About
I am a Ph.D. candidate and Rackham Predoctoral Fellow in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, specializing in colonial Latin American and Indigenous studies. My research explores how sixteenth‑ and seventeenth‑century Nahua (Aztec) historians fashioned alternative political narratives in response to Spanish imperial rule. Working across Spanish and Nahuatl languages and both alphabetic and pictorial forms of writing, I study Nahua texts not simply as remnants of a lost civilization but as theoretical interventions that engage fundamental categories such as sovereignty, law, property and the justice of war.
My dissertation, Politicizing the Past: Nahua Historiography under Spanish Rule, argues that Nahua authors like Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc and Cristóbal del Castillo centered war, rebellion and massacre as transformative forces in pre‑Hispanic political life in order to critique colonial narratives that sought to naturalize Spanish conquest. By staging a three‑way dialogue among Nahua historians, Spanish authors and the pictorial and alphabetic sources on which they both drew, my project shows how Indigenous writers engaged European political ideas and offers new insights into the genealogy of modern concepts.
