CHAPTER 6 INDIGENOUS LITERATURE FROM COLONIAL MESOAMERICA 247When our Lord Cortés first arrived with a crowd of white people, he came to our ñuu
chayu [town]. Then he came out to meet us and to name us. He received and named our
yya [ruler] don Diego Cortés Dzahui Yuchi.... The yya don Diego Cortés was baptized and, second, all the nobles were baptized
and, third, all the commoners were baptized....
... Then we lived together in peace with the white people, the great ones, and we
gave them a place to build the big church. (Sousa and Terraciano 2003:371)
Figure 6.16 A page from an eighteenth-century “primordial title,” from a Nahua village
called Santa María Tetelpan, which was used to help defend the village’s property in a land
dispute. The four men are supposed to be ancestors who founded the community. Coyoacan
Codex, Codex Indianorum 1.Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.