PhD candidate in History Clio Isaacson presented a conference paper at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), held in January in Chicago.
As part of the panel “Women, Bodies, and Social Control,” Clio’s presentation examined portrayals of elite Spanish women in seventeenth-century Nahuatl-language histories. Her paper argued that colonial Nahua writers transferred ideas about the historical authority of elite Nahua women to Spanish queens, nuns, and virreinas. These women were depicted as holding authority comparable to pre-Hispanic Nahua noblewomen and were used to make political points, much as elite Nahua women functioned as key political symbols in narratives of the pre-Hispanic past. Notably, these portrayals bore little resemblance to how Nahua writers described Spanish women they actually interacted with, who were not treated with the same reverence.
Clio's dissertation is entitled “Women of the Nahuatl Annals: Writing the Lives of Women in Late Pre-Hispanic and Early Colonial Mexico.” It deals with how colonial Nahua writers who wrote Nahuatl-language histories using the newly-introduced Latin alphabet included women in their telling of the past. By moving beyond sources created either by Spaniards or by Nahuas working under Spanish instruction, it provides a more complex depiction of how Nahua women were perceived in their own communities, particularly in relation to male-dominated areas like politics and war.
Congratulations, Clio!