Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza: An Intimate Portrait of an Indian Nobleman

FAIN: FB-50182-04

Camilla Townsend
Rutgers University (Hamilton, NY 13346-1338)

I propose to study the mental world of the Nahuatal-speaking indigenous nobleman who lived in Tlaxcala, Mexico, in the seventeenth century. Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza wrote a remarkable set of annals over the course of his lifetime, which have only recently been translated into Spanish and have never appeared in English. He wrote for other Indians, not for Spaniards. A careful review of his wok, in the context of other Tlaxcalan documents, offers a rare window in to the Indian world, allowing us to hear the thoughts and perspectives of an individual Native American person, moving us beyond the more sociological and structural studies of the indigenous that our colonial sources have generally allowed us to make up to this point.

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