Within these pages lives a story of love, of friendships, and of families, which are imbedded within a place and time, where the most diametrically opposite of human values existed and survived side-by-side, where heaven and hell daily rubbed their social elbows, and each of their elements were ever threatening the survival of their counterpart. Here is a story of people caught between the gears and wheels of their god's invisible machinery that daily drives their universe. Here is portrayed both the physical and psychological landscape of a time whose structures, writings, and beliefs have now been systematically destroyed by a new foreign master and a new foreign religion, which has a so-called "Modern Strategy" about blood sacrifice and intellectual domination. Here is the story of lovers, whose powerful desire to be forever together, is the magic that guides them through an ever-fluxing nightmare that is their reality. The story opens in the capitol city of the Aztec Empire during the night of November the 8th in the year 1516 CE.

In 1519 Corts sailed from Cuba, leading an expedition of search and discovery of any lands to the west of Cuba. What he found was a land and a civilization that was larger and richer than anything in his wildest dreams. He became compulsively determined to have this new land and its riches as his own. But within the fog that hides the future, it was the Aztec's own beliefs and their complete ignorance of any nations existing beyond the seas that made up the substance of that fog, and led them blindly into a collision with a fate, which time and distance had been ever-ripening. It is through that fog that the Aztec's continuing story and the love affair of Jaguar and Five Rabbit unfolds within a quite unbelievable military struggle for the conquest of Mexico.

Traditional stories from the northern Colombian coast, in both English and Spanish. These twenty-one animal tales from the Colombian Caribbean coast represent a sampling of the traditional stories that are told during all-night funerary wakes. The tales are told in the semi-sacred space of the patio (backyard) of homes as part of the funerary ritual that includes other aesthetic and expressive practices such as jokes, song games, board games, and prayer. In this volume these stories are situated within their performance contexts and represent a highly ritualized corpus of oral knowledge that for centuries has been preserved and cultivated by African-descendant populations in the Americas. Ethnomusicologist George List collected these tales throughout his decades-long fieldwork among the rural costeños, a chiefly African-descendent population, in the mid-twentieth century and, with the help of a research team, transcribed and translated them into English before his death in 2008. In this volume, John Holmes McDowell and Juan Sebastián Rojas E. have worked to bring this previously unpublished manuscript to light, providing commentary on the transcriptions and translations, additional cultural context through a new introduction, and further typological and cultural analysis by Hasan M. El-Shamy. Supplementing the transcribed and translated texts are links to the original Spanish recordings of the stories, allowing readers to follow along and experience the traditional telling of the tales for themselves.

Real World Poetry Book Three is a continuation of the style of poems of my first two poetry books. Some few of these poems have appeared as prose embedded within the text of some of my other writings. Again, the mood of these poems is intended to address the lack of objective truth within many of the world's major philosophies, and to call attention to hidden seeds, which will eventually, upon germination, determine both our near and distant futures. Some of these poems may seem overly grating, but their purpose is to awaken those few readers to the perils of worshiping forever, without reflective thought, those philosophies and mythologies, whose messages should have long ago crumbled from lack of any supportive substance and from their old, very old, age.

Real World Poetry Book Two is a continuation of the style of poems, of my first poetry book, Real World Poetry. Some few of these poems have appeared as prose embedded within the text of my other writings. The mood of these poems is intended to address the lack of objective truth within many of the world's major philosophies, and to call attention to hidden seeds, which will eventually determine both our near and distant future. Some of the poems may seem to some few readers to be overly grating, but the purpose is to awakening those few readers to the perils of worshiping forever, without reflective thought, those philosophies and mythologies, whose messages should have long ago crumbled from lack of any supportive substance and from their old, very old, age.

Super Brainy, Level Five, a sequel of Brainy Kids, escorts learners to their multiple destinations on the fifth leg of their English-language journey. By the end of this fun journey, learners will have mastered the set objectives in listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

2023 — Best Subsequent Book — Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 2023 — Honorable Mention, Best Book in the Social Sciences — Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section 2022 — Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize — New England Council of Latin American Studies 2023 — Honorable Mention, LASA Mexico Social Sciences Book Prize — Mexico Section, Latin American Studies Association (LASA) As the first exhaustive translation and analysis of an extraordinary Zapotec calendar and ritual song corpus, seized in New Spain in 1704, this book expands our understanding of Mesoamerican history, cosmology, and culture. In 1702, after the brutal suppression of a Zapotec revolt, the bishop of Oaxaca proclaimed an amnesty for idolatry in exchange for collective confessions. To evade conflict, Northern Zapotec communities denounced ritual specialists and surrendered sacred songs and 102 divinatory manuals, which preserve cosmological accounts, exchanges with divine beings, and protocols of pre-Columbian origin that strongly resemble sections of the Codex Borgia. These texts were sent to Spain as evidence of failed Dominican evangelization efforts, and there they remained, in oblivion, until the 1960s. In this book, David Tavárez dives deep into this formidable archive of ritual and divinatory manuals, the largest calendar corpus in the colonial Americas, and emerges with a rich understanding of Indigenous social and cultural history, Mesoamerican theories of cosmos and time, and Zapotec ancestor worship. Drawing on his knowledge of Zapotec and Nahuatl, two decades of archival research, and a decade of fieldwork, Tavárez dissects Mesoamerican calendars as well as Native resistance and accommodation to the colonial conquest of time, while also addressing entangled transatlantic histories and shining new light on texts still connected to contemporary observances in Zapotec communities.

In 1981, under the editorship of Victoria Bricker, UT Press began to issue supplemental volumes to the classic sixteen-volume work Handbook of Middle American Indians. These supplements are intended to update scholarship in various areas and to cover topics of current interest that may not have been included in the original Handbook. This volume is designed to recognize the important role that epigraphy has come to play in Middle American scholarship and to document significant achievements in three areas: dynastic history, phonetic decipherment, and calendrics. The book covers four of the major pre-Columbian scripts in the region (Zapotec, Mixtec, Aztec, and Maya) and one that is relatively unknown (Tlapanec).

The Aztec Book of Destiny summarizes traditional Mesoamerican beliefs about the spiritual nature of time and its influence on one's personality and fate. The ancient Aztec, Toltec and Maya believed that the day of birth, as defined in their sacred calendar, affects destiny; and this philosophy has guided their daily lives for more than 3000 years. This book condenses the scattered and disparate literature about these beliefs into a fun and informative narrative; but it goes far beyond what academics and popular authors have published to date. The author presents a unique perspective shaped by the wisdom of a traditional calendar-keeper he met in Mexico in 1973. The book's message is that the calendar is not simply an ancient and forgotten curiosity - it is as relevant today as in ancient times. The majority of the book projects the timeless Mesoamerican philosophy into contemporary Western society encouraging introspection and self-awareness.

The Mixtec, or the people of Ñuu Savi ('Nation of the Rain God'), one of the major civilizations of ancient Mesoamerica, made their home in the highlands of Oaxaca, where they resisted both Aztec military expansion and the Spanish conquest. In Encounter with the Plumed Serpent, two leading scholars present and interpret the sacred histories narrated in the Mixtec codices, the largest surviving collection of pre-Columbian manuscripts in existence. In these screenfold books, ancient painter-historians chronicled the politics of the Mixtec from approximately a.d. 900 to 1521, portraying the royal families, rituals, wars, alliances, and ideology of the times. By analyzing and cross-referencing the codices, which have been fragmented and dispersed in far-flung archives, the authors attempt to reconstruct Mixtec history. Their synthesis here builds on long examination of the ancient manuscripts. Adding useful interpretation and commentary, Jansen and Pérez Jiménez synthesize the large body of surviving documents into the first unified narrative of Mixtec sacred history. Archaeologists and other scholars as well as readers with an interest in Mesoamerican cultures will find this lavishly illustrated volume a compelling and fascinating history and a major step forward in knowledge of the Mixtec.