Nahua Horizons: Writing, Persuasion, and Futurities in Colonial Mexico investigates how Nahuas conceptualized their futures in the early colonial period. Scholar Ezekiel G. Stear delves deeply into canonical texts such as the Florentine Codex and the Crónica mexicayotl as well as understudied texts such as the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, the Tira de Tepechpan, and the Anales de Juan Bautista. The study does more than describe how Nahuas conceived of their own futures: it also shows their specific plans for moving into the coming years.

The book examines how Nahua writers in Central Mexico and other Mesoamerican voices in colonial Spanish America played an active, decisive role in shaping culture, using writing to persuade their communities to mold their own destinies, even amid colonial upheaval. This work opens up new directions for research and teaching, shifting inquiry from how Nahuas preserved cultural continuity to how they envisioned their roles as pathfinders toward times to come.

Nahua Horizons challenges the notion that the Spanish erased Nahua culture. The book emphasizes the ways people kept sovereignty over the futures they envisioned for themselves and their communities. Stear’s bold new approach follows the paths that Nahuas forged ahead into unknown times.

Ezekiel Stear is an assistant professor of Spanish at Auburn University.

“In Nahua Horizons Stear draws our attention to Nahua futurities, ways in which Nahua communities and individuals interpreted and defined their futures in the wake of the trauma of Spanish invasion and colonization. Engaging the work of a range of Indigenous scholars and scholarship, this book enhances our understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Nahua pictorial and alphabetic texts by showing how Nahua writers envision a future-oriented representation of Indigenous culture and society and persuade their communities to act to create that reality.”—Amber Brian, author of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico

“Nahua Horizons is an erudite analysis of the different ways that Nahuas deployed the written word, both pictographic and the Roman alphabet, to chart a way into the future on their own terms. With fresh approaches to a series of canonical Nahua materials, Stear shows how writing was a crucial tool for Nahuas to strategically shape and respond to specific contexts, guide their people, and envision their future. This is exactly what one would hope the new generation of Nahua studies scholars would do: Nahua Horizons generously builds on the exceptional scholarship of previous generations, provides sensitive and expert readings of Nahuatl-language materials, and pushes the field forward in a way that insists on Nahua self-determination.”—Kelly McDonough, author of Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them