In Nahua Horizons Stear draws our attention to Nahua futurities, ways in which Nahua communities and individuals interpreted and defined their futures in the wake of the trauma of Spanish invasion and colonization. Engaging the work of a range of Indigenous scholars and scholarship, this book enhances our understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Nahua pictorial and alphabetic texts by showing how Nahua writers envision a future-oriented representation of Indigenous culture and society and persuade their communities to act to create that reality.Amber Brian, author of Alva Ixtlilxochitls Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico
Nahua Horizons is an erudite analysis of the different ways that Nahuas deployed the written word, both pictographic and the Roman alphabet, to chart a way into the future on their own terms. With fresh approaches to a series of canonical Nahua materials, Stear shows how writing was a crucial tool for Nahuas to strategically shape and respond to specific contexts, guide their people, and envision their future. This is exactly what one would hope the new generation of Nahua studies scholars would do: Nahua Horizons generously builds on the exceptional scholarship of previous generations, provides sensitive and expert readings of Nahuatl-language materials, and pushes the field forward in a way that insists on Nahua self-determination.Kelly McDonough, author of Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them
