Peter B. Villella’s research while affiliated with United States Air Force Academy and other places

This essay reviews the following works: The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America. Edited by Diego Armus and Pablo F. Gómez. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. Pp. 262. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822946854. Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain. By Paula S. De Vos. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 352.$50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822946496. For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala. By Martha Few. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015. Pp. x + 304. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780816531875. The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. By Pablo F. Gómez. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xix + 314.$29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469630878. Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. By Kyle Harper. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. x + 704. $35.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780691192123. Carving a Niche: The Medical Profession in Mexico, 1800–1870. By Luz María Hernández Sáenz. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018. Pp. xix + 376.$38.22 paperback. ISBN: 9780773553026. Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason. By Paul Ramírez. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 376. $70.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781503604339. Mexico in the Time of Cholera. By Donald Fithian Stevens. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 328.$34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780826360557. An Imperative to Cure: Principles and Practice of Q’eqchi’ Maya Medicine in Belize. By James B. Waldram. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. Pp. xvi + 288. $84.80 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826361738. Death Is All around Us: Corpses, Chaos, and Public Health in Porfirian Mexico City. By Jonathan M. Weber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Pp. xiii + 294.$30.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781496213440.

This essay reviews the following works: Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City. By Vera S. Candiani. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. xxix + 376. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780804788052. Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México. By Danna A. Levin Rojo. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 307.$34.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780806144344. Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500–1821. By W. George Lovell. 4th ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 306. $34.95 paper. ISBN: 9780773545274. The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City. By Barbara E. Mundy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 246.$75.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780292766563. Maya Ideologies of the Sacred: The Transfiguration of Space in Colonial Yucatan. By Amara Solari. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 212. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780292744943.

This article builds on recent scholarship emphasizing native contributions to Spanish American legal and political cultures to consider how Nahua leaders in early colonial Mexico influenced the construction of imperial policy vis-à-vis indigenous patrimonial lands. By examining a series of cases brought before colonial authorities in Mexico City in the 1530s, it details the efforts of certain highborn Nahuas who resisted efforts by Spanish conquerors to expand their access to Indian wealth. When challenged before colonial tribunals, they defended their actions by emphasizing the overriding importance of custom, ancestry, and kinship in determining land and resource rights. Whether successful or not, such arguments had broader consequences, as they compelled colonial authorities to explicitly weigh and adjudicate disputes shaped to a substantial degree by pre-Hispanic history, by events occurring decades and generations prior to the Spanish conquest. Thus Nahua patrimonial restorationism helped induce precedents that explicitly afforded legal weight to local custom and ancestry at a critical early stage when imperial law with regard to Indian lands remained inchoate and shifting. Not only did it facilitate royal efforts to constrain conqueror claims to native wealth, it also contributed to the eventual recognition of native patrimonial lands in Spanish imperial law.

Modern Mexico derives many of its richest symbols of national heritage and identity from the Aztec legacy, even as it remains a predominantly Spanish-speaking, Christian society. This volume argues that the composite, neo-Aztec flavor of Mexican identity was, in part, a consequence of active efforts by indigenous elites after the Spanish conquest to grandfather ancestral rights into the colonial era. By emphasizing the antiquity of their claims before Spanish officials, native leaders extended the historical awareness of the colonial regime into the pre-Hispanic past, and therefore also the themes, emotional contours, and beginning points of what we today understand as 'Mexican history'. This emphasis on ancient roots, moreover, resonated with the patriotic longings of many creoles, descendants of Spaniards born in Mexico. Alienated by Spanish scorn, creoles associated with indigenous elites and studied their histories, thereby reinventing themselves as Mexico's new 'native' leadership and the heirs to its prestigious antiquity. Bridges the gulf scholars often presume (and thus create) between 'native history', 'folk history', and national history in Latin America Historicizes and contextualizes native texts, which are all too often presumptively dismissed or privileged as 'ancient' Decenters Mexican history to include a wider variety of historical actors, including Indians, mestizos, and middling officials.