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).
The Legacy of the Colegio and the Jesuit Circle
There is still much research to be done on the facts surrounding the relationships that some of the native intellectuals such as Tezozomoc and others had with the Franciscan-Jesuit circle at the beginning of the seventeenth century. We have more information about the connections with a Franciscan–Jesuit circle that Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and several members of his family had.13 His brother, Don Bartolomé de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1600–1670), was a secular priest who had helped some of the Jesuits with the study of Nahuatl. Bartolomé de Alva had not only written a Confesionario mayor y menor en lengua mexicana, he also translated several Golden Age playwrights (Schwaller 1994, 393). However, a close look at annotations on the original manuscripts, for instance that of The Animal Prophet, reveal that even though Don Bartolomé was the main translator, it was also a collaborative enterprise to render Nahua idiosyncrasies “in re-making of Baroque Spanish theater in the Nahua world” (Brian 2014, 210). That a friendship had developed between Bartolomé de Alva and the Jesuits is revealed in his prefatory comments to the Arte de la lengua mexicana (1645) of Jesuit Horacio Carochi (1579–1662), a grammar that illustrates innovative techniques in the use of diacritics to mark the phonological uniqueness of Nahuatl. Bartolomé de Alva not only approves the publication of Carochi’s Arte, but also praises the Jesuit’s command of Nahuatl (Schwaller 1994, 393) and later dedicates to Carochi the translation of Lope de Vega’s La madre de la mejor (ibid.).
A compilation of the works produced by natives, mestizos,