Latin America essays

Latin America essays As pointed out by Dr. Nancy Fitch in her review of Gruzinski's The Conquest of Mexico, authorities disagree over how early the Nahuas adopted the Spanish alphabet to render Nahuatl into a written language to produce their own codices or written accounts of the conquest (Fitch, 2003). The Mexican historian Miguel Leon-Portilla, author of The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, believes that a rare French Bibliotheque National manuscript (variously described as "Manuscript 22", Unos anales historicos de la nacion mexicana, or the Tlatelolco Codex) was written in Nahuatl by a group of anonymous natives of Tlatelolco in 1528, just seven years after the conquest (Fitch, 2003). J. Jorge Klor de Alva, who wrote the forward to the English translation of The Broken Spears, offers some additional independent primary source evidence that the Nahuas were writing in their native language in the 1520s (Fitch, 2003). There is evidence that indigenous peoples authored many codices, but the Spaniards destroyed most of them in their attempt to eradicate ancient beliefs (Fitch, 2003). Moreover, we can gain little sense of how their production was shaped by interaction with the Spaniards, since the fourth Mexica King, Itzcoatl, apparently destroyed most earlier manuscripts during his reign from 1426-1440, in order to preserve his vision of how he constructed the Mexica empire; still others simply disappeared, without being published or preserved (Fitch, 2003). The Spaniards believed language and evangelization were the keys to making the natives "Spanish", in their understanding of the world (Fitch, 2003). Many sons of caciques in sixteenth century New Spain were sent to the priests to be taught to read and write in Spanish, and to be indoctrinated in Catholicism (Fitch, 2003; Kartutten, 1998). As Zhenja La Rosa argued, the Spaniards assumed t...