Field of Research: Colonial Latin American Studies

I am interested in the relationship between Mesoamerican cultural Indigenous heterogeneity and colonial transculturation in the chronicles of Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc.

Current Book Project

Proyecciones y reflexiones mexica-tenochca en la colonia: El caso de Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc. (Mexica-Tenochca Projections and Reflections in the Colonial Period: The Case of Hernando de Alvardo Tezozomoc).  In this work I highlight the historical context of sixteenth-century New Spain to shed light on the complexities of indigenous historical narrative production.  By studying a wide variety of documents such as letters, land tenure disputes and historical narratives of indigenous writers, as well as pre-Hispanic material culture and historical registers, I examine Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc’s  Crónica mexicana and Crónica mexicayotl, written in Spanish and Nahuatl respectively.  On the one hand, his texts exemplify the implementation of autochthonous cultural survival practices engendered by the colonial situation at both an individual and corporate level; on the other, they reveal the organization of indigenous historical registers and memory which can be traced in land tenure documents as late as the eighteenth century.