Profiles the history, people, culture, artwork, beliefs, and daily life of Moctezuma's Mexico.

Though the Aztec Empire fell to Spain in 1521, three principal heirs of the last emperor, Moctezuma II, survived the conquest and were later acknowledged by the Spanish victors as reyes naturales (natural kings or monarchs) who possessed certain inalienable rights as Indian royalty. For their part, the descendants of Moctezuma II used Spanish law and customs to maintain and enhance their status throughout the colonial period, achieving titles of knighthood and nobility in Mexico and Spain. So respected were they that a Moctezuma descendant by marriage became Viceroy of New Spain (colonial Mexico's highest governmental office) in 1696. This authoritative history follows the fortunes of the principal heirs of Moctezuma II across nearly two centuries. Drawing on extensive research in both Mexican and Spanish archives, Donald E. Chipman shows how daughters Isabel and Mariana and son Pedro and their offspring used lawsuits, strategic marriages, and political maneuvers and alliances to gain pensions, rights of entailment, admission to military orders, and titles of nobility from the Spanish government. Chipman also discusses how the Moctezuma family history illuminates several larger issues in colonial Latin American history, including women's status and opportunities and trans-Atlantic relations between Spain and its New World colonies.

The Spanish invasion of Mexico in 1519 left the capital city, Tenochtitlan, in ruins. Conquistador Hernán Cortés, following the city's surrender in 1521, established a governing body to organize its reconstruction. Cortés was careful to appoint native people to govern who had held positions of authority before his arrival, establishing a pattern that endured for centuries. William F. Connell's After Moctezuma: Indigenous Politics and Self-Government in Mexico City, 1524–1730 reveals how native self-government in former Tenochtitlan evolved over time as the city and its population changed. Drawing on extensive research in Mexico's Archivo General de la Nación, Connell shows how the hereditary political system of the Mexica was converted into a government by elected town councilmen, patterned after the Spanish cabildo, or municipal council. In the process, the Spanish relied upon existing Mexica administrative entities—the native ethnic state, or altepetl of Mexico Tenochtitlan, became the parcialidad of San Juan Tenochtitlan, for instance—preserving indigenous ideas of government within an imposed Spanish structure. Over time, the electoral system undermined the preconquest elite and introduced new native political players, facilitating social change. By the early eighteenth century, a process that had begun in the 1500s with the demise of Moctezuma and the royal line of Tenochtitlan had resulted in a politically independent indigenous cabildo. After Moctezuma is the first systematic study of the indigenous political structures at the heart of New Spain. With careful attention to relations among colonial officials and indigenous power brokers, Connell shows that the ongoing contest for control of indigenous government in Mexico City made possible a new kind of political system neither wholly indigenous nor entirely Spanish. Ultimately, he offers insight into the political voice Tenochtitlan's indigenous people gained with the ability to choose their own leaders—exercising power that endured through the end of the colonial period and beyond.

For mid-19th-century Americans, the Mexican War was not only a grand exercise in self-identity, legitimizing the young republic's convictions of mission and destiny to a doubting world; it was also the first American conflict to be widely reported in the press and to be waged against an alien foe in a distant and exotic land. It provided a window onto the outside world and promoted an awareness of a people and a land unlike any Americans had known before. This rich cultural history examines the place of the Mexican War in the popular imagination of the era. Drawing on military and travel accounts, newspaper dispatches, and a host of other sources, Johannsen vividly recreates the mood and feeling of the period--its unbounded optimism and patriotic pride--and adds a new dimension to our understanding of both the Mexican War and America itself.

The Spanish invasion of Mexico in 1519, which led to the end of the Aztec Empire, was one of the most influential events in the history of the modern Atlantic world. But equally consequential, as this volume makes clear, were the ways the Conquest was portrayed. In essays spanning five centuries and three continents, The Conquest of Mexico: 500 Years of Reinventions explores how politicians, writers, artists, activists, and others have strategically reimagined the Conquest to influence and manipulate perceptions within a wide variety of controversies and debates, including those touching on indigeneity, nationalism, imperialism, modernity, and multiculturalism. Writing from a range of perspectives and disciplines, the authors demonstrate that the Conquest of Mexico, whose significance has ever been marked by fundamental ambiguity, has consistently influenced how people across the modern Atlantic world conceptualize themselves and their societies. After considering the looming, ubiquitous role of the Conquest in Mexican thought and discourse since the sixteenth century, the contributors go farther afield to examine the symbolic relevance of the Conquest in contexts as diverse as Tudor England, Bourbon France, postimperial Spain, modern Latin America, and even contemporary Hollywood. Highlighting the extent to which the Spanish-Aztec conflict inspired historical reimaginings, these essays reveal how the Conquest became such an iconic event—and a perennial medium by which both Europe and the Americas have, for centuries, endeavored to understand themselves as well as their relationship to others. A valuable contribution to ongoing efforts to demythologize and properly memorialize the Spanish-Aztec War of 1519–21, this volume also aptly illustrates how we make history of the past and how that history-making shapes our present—and possibly our future.

Freud's Mexican disciples, Mexican books, Mexican antiquities, and Mexican dreams. Freud's Mexico is a completely unexpected contribution to Freud studies. Here, Rubén Gallo reveals Freud's previously undisclosed connections to a culture and a psychoanalytic tradition not often associated with him. This book bears detailed testimony to Freud's relationship to a country he never set foot in, but inhabited imaginatively on many levels. In the Mexico of the 1920s and 1930s, Freud made an impact not only among psychiatrists but also in literary, artistic, and political circles. Gallo writes about a “motley crew” of Freud's readers who devised some of the most original, elaborate, and influential applications of psychoanalytic theory anywhere in the world. After describing Mexico's Freud, Gallo offers an imaginative reconstruction of Freud's Mexico: Freud owned a treatise on criminal law by a Mexican judge who put defendants—including Trotsky's assassin—on the psychoanalyst's couch; he acquired Mexican pieces as part of his celebrated collection of antiquities; he recorded dreams of a Mexico that was fraught with danger; and he belonged to a secret society that conducted its affairs in Spanish.

In Aztec Philosophy, James Maffie reveals a highly sophisticated and systematic Aztec philosophy worthy of consideration alongside European philosophies of their time. Bringing together the fields of comparative world philosophy and Mesoamerican studies, Maffie excavates the distinctly philosophical aspects of Aztec thought. Aztec Philosophy focuses on the ways Aztec metaphysics—the Aztecs’ understanding of the nature, structure and constitution of reality—underpinned Aztec thinking about wisdom, ethics, politics, and aesthetics, and served as a backdrop for Aztec religious practices as well as everyday activities such as weaving, farming, and warfare. Aztec metaphysicians conceived reality and cosmos as a grand, ongoing process of weaving—theirs was a world in motion. Drawing upon linguistic, ethnohistorical, archaeological, historical, and contemporary ethnographic evidence, Maffie argues that Aztec metaphysics maintained a processive, transformational, and non-hierarchical view of reality, time, and existence along with a pantheistic theology. Aztec Philosophy will be of great interest to Mesoamericanists, philosophers, religionists, folklorists, and Latin Americanists as well as students of indigenous philosophy, religion, and art in the Americas.

Modern Mexico derives many of its richest symbols of national heritage and identity from the Aztec legacy, even as it remains a predominantly Spanish-speaking, Christian society. This volume argues that the composite, neo-Aztec flavor of Mexican identity was, in part, a consequence of active efforts by indigenous elites after the Spanish conquest to grandfather ancestral rights into the colonial era. By emphasizing the antiquity of their claims before Spanish officials, native leaders extended the historical awareness of the colonial regime into the pre-Hispanic past, and therefore also the themes, emotional contours, and beginning points of what we today understand as 'Mexican history'. This emphasis on ancient roots, moreover, resonated with the patriotic longings of many creoles, descendants of Spaniards born in Mexico. Alienated by Spanish scorn, creoles associated with indigenous elites and studied their histories, thereby reinventing themselves as Mexico's new 'native' leadership and the heirs to its prestigious antiquity.

Moctezuma was the most famous ruler of the powerful Aztec empire. Readers will learn about Moctezuma in this fascinating biography that features vibrant photos, stunning facts, engaging sidebars, and supportive text. Along with details of Moctzeuma's life, readers will also learn about the Aztec Empire, Eagle Warriors, Jaguar Warriors, Incas, Mayans, and the city of Tenochtitl�n. A table of contents, glossary, and index are featured to help readers better understand the content.