Jeffres, Travis. "We Mexicas went everywhere in that land" : the Mexican Indian diaspora in the Greater Southwest, 1540-1680. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-gdz8-pp03
DescriptionBeginning with Hernando Cortés’s capture of Aztec Tenochtitlan in 1521, legions of “Indian conquistadors” from Mexico joined Spanish military campaigns throughout Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century. Scholarship appearing in the last decade has revealed the awesome scope of this participation—involving hundreds of thousands of Indian allies—and cast critical light on their motivations and experiences. Nevertheless this work has remained restricted to central Mexico and areas south, while the region known as the Greater Southwest, encompassing northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, has been largely ignored. This dissertation traces the movements of Indians from central Mexico, especially Nahuas, into this region during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and charts their experiences as diasporic peoples under colonialism using sources they wrote in their own language (Nahuatl). Their activities as laborers, soldiers, settlers, and agents of acculturation largely enabled colonial expansion in the region. However their exploits are too frequently cast as contributions to an overarching Spanish colonial project. This dissertation seeks to uncover underlying indigenous agendas and reveal what colonial service meant for native participants. Nahuatl sources demonstrate that activities typically portrayed as contributions to Spanish colonial causes reflected indigenous attempts to wrest land, privileges, and rights to self-governance from the colonial regime. Overall the project urges us to reconsider the extent to which colonial expansion into the early U.S.-Mexico borderlands was European. It also asks whether we have, by relying on European sources to write histories of nation-states, elided native peoples from key American stories and distorted the history of a transnational region vitally important to both Mexico and the United States today.