Black Imaginaries and Nahua Rhetoric in Colonial Mexico: Diario de Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin

Abstract

Abstract In 1612, Chalca historian Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, Mexico’s most prolific Indigenous writer, documented the execution of thirty-five Black and mulatto people. The group of twenty-eight men and seven women was accused of scheming against the Spanish colonial government, threatening to riot, and plotting to “blacken” the population of New Spain by killing Spaniards and forcing racial mixing. Attending to the semantic and morpho-syntactic structure of Nahuatl, this article proposes a linguistic analysis to recontextualize Chimalpahin’s retelling of the alleged plot and the fears of a Black uprising in colonial Mexico from an Indigenous perspective. At stake is how the plurivocal structure of the Nahua archive allows for the inscription of Blackness and racialized subjectivities in colonial Mexico while challenging the claims to an absolute truth imposed by the Spanish.