ABSTRACT
No eyewitness accounts by Native peoples regarding the fall of the grand imperial capital of Mexico Tenochtitlan in 1521 were written. Moreover, the Spanish loan word conquista was never used in the Native-language writings of the era. That is not to say that Indigenous record keeping ceased upon the invasion by the Spaniards. On the contrary, their pictorial records continued apace, soon to be complemented and then eventually supplanted by alphabetic writing. In the 1610s, Chimalpahin, the master Nahua historian of early Mexico, took it upon himself to collect and “write anew,” as he said, the many extant histories. Deities, dynasties, and battles are the recurring themes over the centuries, and Native record keeping persisted in spite of but more likely because of the loss of Aztec sovereignty.
