European Appropriation of Prehispanic Speeches: Reexamining the Huehuetlatolli as a Colonial Project

Abstract

The Nahuatl speeches known as huehuetlatolli have been studied primarily as a symbolic practice of Prehispanic Aztec morality and philosophy from the colonial period to the present. When the Spanish missionaries came to New Spain for their evangelical project, they needed to prove the Indians as capable and reasonable human beings who could be converted into Christians against their fellow Spaniards who despised the Indians as inferior creatures or barbarous savages. In this context, the Spanish priests presented the moral, philosophical, and religious behaviors that the speeches promoted as evidence of indigenous civility and intellectuality. Such a presentation of Indians, however, involved serious Europeanization of the speeches as the Spanish priests frequently modified and transformed the huehuetlatolli to make them similar to the content and style of European moral and religious speeches. This study traces how the Spanish priests transformed the huehuetlatolli by examining in detail not only the chronicles of Frays Andrés de Olmos and Bernardino de Sahagún who first collected the huehuetlatolli in Nahuatl and translatedthem into Spanish but also those of Frays Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan de Torquemada, and other chroniclers who took advantage of huehuetlatolli to promote their own colonial projects.