The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl: Pre-Hispanic History, Religion, and Nahua Poetics Book

Lee's argument is that typical portrayals of Nezahualcoyotl, from the colonial period to the present in history and in popular culture (although the latter is less discussed), have erroneously focused on his peacefulness (as a philosopher-poet-king) and his intuition of a single god in contrast to the warlike and many gods of the Aztecs. He asserts that the problem with this interpretation and holding up of such a pre-colonial figure in this way is that it reproduces all kinds of colonialist assumptions that justified domination and forced religious conversion. AND plus: the interpretations are wrong. Nezahualcoyotl was closely allied with the Aztecs and used human sacrifice as a leader in Texcoco, and so is not clearly distinguished from the bloodthirsty Aztecs in his actual religious practice. As for the poetry: most of the fragments and poems attributed to him cannot stand up to scrutiny--music and poetry were often dedicated to or solicited by leaders like Nezahualcoyotl, but the composition of such things was not seen as a case of individual authorship apart from collective performances. Plus, just because a poem mentions his name, doesn't mean he wrote it (a fair but obvious point). A final word: the "flowers" in all the poetry, far from being a soft, gentle symbol of peace but were the bodies of warriors sacrificed (flower wars and all), and the nature themes are simultaneously themes of war and death.

The typical interpretations rest on reading colonial sources without regard for colonial context and so many scholars have repeated the same mistakes through the years, taking the original primary sources for granted (or not even consulting them and going with the secondary interpretations altogether). Rather than seeing that certain scholars of the colonial period wanted to distance themselves from the Mexica/Aztecs by portraying a previous leader who was supposedly so different and thereby justify their colonial high status, contemporary and later scholars just embraced the idea that Nezahualcoyotl WAS different and therefore could be used to redeem SOME of the indigenous people who were like him. A kind of "They're not ALL bad, so we should try to save as many as possible" thing. And because so many scholars have gone back to the well of these colonial sources and, after a bit of hemming and hawing about reliability (if that), they wholesale adopt these colonial creations as representative of a PRE-colonial mentality.

Sometimes I wonder if Lee is splitting hairs, because he sometimes embraces the same authors that he rejects in other places as hopelessly compromised and biased in their attempts to supplant the Mexica in pre-colonial histories and the world of colonial statuses. He'll use a source to criticize a portrayal of Nezahualcoyotl and then turn around and use THAT source to critique ANOTHER source. When can you tell if a source is good enough to be used? That point gets far too little discussion, in my opinion. But he does use a variety of indigenous sources well to prove that Nezahualcoyotl WASN'T that different from other leaders, even within the works of the scholars who suggest that he was. The whole thing rests on whether or not Lee has the "right" interpretation of indigenous pictorial sources, as opposed to the other scholars then and now who have the "wrong" or "misguided" interpretation. How can we know?

I think the strength of his work lies in the careful cataloguing of the original sources and the points of how many others relied on the works of their contemporaries to set up their own arguments and then LATER scholars just copied the whole thing without tracing back the genealogy and questioning the motives of the original and later writers. He goes through the sources, showing how the interpretations gained weight over time and were continually unquestioned.

His point about the colonial context is essential and makes me wonder how many historical assumptions about primary sources have gone unquestioned and continue to be shaping our views of history in ways that ignore unequal power dynamics in the writing and recording of history (then and now) AND actively erasing the perspectives of indigenous people and other marginalized groups because even the sources supposed to be closest to their experience have been manipulated and interpreted over and over again. His insistence on interdisciplinary work to reach different views and interpretations of history is also essential: if the written sources have such biases, we should be reaching out to other ways of studying the past and particular societies in order to see what shakes loose, what can be gleaned and cross-checked.

An interesting book that fundamentally ends with me going "Well, I guess we'll never know," but in the best possible way. His academic rigor is...rigorous, but even he would have to admit that his interpretation is one of many. Which is NOT to write him off, but to say that he's getting at some really important questions and that kind of ambiguity should be present and allowed for in discussions. His work has contemporary political significance in addition to historiographical significance: he questions the very mode of doing history in service of making voices heard and acknowledging that things get written down by actual people in complex relationships, not just one single story that fits all facts and situations that never changes throughout time as we go back and try to understand the past. Check your source, indeed.