A Steward's Desk in Mexico City

Nothing about his position was grand. Chimalpahin was born at Amaquemecan in 1579 into a family that claimed descent from the ruling houses of Chalco, moved to Mexico City as a young man, and spent decades as a lay steward at the church and hospital of San Antonio Abad, a modest establishment near the causeway. He was never ordained. The post gave him a room, a small income and, evidently, time.

Around that work he assembled documents: his own family papers, older annals from the Chalco towns, testimony from people who remembered, and manuscripts lent by others. He copied and corrected as well as composed, and one of the more striking items associated with him is an annotated Nahuatl adaptation of a Spanish history of the conquest, in which a Nahua reader is quietly repairing a Spanish account. His own manuscripts left Mexico and spent generations in European collections, part of them held in London until they were offered at auction and acquired by Mexico in 2014. He died in 1660. Almost everything known about his life comes from remarks he made in passing while writing about other people, which is a fair description of how most Nahua authors of his century reach us at all. He never saw a page of his own in print and would have had no expectation of readers outside his own circle, which makes the survival of the corpus at all a piece of luck rather than a plan.