Jessica's History 465 Blog 2010-03-03 10:50:00

Chapter Seven of Indian Women in Early Mexico discusses the use of last wills and testaments in Mexica society. They were used by men and women alike to outline the inheritance of important family heirlooms and valuable possessions. The statistics given regarding these documents clearly show the unique situation of many Nahua people at the time, as they learned about Spanish culture and watched the effects of it on their own people.

One interesting aspect of these wills is their extensive use by women. In Spanish traditions (though not always in practice), women were not allowed to own property, but the Mexica valued the responsibilities of women, and the control of certain parts of land and possessions went along with their duties. Women usually left their wealth or holdings to their children, often to their daughters, in order to ensure that they would retain the rights promised them by the traditions of their people. The household goods that were often left to girls also helped teach them to value the traditional duties of a woman, and to expect the honor that their participation in society was supposed to give them.

The practice of writing wills was a Spanish one, and did not begin in Latin America until it was colonized. It would be easy to think, then, that the documents were drafted in order to please the conquistadors and conform to their society. But they were written in Nahuatl, which means they were meant for fellow natives to read and understand. It reminds me of the traditional Nahuatl dialogues, which were transcribed by a Dominican monk, but were intended for the education of the natives by their own leaders, and contained many praises of the old system, as well as references to the parallel gender system by which the Mexica society was structured. The wills, similarly, were a native adoption of a Spanish practice that they then used to serve their own motives, namely the preservation of traditions and society. The Spanish, after all, were vastly outnumbered by the natives in Latin America, so it was nearly impossible for them to spread their own culture as quickly as many people believe they did. They did not present a system that was infinitely better than the Mexica way of life, nor did they all spend much time trying to understand the native society. Consequently, the natives were able to retain much of their belief system, including their ideas about gender roles, by conforming the new Spanish practices to their traditional values.

The importance of these documents, then, comes both from their revelations about the preservation of gender and their revelations about the preservation of Nahua ideals in general. These natives were not ignorant or passive people. Though they are often portrayed as savages who practiced human sacrifice and were wiped out by the more educated Spanish, there were much broader motivations to their belief systems, based on their religion and their ideas about the order of the universe. Many of their attempts to pass these values through the generations were successful, which is why so much of the native culture remains prevalent in Latin America even in modern times.