Man-Gods in the Mexican Highlands: Indian Power and Colonial Society, 1520-1800

Serge Gruzinski's Man-Gods in the Mexican Highlands, Indian Power and Colonial Society, 1520 to 1800, translated by Eileen Corrigan and published by Stanford University Press in 1989 from the original French Les hommes-dieux du Mexique of 1985, is a scholarly study built from Spanish Inquisition trial records of colonial Mexican indigenous figures who claimed some aspect of divinity. Its authority rests on standard academic peer review at a major university press and Gruzinski's direct archival work with primary colonial documents. Its limit is the nature of the underlying source material itself: Inquisition trial records were produced by a prosecuting authority specifically in order to convict, so what a defendant is recorded as having claimed or done reaches the modern reader already filtered through that adversarial colonial legal process, a caution the book itself is attentive to but which any reader of its conclusions should also keep in mind.