Due to the five-hundredth anniversary (2021) of the Mexica empire’s defeat, the Spanish conquest of the Americas has been a recurring topic in recent scholarship. In contrast, since the foundational work of Charles Gibson (The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, Stanford, 1964) and James Lockhart (The Nahuas after the Conquest, Stanford, 1992), the transitions that occurred during early colonial rule in New Spain have attracted diverse studies of transformations that span the historiography of legal cultures (Susan Kellogg, Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500–1700, Oklahoma, 1995; Brian Owensby, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico, Stanford, 2008), Indigenous historical sources (Susan Schroeder, Chimalpahin and the Kingdoms of Chalco, Arizona, 1991; Camilla Townsend, Annals of Native America, Oxford, 2016), and relations among Natives, mendicants, and the Catholic Church (David Tavárez, The Invisible War, Stanford, 2011; Ryan Crewe, The Mexican Mission, Cambridge, 2019; Jennifer Scheper-Hughes, The Church of the Dead, NYU Press, 2021).

As a contribution to the historiography cited above, this panel provides novel perspectives on several paramount transitions that occurred in Central Mexico from preconquest to colonial times across three domains: religious practice, the social and economic order, and group identity. Through the innovative use of primary sources, our analyses retrieve the significance of ideological and political conceptions, and the role of human and non-human actors. Our first presentation examines the protests against a “tribute of the dead” forced on Indigenous survivors of epidemic outbreaks in the late sixteenth century. It argues that the struggle of survivors to adjust this tribute to preconquest forms of collective labor had a sizable impact on the labor-extraction encomienda system. A second presentation interrogates the discourses about group identity and group origins that circulated among the Mexica before the conquest and in early colonial times, and concludes that these ideologies of difference emphasized distinctions on sustenance, dress, and appearance, but did not stress the phenotypic differences at the core of distinctions among castas and “nations” introduced by Spanish administrators. The third presentation analyzes preconquest and early colonial economics and sustenance through a focus on the economic importance of the izcahuitli (brine fly larva) native to Lake Texcoco, which provided sustenance for the Mexica state. Our final presentation examines Nahua conceptions of bravery, as embodied in terms like tiyahcauh (brave in war) and yolchicauhualiztli (courage), and examines both the gendered dimensions of bravery, and the deep ambivalence that Nahua sources expressed regarding the social roles and shortcomings of the brave.

As to methodological orientation, our presentations include deeply researched philological and linguistic approaches to the analysis of primary sources in Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin. Our study of these sources, which include chronicles authored by Nahuas and Franciscans, devotional works for Natives, and administrative documents, is neither descriptive nor exegetical, as we begin with an assessment of the historiographical uses of these sources and provide comparative analyses. Finally, we are proud of our panel’s diversity regarding its gender balance, and the presence of scholars who are members of underrepresented groups.