Domingo Chimalpahin

Chimalpahin wrote the year count, the indigenous historical form: one entry after another under its year sign, without a narrative arc imposed on top. His Relaciones and his Diario carry the altepetl of Chalco Amaquemecan and the wider Valley of Mexico from the twelfth century migrations to 1615, and they do it in Nahuatl. That last fact is the rare one. Most colonial history of Mexico was written in Spanish, by Spaniards, for readers in Spain, and its purpose was to explain the Nahua to somebody else.

Chimalpahin was explaining the Nahua to the Nahua. He records the founding of towns, the succession of rulers, wars, floods and eclipses, the building of churches and the arrival of new orders of friars, all in the same annual frame, so that the conquest appears as a very large event inside a continuing history rather than as the beginning of one. He also keeps the older calendar alongside the Christian year, which lets a modern reader correlate the two. He belongs to a small group of Nahua annalists, with Cristóbal del Castillo and the anonymous authors of the Anales de Tlatelolco, whose work is the nearest surviving thing to the tradition speaking in its own voice and on its own terms.

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.