{"product_id":"aztecs-at-independence","title":"Aztecs at Independence","description":"Nahuatl-speaking women and men left last wills in their own tongue during an era when the written tradition of their language was generally assumed to have ended. Describing their world in testaments clustered around epidemic cycles, they responded to profound changes in population, land use, and local governance with astonishing vibrancy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Aztecs at Independence\u003c\/i\u003e offers the first internal ethnographic view of these central Mexican indigenous communities in the critical transitional time of Independence. Miriam Melton-Villanueva uses previously unknown Nahuatl-language sources—primarily last wills and testaments—to provide a comprehensive understanding of indigenous societies during the transition from colonial to postcolonial times. The book describes the cultural life of people now called Nahuas or Mexicas in the nineteenth century—based on their own words, their own written records. The book uses previously unknown, unstudied, and untranslated indigenous texts to bring Nahua society into history, fleshing out glimpses of daily life in the early nineteenth century. Thus, \u003ci\u003eThe Aztecs at Independence\u003c\/i\u003e describes life at the most local level: Nahua lineages of ritual and writing, guilds and societies, the people that take turns administering festivals and attending to the last wishes of the dying.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Interwoven with personal stories and memory, \u003ci\u003eThe Aztecs at Independence \u003c\/i\u003einvites a general audience along on a scholarly journey, where readers are asked to imagine Nahua concepts and their contemporary meanings that give light to modern problems.","brand":"University of Arizona Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57257526067544,"sku":"9780816546978","price":34.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/aztecs-at-independence","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}