Southwestern Historical Quarterly

For the last two decades, Danna A. Levin Rojo, a professor of Mexican historiography at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Azcapotzalco in Mexico City, has conducted interdisciplinary research on northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. She has grounded her investigations in the application of historiographical analysis to such themes as interethnic relations and the role of indigenous groups during the late colonial and Mexican national periods in the region. Her research has led to a number of publications on a variety of topics from the Spanish colonial period to contemporary New Mexico. [End Page 427]

In this work, Levin Rojo offers an innovative explanation of the reification of Nuevo México, which she argues existed as an “imaginary world” (7) long before it emerged as a physical place roughly associated with the present-day state of New Mexico. She challenges conventional historiography, which holds that the northern expansion of Spaniards out of the Valley of Mexico was fueled primarily by such European fantasies as the existence of the Seven Cities of Cíbola, supposedly established by seven Portuguese bishops fleeing the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula.

Rather than European imaginings, Levin Rojo asserts that Spaniards were more significantly influenced by Nahua migration stories that told of a place of origin—”Yancuic Mexico, which can be translated as ‘the first, the original Mexico’; that is, Aztlan” (191). These migration stories became known to the Spaniards because of the tales told by Náhuatl speakers from the Valleys of Mexico and Puebla who participated in the exploration of northwestern New Spain and through representations in the numerous codices crafted in the aftermath of the conquest. According to the author, Spaniards willingly added Nahua knowledge to their own because they saw many similarities between Spanish society and the societies they encountered in the Valley of Mexico and surrounding areas. This sense of commonality with the conquered as perceived by the conquering Spaniards contributed to a situation in which it was possible for social and cultural exchange to take place as well as the appropriation of Nahua historical memory and the space it described.

The narrative of Nahua migration was particularly attractive to Spaniards because it held out the possibility that another Mexico-Tenochtitlan, perhaps even richer, lay far away to the northwest. Levin Rojo explains that the toponym Nuevo México is unique in all the lands Spain explored and occupied in the early colonial period. It alone incorporates “the name of an Amerindian place, the indigenous metropolis whose destruction made possible the birth of New Spain itself: Mexico-Tenochtitlan” (6). The author notes that among those Spaniards who placed the Mexica place of origin in Nuevo México (although not mentioning Aztlan by name) was Gaspar de Villagrá, the epic poet of the Juan de Oñate expedition.

In many ways this is an astounding piece of scholarship, combining elements of anthropology, ethnography, and documentary history. If it receives the wide readership it merits, Return to Aztlan should forever alter perceptions about the motives that spurred Spanish expansion into what is today the southwestern United States. [End Page 428]