The Book of the Dead from Huexotzinco (1619-1640)

The Book of the Dead from Huexotzinco (El libro de los difuntos) is a Nahuatl-language death registry maintained by the Indigenous people of Huexotzinco, Mexico, between 1619 and 1640. On its fragile vellum pages are the names of over twenty-five hundred Indigenous men, women, and children who succumbed to the waves of epidemic disease that followed the Spanish invasion and conquest of Mexico. The registry was created during a "golden age" of Nahuatl record-keeping, when the Nahua were integrated enough into colonial systems to meet the administrative demands of the Spanish Church, yet still rooted in their own cultural traditions, recording deaths in Nahuatl with classifications that reflected their own cultural understanding of death and memory. By transcribing and translating the registry for the first time, this work offers a rare, intimate look at life and death in a colonial Nahua community (altepetl) during the devastating epidemics of seventeenth-century Mexico.