Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl belonged to the ruling line of Texcoco through his mother, and he wrote in Spanish for readers who could grant or withhold things his family needed: land, exemption from tribute, offices. That is not a reason to discount him, but it is the frame every page sits in. His Relaciones and the unfinished Historia de la nación chichimeca take the Chichimec migration into the valley as their starting point, follow the Acolhua dynasty of Texcoco down to the conquest, and treat Texcoco rather than Tenochtitlan as the civilised centre of the alliance. He worked from painted manuscripts, including the pictorial history now called the Codex Xólotl, and from elders who could still read them and explain the glyphic name signs. He held the post of interpreter in the general court for Indians in Mexico City, which put him among people whose daily business was translating one legal world into another, and he served as governor at Texcoco and at Tlalmanalco. His writings circulated in manuscript, passed to Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora in the following century, and were not printed until the nineteenth, by which time Texcoco had become a useful ancestor for a new Mexican nation. He died in Mexico City in 1650, still petitioning.

Ixtlilxóchitl is the main authority for the claim that Nezahualcóyotl worshipped a single invisible creator, built him a temple with no image in it, and was reluctant about human sacrifice. He is also that ruler's descendant, a baptised Christian writing under Spanish authority, and a petitioner with an interest in his ancestors reading as noble rather than as idolaters.

Historians split on what to do with that. One position holds that he preserved genuine Texcocan court tradition, including the philosophical songs, and that the pre conquest Nahua world contained real theological argument which the friars flattened. The other holds that the monotheistic Nezahualcóyotl is largely his construction, assembled from Christian categories to make a lineage presentable, and that the songs cannot be assigned to any named author at all. The dispute is not settled and probably cannot be settled from the texts alone, because the pictorial sources he used record events, names and dates rather than doctrine, and the alphabetic song collections were written down after the conquest by scribes who were themselves converts. What is not in dispute is the value of his dynastic and territorial material, which anchors much of what is known about the Acolhua polity and its relations with Tenochtitlan.