SAINTS AND WARRIORS

TLAXCALAN PERSPECTIVES

ON THE CONQUEST OF

TENOCHTITLAN

By

JEANNE GILLESPIE

          This book brings together an exploration of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican historiographic traditions and colonial European communicative technologies adapted by the Tlaxcalans.  Amerindian allies of Cortés in the defeat of the Mexica-Tecnochca at Tenochtitlan, learned very quikly how to manipulate the new communicative systems to assure that their participation in this campaign would be rewarded, and that they would take part in the new world order established by the Europeans.  The sixteenth-century documents related to the Lienzo of Tlaxcala illustrate how these technologies were adapted and how the Tlaxcalan acculturation process affected their petitions.

          Since the Tlaxlacans were originally ‘victors’ in the conquest, this study sheds new light on the representations of the Tlaxcalans, of Cortés and Malintzin, and of the role of the Catholic church in the conquest of Mexico because it analyzes the European presence from an Amerindian and victorious perspective.  The colonizing process carried out in the name of Spain and the Catholic church is presented as a militaristic, conquest-driven enterprise that the Amerindians understood very well. Thanks to recent research in this complicated, multidisciplinary area of investigation, these voices are now entering the scholarly dialogue, forcing us to reevaluate our perceptions of the conquest of the Americas.

 JEANNE GILLESPIE

is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at The University of Southern Mississippi.  She received a Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Literatures from Arizona State University.

She recently co-edited another book, along with Jennifer L. Eich and Lucia G. Harrison, Women's Voices and the Politics of the Spanish Empire, with University Press of the South in 2008.

Jeanne Gillespie