The Roses of Alahuiztlán

 

In December 1603 the Marquis of Montesclaros, viceroy of New Spain agreed to a request from the Indigenous people of Alahuiztlán (now Alahuixtlán in the west of the modern state of Guerrero). The Marquis had ordered that the entire population be moved from their existing homes to a location more convenient for officials to collect taxes and for priests to preach. Moreover, the houses that the people of Alahuiztlán had built for themselves were to be demolished to ensure that nobody lingered behind. Such forced locations were common in late 16^th-century and early 17^th-century Mexico. The native population, devastated by epidemics, had been reduced to such a level that the administrative convenience of Spanish officialdom trumped the attachment to ancestral villages.

 

The people of Alahuiztlán promptly petitioned the viceroy. In the midst of epidemics and death they had carefully tended a rose bush whose flowers were used to decorate their church. If the bush was not cared for it would die. Montesclaros ruled that one house should be spared from demolition so that two or three villagers could remain behind to tend to the rose.

 

The church of Alahuixtlán

In about 1521 three elders of the village of Noxtepec in northern Guerrero, travelled to Tenochtitlan, the defeated capital of the Aztec empire, to introduce themselves to their new overlord. The village leaders met Hernán Cortés himself, who told them that one of his lieutenants, Juan de Cabra would be their new lord. The Spaniards offered the elders Spanish food, but so disgusting was the European cooking that they could not eat it. They took it home and offered it to the men of Noxtepec, but none of them fancied it either. They also returned home with an instruction from Cabra to build a church to replace their prehispanic temple. The elders asked for time to do so and eventually finished the work in 1533. The church of St James the Apostle of Noxtepec stands there to this day.

 

The 16th-century church of Noxtepec

 

These two anecdotes are just two of many tales from the history of Guerrero recounted in my forthcoming book. The following is the University of New Mexico Press catalogue entry:

 

Indigenous Culture and Change in Guerrero,

Mexico, 7000 BCE to 1600 CE

Ian Jacobs

Until recently, Guerrero’s past has suffered from relative neglect by archaeologists and

historians. While a number of excellent studies have expanded our knowledge of certain

aspects of the region’s history or of particular areas or topics, the absence of a thorough

scholarly overview has left Guerrero’s significant contributions to the history of Mesoamericaand colonial Mexico greatly underestimated.

 

With Indigenous Culture and Change in Guerrero, Mexico, 7000 BCE to 1600 CE Ian Jacobs

at last puts Guerrero’s history firmly on the map of Mexican archaeology and history. The

book brings together a vast amount of cross-disciplinary information to understand the

deep roots of the Indigenous cultures of a complex region of Mexico and the forces that

shaped the foundations of colonial Mexico in the sixteenth century and beyond. This book

is particularly significant for its exploration of archaeological, Indigenous, and historical

sources.

April 1

384 pp.; 6 x 9; 33 halftones,

2 maps, 35 tables

$85.00 cloth

ISBN 978-0-8263-6586-6

$106.00 CAD

$85.00 webPDF

E-ISBN 978-0-8263-6587-3

 

 

And as immodest self-promotion, these comments will be on the back cover:

 

"A remarkable book, combining unusual ambition, meticulous research, and lucid analysis; in its pages, Guerrero morphs from a marginal hinterland of 'wild Mexico' into a dynamic entity, whose territory, peoples, trade, production and culture are vividly recreated."

--Alan Knight, author of Mexico: from the Beginning to the Spanish Conquest

 

“This is an ambitious, superbly researched, and significant reassessment of the history of Guerrero. Based on meticulous research, Ian Jacobs has written a deep history that foregrounds the formation of indigenous cultures and economies in Mesoamerican Guerrero over millennia, and their transformation during the first century after the Spanish invasion. This is an absorbing narrative that exposes searing destruction and displacement of indigenous peoples of the region under Spanish colonial rule, but also adaptation and resilience. It is a remarkable work and a major contribution to the field.”--Susan Deans-Smith, author of Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers - the Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico.