars of the Indigenous Southeast.
Ezekiel Stear is an assistant professor of Spanish and colonial Spanish American literature at Auburn University.
