Creoles, Mestizos, and the Native Archive

On May 21, 2014, three volumes of manuscripts that had belonged to don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora centuries ago were to be auctioned by Christie's in London. Known as Bible Society Manuscripts 374 (BSMS 374), the first and second volumes contain the original manuscripts of don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl's five historical works, while the third volume contains don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin's Historia, o chronica mexicana. There are additional texts interspersed throughout all three volumes. The day before the sale, the set was removed from the auction list and sold privately. On September 17, 2014, press releases and subsequent news stories revealed that Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antroplogía e Historia (INAH) had purchased the three volumes for one million dollars. In celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of INAH and the fiftieth anniversary of the Museo Nacional de Antropología, the three volumes were reintroduced to the Mexican public with the new title of "Códice Chimalpahin," highlighting one author of the manuscripts' contents.

In a press release titled "The Mexican Government Recovers the Códice Chimalpahin" [El gobierno de México recupera el Códice Chimalpahin], INAH announced these details:

These invaluable documents were acquired by INAH, last May 20th, from the Bible Society in London, which had held them since the nineteenth century. Their acquisition builds the Mexican bibliographical patrimony and represents the first repatriation of a foundational document for the nation, an example of the country's historical and cultural patrimony.

[Estos documentos invaluables fueron adquiridos por el INAH, el pasado 20 de mayo, a la Sociedad Bíblica de Londres, que los poseía desde el siglo XIX. Su adquisición incrementa el patriomonio bibliográfico mexicano y representa la primera repatriación de un documento fundacional de la nación, patrimonio histórico y cultural del país.] (INAH 2014)

Scholars and politicians alike have now recognized the importance of these three volumes to Mexican historiography and cultural identity by ensuring their return to a Mexican institution. In this sense, the repatriation of the "Códice Chimalpahin" foregrounds the foundational role of these materials in the Mexican cultural archive.

In many ways, the archivo (archive) has maintained the resonance of its etymological roots in the Greek arkheion (residency of the magistrates) by bringing to mind a building that houses public records in the service of government (Corominas 1961, 59). Joan Corominas, the great philologist of Spanish, indicated that the term entered Castilian vocabulary in 1490, serendipitously just two years before Columbus's first voyage. The introduction of "archive" as a term and a process into the language of the Catholic monarchs would become intimately connected with the reality of governing the distant territories they and their heirs came to possess. The state archives, first at Simancas and then later in Seville, were established to house the mountains of papers produced in the governance of the vast Spanish Empire. Record-keeping was both a product of empire and a factor in its governance.

Of course, grand state institutions were not the only archives during the period of Spain's rule over the Americas. There were also local archives, in small towns and cities throughout the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. This chapter addresses an archive on yet a smaller scale, though tremendously significant nonetheless: Alva Ixtlilxochitl's native archive. By "native archive," I refer to the knowledge native communities collected in an effort to preserve their connection to the pre-Hispanic past in the context of European domination. Just as Corominas links the archive to public power and office holders, the native archive contained knowledge preserved by the power-holders of the native communities as links between oral and written traditions both before and after the arrival of the Spaniards.

Alva Ixtlilxochitl's archive of native pictorial and alphabetic texts offers an example of the physical genealogy of knowledge about the pre-Columbian world in Mexico. In that sense this archive also works as a theoretically potent image for thinking about the archive as an institution and an intellectual endeavor. The concept of the archive has been a touchstone for influential work on colonial Spanish American literature (González Echevarría 1998 [1990]; Higgins 2000; More 2013). While commenting on Corominas's entry for "archive," mentioned above, Roberto González Echevarría condenses the central argument of Myth and Archive: "Power, secrecy and law stand at the origin of the Archive" (1998 [1990], 31). Anna More (2013) focuses on the formation and articulation of what she calls a "creole archive" in the works of don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, where Sigüenza positions himself as a privileged interpreter of material history related to the native past and thus a founding voice in patriotic Mexican history. Antony Higgins is also interested in the role of native knowledge in creole writings; in his study of Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren (1696–1763) and another neo-Latin poet, Rafael Landívar (1731–1793), he posits that "creole intellectuals constitute a body of knowledge as a theoretical ground for their claims to authority and power" and that this body of knowledge emphasizes the history of the native inhabitants as a means of differentiating the creoles from the Spaniards (2000, ix–x). In the case of Eguiara y Eguren, Sigüenza's collection of native writings was central to the eighteenth-century writer's scholarly authority.

In these studies, the power associated with the archive is aligned with the European elite. My invocation of "archive" here attempts to pull the embedded discussion of power and authority away from a strictly creole or European social and discursive context. Approaching Alva Ixtlilxochitl's collection of Indian texts as a "native archive" places the emphasis on the ways in which the native community and a native scholar established not only a corpus of materials that would become foundational to Mexican historiography, but also a means of interpreting those materials and giving them meaning and authority in colonial Mexico. During his lifetime, Alva Ixtlilxochitl amassed a large collection of pictorial and alphabetic texts. He also consulted with elders from native communities and documented the stories they possessed from pre-Hispanic and conquest-era Mexico. This collection offers us an example not of an archive directly generated by viceregal power but one that represented the perspective and concerns of the native landed elite...