{
  "id": "fernando-de-alva-ixtlilxochitl",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and the Obras historicas",
  "summary": "A descendant of the ruling house of Texcoco, schooled at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco and in his last years interpreter of the viceregal Indian court, who wrote the Nahua past in Spanish from hieroglyphic paintings and from songs and papers he produced before the town council of Otumba. His work circulated in manuscript for nearly three centuries and was printed at Mexico only in 1891 and 1892, in a state centenary edition whose editor argues with his author in the footnotes.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "historiography",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "new-spain",
    "ethnography",
    "books",
    "biography",
    "mexico",
    "seventeenth-century"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colegio-de-santa-cruz-de-tlatelolco"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "juzgado-general-de-naturales"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "inca-garcilaso-de-la-vega"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "clavijero-disertaciones-1780"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "sahagun-relacion-del-autor"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "motolinia-historia-de-los-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "betanzos-suma-y-narracion-de-los-incas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "antonio-valeriano"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "munoz-camargo-historia-de-tlaxcala"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "alvarado-tezozomoc-cronica-mexicana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "codice-ramirez"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "chimalpahin-relaciones-de-chalco-amaquemecan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "pachacuti-yamqui-antiquities-of-peru"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "hernando-de-ribas"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who was Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl?",
    "What are the Obras historicas of Alva Ixtlilxochitl?",
    "Who wrote the history of Texcoco?",
    "Did the Spanish burn the picture-histories of Mexico?",
    "What happened to the archive of Nezahualpilli at Texcoco?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "He came of the lords of Texcoco, through the marriage of that house with dona Beatriz Papantzin, daughter of Cuitlahuac, the penultimate emperor of Mexico. He was born about 1568, was a pupil of the Colegio de Santa Cruz at Tlatelolco, in his last years held the post of interpreter of the Juzgado de indios, and died about 1648 at the age of eighty. The chain matters: a Nahua noble educated in the Franciscan college for the sons of the indigenous nobility ended as a sworn interpreter in the crown court established to hear Indian causes.",
      "sources": [
        "chavero-obras-historicas-notas-1891"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "His editor states the motive as well as the method, and the motive is not disinterested. From the class of his works it appears that he began to write out of study, following the interpretation of ancient paintings, and afterwards gave a more finished form to his writings while pursuing the restitution of his small lordship. The historian of Texcoco was a claimant in his own history.",
      "sources": [
        "chavero-obras-historicas-notas-1891"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The documentary base was produced in public and before a court of record. Ixtlilxochitl presented to the cabildo of Otumba \"las pinturas, cantos, y otros papeles y recados\" from which he drew his first works - a municipal council in New Spain used as the notarial witness that the pictorial and oral sources existed and said what he reported them to say.",
      "sources": [
        "chavero-obras-historicas-notas-1891"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The corpus is unstable and its shape is itself a scholarly question. The first work, apparently written about 1600, was the Relaciones historicas de la nacion tulteca; the second the Historia de los Senores Chichimecas, to which belong opuscules that sometimes circulate separately under titles such as Continuacion de la Historia de Mexico and Pintura de Mexico. Different old catalogues of his works exist - one from Boturini, who said he copied them in his own hand, another from Beristain, another from Clavijero - and Fernando Ramirez compared these catalogues with each other and with the manuscripts of the Archivo and the Museo and the Kingsborough collection.",
      "sources": [
        "chavero-obras-historicas-notas-1891"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "In his own voice Ixtlilxochitl measures what he has against what was lost. The things of which painting and history are still found, he writes, are all \"cifras en comparacion de las historias que mando quemar el primer arzobispo que fue de Mexico\" - mere ciphers beside the histories the first archbishop of Mexico ordered burned. The charge is made by a Nahua author, in Spanish, in a work addressed to the colonial public.",
      "sources": [
        "alva-ixtlilxochitl-obras-historicas-1891-1892"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The charge is contested inside the same edition, and the counter-case is worth stating at its strongest. In a note to that page the editor sides with Garcia Icazbalceta's defence of bishop Zumarraga: he does not deny that the bishop, like the first friars, destroyed paintings that came to hand as works of the devil, but he sets beside it Sahagun's statement that under Itzcoatl the Nahua lords themselves ordered all the paintings burned so that they should not fall to the common people, and the practice of burning the teocalli of a conquered town with the hieroglyphs kept in it - as, he says, the Tlaxcaltecs who accompanied Cortes did at Texcoco.",
      "sources": [
        "chavero-obras-historicas-notas-1891"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "In the second volume the same editor concedes that the evidence turns against his own defence. Quoting Juan Bautista Pomar's Relacion de Texcuco of 1582, he records that the paintings were burned when Cortes first entered Texcoco, in the royal houses of Nezahualpilzintli, in a great chamber that was \"el archivo general de sus papeles\", where all their ancient things were painted; Ixtlilxochitl says the burning was done by the Tlaxcaltecs with Cortes. Pomar adds that the hieroglyphs left in the hands of some principales were burned for fear of Zumarraga, lest he ascribe them to idolatry, at the time when don Carlos Ometochtzin, son of Nezahualpilzintli, stood accused of idolatry after baptism - and the editor writes that the first consequence to be drawn from the quotation is contrary to Zumarraga.",
      "sources": [
        "chavero-obras-historicas-notas-1891"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "Whatever the agency, the outcome is not in dispute between them: the official archive of the historical paintings of Texcoco was destroyed. The editor adds the loss that bears on every claim in the corpus - the hieroglyphic paintings are the best element that can be used in work of this kind, and it is regrettable that such paintings are not preserved, nor even enumerated, so that their importance might be judged. The pictorial evidence behind these histories cannot now be checked against them.",
      "sources": [
        "chavero-obras-historicas-notas-1891"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The printing has a frame of its own that a citation should carry. Tomo I, Relaciones, is dated Mexico 1891 and tomo II, Historia Chichimeca, Mexico 1892, both from the Oficina Tipografica de la Secretaria de Fomento, published and annotated by Alfredo Chavero. The title page states that the edition is made by agreement of President General Porfirio Diaz, to be presented as Mexico's homage to Christopher Columbus at the fourth centenary of the discovery of America. A seventeenth-century Nahua historian reached print as an instrument of a nineteenth-century state commemoration.",
      "sources": [
        "alva-ixtlilxochitl-obras-historicas-1891-1892"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Alva Ixtlilxochitl is usually met as a name in a list of indigenous chroniclers, or as a source quoted at second hand for the fall of Texcoco. What is set out here instead is the apparatus: the college and the court post that made him able to write, the lawsuit for a lordship that gave him a reason to, the cabildo of Otumba where he produced his pictorial sources on the record, and the state centenary edition through which nearly everything quoted from him has passed. It also does something a partisan account of either side avoids - it prints his accusation against the first archbishop of Mexico and, from the same edition, the editor's argument against it, and then the passage in the second volume where that editor concedes the evidence runs the other way. The reader gets the dispute, dated and attributed, rather than a verdict.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-11",
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    "name": "Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and the Obras historicas",
    "description": "A descendant of the ruling house of Texcoco, schooled at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco and in his last years interpreter of the viceregal Indian court, who wrote the Nahua past in Spanish from hieroglyphic paintings and from songs and papers he produced before the town council of Otumba. His work circulated in manuscript for nearly three centuries and was printed at Mexico only in 1891 and 1892, in a state centenary edition whose editor argues with his author in the footnotes.",
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    "citation": [
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