Hybrid Historiography in Colonial Mexico: Genre, Event and Time in the "Cuauhtitlan Annals" and the "Historia De La Nacion Chichimeca

229 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.In this study, I compare how two histories of the pre-Hispanic Nahuas from the late 16th and early 17th centuries reflect their dual cultural and historiographical legacies. My basic thesis is that, far from indicating a merely passive "assimilation" of European culture, these works strategically make use of it as they respond to the colonial situation in which they are immersed. While the Historia de la nacion chichimeca (written in Spanish by the colonial historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl), appears to be a more Christianized account of the pre-Hispanic past than the Cuauhtitlan Annals (written in Nahuatl, probably by a Franciscan-educated Nahua scholar), this is not always the case. Making use of historical, literary, and anthropological studies as well as post-colonial theory, I show how, with respect to their generic configuration as well as their representations of the pre-Hispanic event and sense of time, the texts are best described as hybrid, transcultural depictions of the pre-Hispanic past: neither "mostly" Nahua nor "mostly" European, but, often depending on the writers' rhetorical purposes and audience, belonging to both traditions. While the Cuauhtitlan Annals responds to the Spanish colonial order by bringing the pre-Hispanic past into the colonial present and by bearing witness to the impact of the conquest, the Historia de la nacion chichimeca responds to it by projecting the present back into the pre-Hispanic past it constructs.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD