Mesoamerica

Primary Sources On this Website

• Aztec Slaves (16th century)

Primary Sources Elsewhere

• Phillips, Jr., Henry. “Notes upon the Codex Ramirez, with a Translation of the Same.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 21, no. 116 (1884).
• Sahagún, Bernardino de. General History of the Things of New Spain by Fray Bernardino De Sahagún: The Florentine Codex. Translated by Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson. Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1953.
• Sandoval, Alonso de, S.J. Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De instauranda Aethiopum salute. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Nicole von Germeten. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008. 
• Townsend, Camilla. “What in the World Have You Done to Me, My Lover? Sex, Servitude, and Politics among the Pre-Conquest Nahuas as Seen in the Cantares Mexicanos.” The Americas 62 (2006): 349-389.

Selected Bibliography

• Anderson, Arthur J. O. “The Institution of Slave-Bathing.” Gedenkschrift Walter Lehmann 7, no. 2 (1982): 81-92.
• Balderas, Ximena Chávez. “The Offering of Life: Human and Animal Sacrifice at the West Plaza of the Sacred Precinct, Tenochtitlan.” PhD diss., Tulane University, 2019.
• Bennett, Herman. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
• Clendinnen, Inga. “The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society.” Past and Present 107 (1985): 44-89.
• Hassig, Ross. “The Famine of One Rabbit: Ecological Causes and Social Consequences of a Pre-Columbian Calamity.” Journal of Anthropological Research 37 (1981): 172-182.
• Houston, Stephen, David Stuart, and Karl Taube. “Dishonor.” In The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya, 202-226. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.
• Lockhart, James. The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
• Martínez, María Elena. “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico.” The William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2004 2004).
• Millerhauser, John. “Debt as a Double-Edged Risk: A Historical Case from Nahua (Aztec) Mexico.” Economic Anthropology 4 (2017): 263-275.
• Offner, Jerome. “The Future of Aztec Law.” In Legal Encounters on the Medieval Globe, edited by Elizabeth Lambourn, 1-32. Kalamazoo: Arc Humanities Press, 2017.
• Owensby, Brian. “How Juan and Leonor Won their Freedom: Litigation and Liberty in Seventeenth-Century Mexico.” Hispanic American Historical Review 85.1 (2005): 39-79.
• Saburo, Sugiyama. Human Sacrifice, Militarism, and Rulership: Materialization of State Ideology at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, Teotihuacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Seijas, Tatiana. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
• Seijas, Tatiana, and Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva. “The Persistence of the Slave Market in Seventeenth-Century Central Mexico.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 37, no. 2 (2016): 307-33.
• Shadow, Robert D., and María J. Rodríguez V. “Historical Panorama of Anthropological Perspectives on Aztec Slavery.” In Arqueología del norte y del occidente de México: Homenaje al Doctor J. Charles Kelley, edited by Barbro Dahlgren de Jordán and María de los Dolores Soto de Arechavaleta, 299-323. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995. 
• Sierra Silva, Pablo Miguel. Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531-1706.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Smith, Michael E. The Aztecs. 3rd ed. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Especially pp. 141-142.
• “Special Section: Recent Archaeological Research at the Moon Pyramid, Teotihuacan.” Ancient Mesoamerica 18, no. 1 (2007): 107-190.
• Townsend, Camilla. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
• Townsend, Camilla. “Slavery in Precontact America.” In The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 2, AD 500 – AD 1420, ed. Craig Perry, David Eltis, Stanley Engerman, and David Richardson, 553-570. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
• Villa-Flores, Javier. “‘To Lose One’s Soul’: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain.” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 3 (2002): 435-68.
• Zavala, Silvio. Los esclavos indios en Nueva España.  México: Colegio Nacional, 1967.
• Zeuske, Michael. “The Rise of Atlantic Slavery in the Americas.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery Throughout History, ed. Damian Pargas and Juliane Schiel. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. This book is open-access.

Contributors

Carolyn Arena, Hannah Barker, Elizabeth Boone, Jennifer Rodriguez, Tatiana Seijas, Michael Smith, John Verano