Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives

By Jongsoo Lee and Galen Brokaw

Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives presents an in-depth, highly nuanced historical understanding of this major indigenous Mesoamerican city from the conquest through the present. The book argues for the need to revise conclusions of past scholarship on familiar topics, deals with current debates that derive from differences in the way scholars view abundant and diverse iconographic and alphabetic sources, and proposes a new look at Texcocan history and culture from different academic disciplines.

Contributors address some of the most pressing issues in Texcocan studies and bring new ones to light: the role of Texcoco in the Aztec empire, the construction and transformation of Prehispanic history in the colonial period, the continuity and transformation of indigenous culture and politics after the conquest, and the nature and importance of iconographic and alphabetic texts that originated in this city-state, such as the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa Quinatzin, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles. Multiple scholarly perspectives and methodological approaches offer alternative paradigms of research and open a needed dialogue among disciplines—social, political, literary, and art history, as well as the history of science.

This comprehensive overview of Prehispanic and colonial Texcoco will be of interest to Mesoamerican scholars in the social sciences and humanities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Jul 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781607322849

Book preview

Texcoco

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Texcocan Studies Past and Present

DOI: 10.5876_9781607322849.c000

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JONGSOO LEE AND GALEN BROKAW

From the conquest through the present, Texcoco, best known as the home of the famous King Nezahualcoyotl, has been an important topic of research on Prehispanic and colonial Mexico. Numerous Texcocan leaders figure prominently in chronicles and histories of ancient Mexico: from the legendary Chichimec conqueror Xolotl to Nezahualcoyotl prior to the conquest and from Cortés Ixtlilxochitl through Carlos Ometochtzin and Hernando Pimentel Ixtlilxochitl during the colonial period. These histories frequently describe Texcoco as an enlightened city that developed highly advanced and efficient political and legal systems. Moreover, they often eulogize Texcoco as the home of a unique Prehispanic artistic and literary tradition supported and exemplified most notably by Nezahualcoyotl (1402–72).

The scholars who study Prehispanic and colonial Texcoco are fortunate in that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources are abundant and diverse. The rich and wide-ranging corpus of colonial writings on Texcoco includes pictorial and alphabetic texts painted and written by Europeans, Texcocan and non-Texcocan mestizos, and indigenous and non-indigenous Texcocans. However, the texts produced by these groups reflect the particular interests and ideological perspectives derived from their positions in colonial society and the motives that informed their projects. Among the earliest available sources on Texcoco are the works of Spanish friars, such as the Memoriales by Fray Toribio de Benavente (1971), more commonly known as Motolinia. In his treatment of Prehispanic Mexico, Motolinia does not document the entire history and culture of Prehispanic Texcoco, but he refers repeatedly to Texcocan religion, politics, and the legal system. The historical work of the Franciscan Andrés de Olmos has been lost, but it informs later writings by Gerónimo de Mendieta (1971), Juan de Torquemada, and Alonso de Zorita (Baudot 1995: 75–81). In the Primeros memoriales (Sahagún 1997), Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, who spent several years in the Texcocan city of Tepepulco, records Prehispanic religious rituals and practices and includes a brief treatment of Texcocan dynastic genealogy, from the Prehispanic ruler Quinatzin Tlaltecatzin to the colonial don Hernando Pimentel. This book was later incorporated in several books of the Florentine Codex (Sahagún 1950–82). Among the Spanish chroniclers, Juan de Torquemada (1975 [1615]), who in his Monarquía indiana records in detail the genealogical succession of Texcocan kings and the major achievements of each from Xolotl to Cortés Ixtlilxochitl, was able to consult a number of pictorial and alphabetic sources available in the seventeenth century; this history is very similar to that of the native Texcocan chroniclers.

The most important pictorial and alphabetic texts were produced in Texcoco itself. From the mid-sixteenth century to the early seventeenth century, native Texcocan tlacuiloqueh (scribes) painted texts such as the Códice Xolotl (1996 [1951]), the Mapa Quinatzin (Aubin 1886a), the Mapa Tlotzin (Aubin 1886b), and the Códice Ixtlilxochitl (1976). Along with these pictorial sources, two major alphabetic texts record almost the entire history of Prehispanic and colonial Texcoco: Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles (Alva Ixtlilxochitl 1997 [1600–25]) and Juan Bautista Pomar’s Relación geográfica de Texcoco (Pomar 1993 [1582]). In these sources, Texcocan history begins with the arrival of several Chichimec groups in the basin of central Mexico 300 years before the Spanish Conquest.

The legendary Chichimec leader Xolotl conquered most of the basin and settled down alongside the Toltec descendants already living in the area. After settling his people, Xolotl distributed land to other Chichimec groups that arrived later and helped them build their cities. He also gave his daughters in marriage to the leaders of these groups to serve as the founding mothers of their dynasties, thereby cementing political relationships. At the end of the thirteenth century, Quinatzin Tlaltecatzin, who according to the Texcocan sources was a great-grandson of Xolotl, founded a small village in Oztoticpac that would later become Texcoco. Xolotl bequeathed vast lands to the Texcocan kings, and they became the dominant political power in the basin. In the 1410s, however, Tezozomoc of Azcapotzalco conquered Texcoco. In spite of this defeat, around 1430 an alliance with Tenochtitlan allowed Texcoco to reemerge as the dominant city-state in the basin. Nezahualcoyotl regained control over the basin and joined with Tenochtitlan to form the Aztec empire. However, when the Spaniards arrived, Texcoco, which had been Tenochtitlan’s closest ally, sided with the Spaniards. The Texcocan ruler who came to be known as Cortés Ixtlilxochitl appears as the most important figure in the Texcocan history of the conquest. Cortés Ixtlilxochitl’s direct descendant, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, is enthusiastic in portraying his ancestor as a colonial hero and a religious apostle who embraced Christianity and helped the Spaniards conquer Tenochtitlan.

Many other colonial texts originate from cities near, or subject to, Texcoco. Several pictorial codices—such as the Codex en Cruz (1981) from Chiauhtla, the Tira de Tepechpan (1978), the Códice de Tepetlaoztoc (1992), and the Códice de Xicotepec (1995)—and several alphabetic texts, such as the Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: México (1982–88) from Acolman, Tepechpan, Teotihuacan, Coatepec, and Cempoala, provide information on Texcocan history that corroborates much of what appears in the sources from Texcoco itself. However, in many cases they also present conflicting accounts. These sources are particularly useful in assessing the nature of Texcoco’s alleged political dominance in the Acolhua region, which Texcocan authors’ pictorial and alphabetic texts attempt to document. In fact, some of these sources explicitly deny that Texcoco ever dominated the eastern basin of Mexico.

Most of the other historical accounts relevant to the history of Texcoco come from its closest ally, Tenochtitlan. Several pictorial sources, such as the Codex Azcatitlan (1995) and the Codex Mexicanus (Menguin 1952), and alphabetic texts, such as the Anales de Tlatelolco (1948), Histoire du Mechique (1965), and Crónica mexicana (Tezozomoc 1987 [1878]), record Texcocan political and cultural events relevant to Mexica history. The Annals of Cuauhtitlan (1992) and the chronicles of Domingo Francisco Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin (1965, 1991), produced in Cuauhtitlan and Chalco, respectively, also record major political achievements of Texcocan rulers such as Nezahualcoyotl, Nezahualpilli, and Cortés Ixtlilxochitl.

The most important sources are the works produced by Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, who seems to have consulted many pictorial texts from Texcoco as well as other regions. Evidently, Alva Ixtlilxochitl actually collected numerous important pictorial documents, such as the Codex Xolotl and the Mapa Quinatzin, and alphabetic works, such as the Annals of Cuauhtitlan. His collection of manuscripts served as a source for later historians of Ancient Mexico. At some point after his death in the mid-seventeenth century, the contents of his library ended up in the possession of Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, and from that point on the study of Texcoco became an exclusively Creole project that romanticized the indigenous past as part of what would eventually become a nationalist discourse. Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s collection of books and manuscripts served as the basis for Sigüenza y Góngora’s history of Mexico, in which he further develops Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s treatment of the myth that the god Quetzalcoatl was really the apostle Saint Thomas by drawing a connection to the worship of an unknown or true god, a practice that, according to Alva Ixtlilxochitl, was instituted by Nezahualcoyotl (Sigüenza y Góngora 1995: 52–53).

Subsequently, Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s library passed into the hands of the Italian Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci and then to Mariano Fernández de Echeverría y Veytia. Boturini followed Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Toltec chronology, and he reproduced the Quetzalcoatl–St. Thomas myth drawing from Alva Ixtlilxochitl and others (Boturini Benaduci 1990 [1949]: 242). Veytia recorded Prehispanic history primarily based on Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles. His history of Prehispanic Mexico exhibits a Texcocan-centric perspective through the death of Nezahualcoyotl (Veytia 1944). Another eighteenth-century historian, Francisco Clavijero, seems to have used Alva Ixtlixochitl’s manuscripts as primary sources in the composition of his Storia antica del Messico (Clavijero 1780–81), translated into Spanish as Historia antigua de México in 1826, which records the same trajectory of Prehispanic history up through the death of Nezahualcoyotl followed by Veytia and other Texcocan-centric chroniclers. He begins with the Toltec settlement in the basin and then narrates in detail the history of the area from the arrival of Xolotl through Nezahualcoyotl’s reign (ibid.: 48–116). Like Veytia, however, after the death of Nezahualcoyotl, Clavijero’s history takes on a Mexica perspective.

From the end of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century, Texcoco gained even more prominence in the nationalist discourse of Mexican historiography as Creole intellectuals adopted the indigenous past as part of a project to construct and disseminate a national heritage that would distance them from Spain. Nineteenth-century Mexican intellectuals such as Carlos María Bustamante celebrated the political and cultural systems of Prehispanic Texcoco as described in Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles and its derivatives to promote their vision of Mexican independence. Bustamante published a portion of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s work titled Tezcoco en los últimos tiempos de sus antiguos reyes (Bustamente 1970 [1827]), presenting the Texcocan king Nezahualcoyotl as the model political leader for the newly independent nation.

The North American historian William H. Prescott also contributed to this nationalization of Texcoco’s indigenous past. His famous book, History of the Conquest of Mexico (Prescott n.d. [1839]: 99–116), which was translated into Spanish in the mid-nineteenth century and became one of the most popular books among Mexican historians of the period, exalted Nezahualcoyotl’s Texcocan political, religious, and cultural system as an island of civilization and refinement surrounded by the barbarous and sanguinary Mexicas. In the second half of the nineteenth century, José Fernando Ramírez, who studied the library of the French scholar Joseph Maurius Alexis Aubin, reintroduced to Mexico the two major pictorial texts, Mapa Quinatzin and Mapa Tlotzin (de La Torre Villar 2001: 104–7). In addition, he studied in depth Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles. These studies later served as a fundamental source for the editions prepared by Alfredo Chavero (1891–92). During this period, another Mexican historian, José María Vigil, also published a biography of Nezahualcoyotl that presented him as a national hero (Vigil 1957). In the field of literary studies, José Joaquín Pesado incorporated Nahua literature into Mexico’s nationalist literary tradition through the publication of a collection of Prehispanic poems titled Las Aztecas (Pesado 1998 [1854]). In this collection, Pesado presents Nezahualcoyotl as a symbolic figure of the Prehispanic literary tradition.

Although in many cases the historical investigations produced during this period are more relevant for understanding nineteenth-century Mexican nationalism than Prehispanic history, the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth also saw the publication of editions of important primary texts from the colonial period that made it easier for scholars to conduct research in this field. In 1886 (a and b), Aubin published studies and re-drawings of the Mapa Quinatzin and the Mapa Tlotzin. In 1891–92, Alfredo Chavero published for the first time in Mexico the collected works of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl under the title Obras históricas. And in 1905, Francisco del Paso y Troncoso published the Papeles de Nueva España, which include the Relaciones geográficas from the Texcocan region (Paso y Troncoso 1905).

The increased availability of these primary sources laid the foundation for the expansion and diversification of Texcocan studies in the twentieth century. The Mexican Revolution awakened the interest in indigenous culture and history, and the field witnessed the emergence of a new generation of scholars, including such figures as Manuel Gamio, Alfonso Caso, Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, Robert Barlow, and Rubén Campos. This group’s main research interests generally centered on Tenochtitlan and other Prehispanic cities such as Teotihuacan, but in one way or another they contributed directly or indirectly to the study of Texcoco as well. Jiménez Moreno (1954–55) contextualized Texcocan history in the broader historical context of the basin through a comparison with the city-states of other regions, such as Culhuacan, Tenayuca, Tenochtitlan, and Cuitlahuac. Based on Texcocan sources, Caso (1966) published a Texcocan dynastic history beginning with the first Chichimec leader, Xolotl. Barlow (1994 [1950]) found the lost third leaf of the Mapa Quinatzin and published a detailed interpretation of this pictorial text. Campos (1936) developed a theoretical basis for modern Mexican literature as a mestizo discourse; for him, the Texcocan king Nezahualcoyotl is the most representative figure of Prehispanic literature.

The second half of the twentieth century through the present has produced a new wave of editions of alphabetic and pictorial texts from Texcoco and interpretations of them. Charles Dibble published modern editions of the Códice Xolotl (1996 [1951]) and the Codex en Cruz (1981), along with accompanying interpretations. Dibble’s study of the Codex Xolotl was later supplemented by Marc Thouvenot (1988), who provided a more in-depth graphic reading of this codex. The publication of other pictorial sources, along with interpretative analyses, includes the Códice Ixtlilxochitl (1976) by Jacqueline de Durand-Forest, the Tira de Tepechpan (1978) by Xavier Noguez, the Códice de Tepetlaoztoc (1992) by Perla Valle, the Códice de Xicotepec (1995) by Guy Stresser-Pean, and the Mapa Quinatzin by Luz María Mohar Betancourt (2004). These publications have contributed significantly to the field of Texcocan studies, not only because they include analyses along with the pictorial texts but also because they facilitate access by other scholars to a corpus of pictorial sources available previously only to those with the means to travel to the various archives and libraries where they were kept.

During this period, historians have also published new editions of major Texcocan alphabetic texts. Edmundo O’Gorman (1997 [1975]) produced an edition of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles, with an introduction that immediately became indispensible for Texcocan studies. O’Gorman’s introduction includes a biography of Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a historical chronology of ancient Mexico based on his chronicles, an analysis of the available manuscripts and the order in which the texts were composed, and a bibliography of relevant sources (ibid.). René Acuña also published the Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI: México (1982–88) from the Texcocan region: Teotihuacan, Acolman, Tepechpan, Tepepulco, and Cempoala.

In addition to the publication and textual analysis of alphabetic and pictorial documents by historians, in the 1960s archaeologists began studying Texcoco as well. William T. Sanders (1965, 1970) conducted archaeological research into issues such as urbanization, land availability, and population density in major cities in the Teotihuacan Valley, such as Acolman, Otompan, Teotihuacan, and Tepechpan. His pioneering work established the initial archaeological and ecological context of Teotihuacan that would inspire later studies of this region. While Sanders focused on the Teotihuacan Valley, which was subordinate to Texcoco, Jeffrey Parsons (1971) studied the demographic and political configurations of the entire Texcocan region from the early classic period through the time of the Spanish Conquest. Subsequently, Thomas Charlton, Susan Toby Evans, and Elizabeth Brumfiel contributed further archaeological studies of the Texcocan area. Charlton, who participated in Sanders’s project, has focused on the major Texcocan city of Otompan, publishing work individually as well as with Deborah Nichols and Cynthia Otis Charlton (Charlton 1973; Charlton, Nichols, and Charlton 2000). Evans initially excavated Cihuatecpan, a village located in the Teotihuacan Valley, focusing on social stratification from commoners to nobles; later, she took up Sanders’s Teotihuacan Valley project and edited a number of reports and articles with him (Evans 1988; Evans and Sanders 2000). While Charlton and Evans focused on the Teotihuacan Valley, Brumfiel’s (1980) work collecting surface data inside the basin at the major Texcocan city-state of Huexotla contributed to a better understanding of agricultural and commercial activities prior to the Spanish conquest.

In the ethnohistorical study of the Texcocan area, numerous scholars such as Charles Gibson, Nigel Davies, Víctor Castillo Farreras, Frederic Hicks, and Jerome Offner have also made valuable contributions. Gibson (1956), a historian of the early colonial period, published an important article about the Acolhua region’s llamamiento system, which was based on Prehispanic labor draft practices. Davies (1980: 42–71, 1987: 42–47) pointed out that Texcocan sources exaggerated Texcoco’s political role during Prehispanic times and challenged the idea that there existed a Texcocan empire, as described in these sources and accepted by most scholars since the colonial period. Castillo Farreras (1972) has studied all of the pictorial representations of Nezahualcoyotl published in pictorial texts. While these scholars have dealt with Texcocan ethnographic history as one component of the larger Aztec empire and Nahua culture in the Basin of Mexico, Hicks and Offner have focused mainly on Texcoco itself and its neighboring cities. Hicks (1978, 1982, 1984a, 1984b) has published a series of articles about the Prehispanic Texcocan tribute system and its political development before and after the conquest. Most recently, in collaboration with Barbara Williams he published a facsimile version of the Códice Vergara (2011) from Tepetlaoztoc, a town of the Texcocan region. Offner’s Law and Politics in Aztec Texcoco (Offner 1983) was the first book ever published that focused exclusively on Prehispanic Texcoco, and his innovative interdisciplinary approach employs a perspective informed by the anthropology of law.

In addition to archaeological and historical research and the publication of primary historical texts, scholars also began translating and studying Nahuatl literary discourses; in these discourses, Texcoco acquires singular importance in Prehispanic culture. Ángel María Garibay K. (1993 [1964]) translated into Spanish selections from the collections of Nahuatl poems known as the Cantares mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs (1985) and the Romances de los señores de la Nueva España (1993), which was attached as an appendix to Juan Bautista Pormar’s Relación geográfica de Tezcoco. Garibay’s translations and analyses of Nahuatl songs initiated the modern study of Nahuatl poetry, and the Texcocan ruler Nezahualcoyotl is the most prominent figure in these poems. Somewhat later, John Bierhorst (1985, 2009) translated the entire corpus of these Nahuatl poems into English and drew very different conclusions about the nature of the texts and the figure of Nezahualcoyotl. These translations and their associated analyses gave rise to two different lines of research based on the two perspectives proposed, respectively, by Garibay and Bierhorst (see discussion below).

Since the 1990s, a new generation of scholars has benefited from the increasing availability of modern facsimiles and editions of pictorial and alphabetic texts. Susan Spitler (1998, 2000), for example, examines the colonial influence on the Mapa Tlotzin and the Mapa Quinatzin. Salvador Velazco (2003) studies Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s writings as a mestizo political and religious project designed to support requests for compensation from the Crown for service by Texcocan nobles. Patrick Lesbre (1998, 1999, 2008), a French scholar, has published a series of articles on the Codex Ixtlilxochitl, the Mapa Quinatzin, and Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles. Lesbre has analyzed not only the political, cultural, and religious systems of Prehispanic Mexico but also the changes these systems underwent after the conquest. Three books that focus exclusively on Texcoco and the Texcocan area have appeared more recently. In The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl: Pre-Hispanic History, Religion, and Nahua Poetry, Jongsoo Lee (2008) presents a detailed analysis of all aspects of Nezahualcoyotl and his city-state of Texcoco from a revisionist, postcolonial perspective grounded in a thorough reading of pictorial and alphabetic sources. In his book In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl, Eduardo Douglas (2010) analyzes the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa Tlotzin, and the Mapa Quinatzin to demonstrate how these texts employ a Prehispanic narrative form and style in an attempt to justify Texcoco’s political dominance and economic rights over neighboring cities in the eastern basin during the colonial period. While Lee and Douglas focus on Texcoco, Lori Boornazian Diel turns her attention to Tepechpan by analyzing the political motives of the Tira de Tepechpan. In The Tira de Tepechpan: Negotiating Place under Aztec and Spanish Rule, Diel (2008) examines how this pictorial text negotiates Tepechpan’s own political status and autonomy before and after the conquest. Diel’s book makes a unique contribution to the study of Texcoco in that it examines the political relationship between the imperial centers of Tenochtitlan and Texcoco and their subject cities, such as Tepechpan, from the perspective of the latter. This subordinate perspective is important given the ideological maneuvering that was taking place in these cities’ colonial historiography.

The renewed interest in Texcoco has given rise to a number of debates derived from differences in the way scholars view the iconographic and alphabetic Texcocan sources discussed above. Some scholars accept more or less at face value the information these sources contain. Others have approached the sources with a certain amount of skepticism because of the ideological biases that informed their production in the colonial period. One of the most prominent debates in Texcocan studies has to do with the specific nature of Nezahualcoyotl’s Texcoco in relation to its neighboring city-states such as Tenochtitlan: whether Texcoco was an island of civilization in the midst of a violent and barbarous world. The essential question in this debate is whether the chronicles of Alva Ixtlilxochitl contain accurate descriptions of Prehispanic Texcocan cultural beliefs and practices or transform them to enhance Texcoco’s position in the colonial order.

The two different approaches to Nahuatl poetry represented by Garibay on the one hand and Bierhorst on the other help put this debate into focus. Garibay interpreted poems as expressions of a philosophy of peace and a religious monotheism, and he identified Nezahualcoyotl as a prominent figure in these compositions. This led many later scholars to identify Texcoco as a cultural center that developed an artistic and philosophical tradition different from that of most other city-states in the basin. Miguel León-Portilla, Garibay’s former student, used the analysis of the Nahuatl songs as the basis for corroborating and further developing the image inherited from Alva Ixtlilxochitl of a civilized, peace-loving Texcoco (León-Portilla 1967, 1972, 1986, 1992, 1996). León-Portilla also devised a method by which he identified the authors of the poems, among whom Nezahualcoyotl figures prominently, and he described them as sages, tlamatinime, who advocated and expressed through their poetry a peaceful philosophy that contrasted starkly with the violent militarism and human sacrifice practiced by Tenochtitlan. Following León-Portilla’s lead, numerous scholars—such as José Luis Martínez (1996 [1972]), Georges Baudot (1979), and Birgitta Leander (1976)—have further advanced this line of research. In addition, these studies have inspired numerous modern literary responses, such as Ernesto Cardenal’s (1992) indigenous poetry and Carlos Fuentes’s (1975) novel Terra Nostra.

On the other hand, a few scholars—such as Gordon Brotherston (1972), John Bierhorst (1985), and Amos Segala (1990)—have adopted a perspective on Nahuatl songs very different from that of León-Portilla and his followers. Brotherston and Bierhorst argue that identifying individual Nahuatl poets is impossible because the songs are collective compositions. They maintain that the notion of individual authorship is a European imposition that obscures the true nature of the songs. Contrary to the interpretation offered by León-Portilla, Segala argues further that the poems, including those attributed to Nezahualcoyotl, express the same religious and militaristic worldview as the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan. The debate on this issue appears explicitly in León-Portilla’s (1986, 2001) response to Bierhorst and Segala and in a rebuttal published by Segala (1992). In all of these studies, Nezahualcoyotl and the city-state of Texcoco appear as the main theme. Thus, regardless of the position one takes, the debate itself has contributed to a growing interest in the field.

Texcocan regionalism constitutes another topic of debate in Texcocan studies that is also linked to the way scholars read the available sources. The Códice Xolotl and Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s chronicles begin their Texcocan genealogies with the legendary Xolotl, but some scholars such as Davies doubt this figure’s historicity. Others, such as Lee, argue that Xolotl may have been the founding father of many other city-states in addition to Texcoco. Furthermore, disagreement exists on the role Texcoco played in the Tepanec-Mexica, which led to the formation of the Aztec empire. According to Texcocan sources, Nezahualcoyotl’s Texcoco saved Tenochtitlan from Azcapotzalco tyranny in the Tepanec War, and in so doing it gained a position of political superiority in the subsequent formation of the Aztec empire. The Mexica version of this war has Tenochtitlan coming to the aid of Texcoco.

These competing versions of Prehispanic history have produced two corresponding perspectives in modern research. Many scholars accept the idea that, up to the reign of Nezahualcoyotl, Texcoco was politically superior to Tenochtitlan or that the two city-states were political equals. Other researchers disregard the claims made in Texcocan sources as colonial propaganda and accept the Mexica version in which Texcoco was subordinate to Tenochtitlan. The issue in this case hinges on the extent to which the available evidence indicates Texcoco’s regional autonomy. The status of a city-state in the Prehispanic period informed its geopolitical boundaries and economic rights in the colonial order. Recent scholarship on Texcoco—such as that by Spitler, Velazco, Lesbre, Douglas, Lee, and Diel—notes that Texcocan sources produced during the colonial period romanticize and Europeanize the Prehispanic history of their hometown to bolster their claims to status in the colonial order.

The research reviewed above and the ongoing debates among scholars have expanded and enriched the field of Texcocan studies. This development of the field has also exposed a number of areas that demand further attention. Except for a few of the books mentioned above, the majority of research on Texcoco has appeared in broader studies of Aztec history and culture. Compared with the published research on the Mexica and the city-state of Tenochtitlan, the work on Texcoco is relatively minimal. In addition, most of the books published on Texcoco focus on Nezahualcoyotl and his political and legal system. Thus the field of Texcocan studies needs more book-length publications that focus on Texcoco in greater depth and breadth. For instance, no thorough analysis of Texcocan religion exists, and we lack in-depth research on colonial Texcocan leaders such as Cortés Ixtlilxochitl and Carlos