The University of Arizona Press
Date: Wednesday, April 2, 2025
Time: 4:15 p.m., PDT
Where: Hahn Building, Room 101, Pomona College 420 N. College Avenue, Claremont, CA
Edward Anthony Polanco, author of Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535-1660, will speak at Pomona College. He will talk on “Cacti, Chia, and Blood Rocks: Suppressed Indigenous Knowledge in Settler Extraction in Colonial Mexico.” By delving into various Nahuatl and Spanish texts, this talk will explore how Spaniards attempted to suppress the Indigenous knowledge of Nahua people. Polanco is a scholar of Mesoamerica and an assistant professor of History at Virginia Tech.
This event is free and open to the public, and a reception will follow the talk.
About the book:
Offering a provocative new perspective, Healing Like Our Ancestors examines sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Nahua healers in central Mexico and how their practices have been misconstrued and misunderstood in colonial records.
This book emphasizes the importance of women as titiçih and highlights their work as creators and keepers of knowledge. These vital Nahua perspectives of healing—and how they differed from the settler narrative—will guide community members as well as scholars and students of the history of science, Latin America, and Indigenous studies.
