Surviving the next thing A guide to life in colonial Mexico

the native Mexica people of Tenochtitlan, the decades after their empire’s fall to Spain in 1821 must have been a nightmare, or at best a time of profound change. The centuries-old capital (upon which the modern-day Mexico City sits) was the seat of the vast Aztec empire, and was one of the largest cities in the world. In the late 1500s, a cadre of its intellectuals undertook the compilation of an extraordinary book.

Their mission was to make a book filled with information essential for survival in the rapidly changing world of colonial Mexico, according to The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain (University of Texas Press, 2018) by Lori Boornazian Diel. The pictorial manuscript, or codex, was produced by and for the Mexica people, but it’s I a mix of Spanish and Nahuatl text and the pictorial script of the Aztecs — which is what the Spanish called the Mexica people.

The codex’s authors were obviously striving for a true representation of the new, blended culture. In the first section, we see a Christian saints’ calendar correlated with Aztec monthly festivals. “I think a main part of it is that the natives have embraced Christianity but they’re also preserving their old ways, so they’re making sure they’re remembering their native calendar and history, and that there’s a new identity they have as Aztec Christians,” Diel told

“To me, that’s the focus I had to take to make sense of what they did. And the pictorial system of writing communicated the native sphere more than it would the Spanish sphere.”