Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl

Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (b. c. 1578–d. 1650) is a relatively unknown figure outside of specialist academic circles, yet he has been very influential in the development of the historiography of pre-Hispanic central Mexico, or Anahuac. Born in the last quarter of the 16th century, his family had roots in Anahuac and in Spain. His mother was descended from elite native rulers of the city of Tetzcoco, while his father was a Spanish settler who worked as a Nahuatl-Spanish interpreter in the courts of Mexico City. Alva Ixtlilxochitl also served as an interpreter and as a bureaucratic official in the colonial government. During his lifetime, Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s family’s wealth and status were tied to his mother’s and grandmother’s connections to the family’s cacicazgo (landed estate) in San Juan Teotihuacan. Yet it was his ancestors from Tetzcoco who were the primary object of study in his five historical works. In four historical accounts and his magnum opus, the History of the Chichimeca Nation (2019, cited under Manuscripts, Editions, Translations), Alva Ixtlilxochitl recounts the origins, deeds, and exploits of the leaders of Tetzcoco, including the renowned Nezahualcoyotl (r. 1429–1472) and Nezahualpilli (r. 1472–1515). For these histories he relied on native sources. As he says himself in the prefatory materials to the History of the Chichimeca Nation, these sources included “painted histories and annals and the songs with which they preserved them,” and to make sense of these materials he sought out “the elders of New Spain who were renowned for their knowledge and understanding of those stories” (History of the Chichimeca Nation, p. 29). The result of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s research and writing has left an important legacy in studies of the history of ancient Mexico. Scholars from the 17th century onward drew on Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s representations of pre-Hispanic and conquest-era Mexico to such an extent that his depictions of Tetzcoco as a center of learning and culture and his depictions of Nezahualcoyotl as a revered poet-king became standard in both academic studies and popular culture. Burgeoning scholarly interest in mestizo historians in the 1990s brought renewed attention to Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s writings and to his position as a colonial subject and author, while the rediscovery of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s original manuscripts in the 1980s provided new material sources with which to study the creation and impact of his works. Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s own projects and his legacy represent an important reminder of how, on occasion, the stories and storytelling of native peoples survived the brutalities of conquest and colonialism.