Annals in Nahuatl, for Nahua Readers

Chimalpahin wrote the year count, the indigenous historical form: one entry after another under its year sign, without a narrative arc imposed on top. His Relaciones and his Diario carry the altepetl of Chalco Amaquemecan and the wider Valley of Mexico from the twelfth century migrations to 1615, and they do it in Nahuatl. That last fact is the rare one. Most colonial history of Mexico was written in Spanish, by Spaniards, for readers in Spain, and its purpose was to explain the Nahua to somebody else.

Chimalpahin was explaining the Nahua to the Nahua. He records the founding of towns, the succession of rulers, wars, floods and eclipses, the building of churches and the arrival of new orders of friars, all in the same annual frame, so that the conquest appears as a very large event inside a continuing history rather than as the beginning of one. He also keeps the older calendar alongside the Christian year, which lets a modern reader correlate the two. He belongs to a small group of Nahua annalists, with Cristóbal del Castillo and the anonymous authors of the Anales de Tlatelolco, whose work is the nearest surviving thing to the tradition speaking in its own voice and on its own terms.