Aztec Philosophy
Understanding a World in Motion
"Sound, enlightening and interesting."
—Rocío Cortéz, The University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh
"These scholars have made an important contribution to the knowledge of this pre-colonial and early colonial site. More valuably, though, they have shined a light on the problematic nature of history and of historical and more generally social-scientific knowledge, stressing that our sources often preserve plural/hybrid cultural perspectives and produce knowledge from their own perspectives and for their own purposes."
—Anthropology Review Database
"[The] chapters present a strong range of perspectives from across disciplines, from both established and emerging scholars, and do much to bring the history of Texcoco, and the accomplishments of its intellectuals, out from the shadows of Tenochtitlan and into its own light."
—Hispanic American Historical Review
Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives presents an in-depth, highly nuanced historical understanding of this major indigenous Mesoamerican city from the conquest through the present. The book argues for the need to revise conclusions of past scholarship on familiar topics, deals with current debates that derive from differences in the way scholars view abundant and diverse iconographic and alphabetic sources, and proposes a new look at Texcocan history and culture from different academic disciplines.
Contributors address some of the most pressing issues in Texcocan studies and bring new ones to light: the role of Texcoco in the Aztec empire, the construction and transformation of Prehispanic history in the colonial period, the continuity and transformation of indigenous culture and politics after the conquest, and the nature and importance of iconographic and alphabetic texts that originated in this city-state, such as the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa Quinatzin, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl's chronicles. Multiple scholarly perspectives and methodological approaches offer alternative paradigms of research and open a needed dialogue among disciplines—social, political, literary, and art history, as well as the history of science.
This comprehensive overview of Prehispanic and colonial Texcoco will be of interest to Mesoamerican scholars in the social sciences and humanities.
Contributors: Bradley Benton, Amber Brian, Galen Brokaw, Lori Boornazian Diel, Pablo García Loaeza, Leisa Kauffmann, Jongsoo Lee, Jerome Offner, Janice K. Pierce, Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Camilla Townsend, Barbara J. Williams
