Mothers and Daughters at Imperial Crossroads: Expressions of Status, Economy and Nurture in 16th Century Mexico.

Abstract

My dissertation, Mothers and Daughters at Imperial Crossroads: Expressions of Status, Economy, and Nurture in 16th Century Mexico considers an often overlooked but foundational aspect of colonization in the New World: the transfer of status and wealth through indigenous women in a confluence of political economy and ritual ceremony. Chapter 1 sets up this analysis through the Nahua historian Chimalpahin Quautlehuanitzin’s exposé on the crisis of government in Chalco, a formerly powerful Nahua state at the southern edge of the valley of Mexico. Chimalpahin’s insistence that colonial authorities recognize women’s nobility prompts an investigation, in Chapter 2, of the gendered dimensions of nobility between Spanish and Nahua societies. To this end, these first two chapters advance a triangular reading of Chimalpahin’s representation of nobility alongside the Florentine Codex, a 16th century encyclopedia of life in pre-Conquest Mesoamerica, and the legal codes propagated by Alfonso X in the Siete Partidas. While Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the stakes of nobility within the colonial regime, Chapter 3 explores the chameleon-like status of the tribute women given to the conquistador Hernán Cortés during his march to Tenochtitlan in 1519. The transformation of young common women into noble brides through body paints, feathers and fine clothing enacts a deliberate dissolution of hierarchies that prefigures the crisis of government in Chalco. Alongside Spanish and Nahuatl accounts of the Conquest, the Lienzo de Tlaxcala’s visual representation of indigenous tribute gifts to Cortés anchors this exploration of Mexico’s tribute women. In Chapter 4, the maguey plant in its deified form, as the goddess Mayahuel, becomes an avatar for a transfer of wealth that flows from women’s bodies to the imperial capital. The insistence of women, however, to harvest maguey and sell its products on their own terms challenges the limitations to their mobility and appropriation of their income—an intrusion into the masculinist historiographies and imperial spaces of 16th century Mexico.