Writing Texcoco for a Spanish Court

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl belonged to the ruling line of Texcoco through his mother, and he wrote in Spanish for readers who could grant or withhold things his family needed: land, exemption from tribute, offices. That is not a reason to discount him, but it is the frame every page sits in. His Relaciones and the unfinished Historia de la nación chichimeca take the Chichimec migration into the valley as their starting point, follow the Acolhua dynasty of Texcoco down to the conquest, and treat Texcoco rather than Tenochtitlan as the civilised centre of the alliance. He worked from painted manuscripts, including the pictorial history now called the Codex Xólotl, and from elders who could still read them and explain the glyphic name signs. He held the post of interpreter in the general court for Indians in Mexico City, which put him among people whose daily business was translating one legal world into another, and he served as governor at Texcoco and at Tlalmanalco. His writings circulated in manuscript, passed to Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora in the following century, and were not printed until the nineteenth, by which time Texcoco had become a useful ancestor for a new Mexican nation. He died in Mexico City in 1650, still petitioning.