The Nahuas Through Their Sources

This seminar aims to give a basic knowledge of the history, society, and culture of the Nahuas, one of the main Indigenous groups of Mexico, during the early period, 16th-18th centuries. The Nahuas left a vast and varied corpus of documents written in Nahuatl, a language still in use today. In each class, we will be reading a different set of documents available both in Nahuatl and in English translation and analyze them together to get an understanding of the Nahua world from within. To help us in this analysis, we will be reading also academic works by experts in the field of Indigenous history of early Latin America.

Thanks to a collaboration with Eduardo de la Cruz, director of IDIEZ (Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas) and a native-speaker instructor of Nahuatl, we will have the possibility to learn how Nahuatl is spoken today and how Indigenous people read their own primary sources from the past. The course will have at least one activity with professor de la Cruz built in the class time and accessible via Zoom.