Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive

For many generations, the Nahuas of Mexico maintained their tradition of the xiuhpohualli. or "year counts," telling & performing their history around communal firesides so that the memory of it would not be lost. When the Spaniards came, young Nahuas took the Roman letters taught to them by the friars & used the new alphabet to record historical performances by elders. Between them, they wrote hundreds of pages, which circulated widely within their communities.  
Over the next century & a half, their descendants copied & recopied these texts, sometimes embellishing, sometimes extracting, & often expanding them chronologically. The annals, as they have usually been called, were written not only by Indians but also for Indians, irregardless to European interests. As such they are rare & inordinately valuable texts & have often been assumed to be both largely anonymous & at least partially inscrutable to modern ears.  
Nahuatl scholar Camilla Townsend reveals the authors of most texts, restores them to their proper contexts, & makes sense of long misunderstood documents. She follows a remarkable chain of Nahua historians, generation by generation, exploring who they were, what they wrote, & why they wrote it. Sometimes they conceived of their work as a political act, reinstating bonds between communities, or between past, present, & future generations. Sometimes they conceived of it largely as art & delighted in offering language that was beautiful or startling or humorous. 
Annals of Native America brings together, for the 1st time, samples of their many creations to offer a heretofore obscured history of the Nahuas & an alternate perspective on the Conquest & its aftermath. 
Winner of the Howard Francis Cline Memorial Prize of the Conference on Latin American History
Winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association