The Nahua: Language and Culture From the Sixteenth Century to the Present. By GalenBrokaw and PabloGarcía Loaeza, Denver: University Press of Colorado, 2024. xiv +297 pp. $32.95 (paperback). $29.95 ebook, ISBN: 9781646425785 (paperback), 9781646425792 (ebook)

This collection of essays begins with a dedication to the renowned scholar Joe Campbell, whose research on modern and classical Nahuatl—as the editors point out—has shaped generations of scholars both directly and indirectly. It is a fitting tribute that the volume as a whole and the chapters comprising it shuttle readily from the colonial era through the present day, offering readers analyses from a range of disciplinary perspectives (especially ethnohistorical, historical, linguistic, and literary) but with a consistent focus on matters of language, from linguistics and philology to translation and language revitalisation. The contributors provide succinct surveys of major scholarly approaches to their objects of study, giving readers a thorough sense of the current state of Nahua studies. In fact, many essays focus on topics that their authors have studied and published on for years, if not decades, which makes this volume a uniquely valuable snapshot of the discipline. Following a Foreword by Camilla Townsend, the introductory essay (Chapter 1) by editors Galen Brokaw and Pablo García Loaeza provides a broad historical overview of the Nahua since the colonial period through the lens of language, concluding with an outline of the development of scholarly studies of Nahuatl. Karen Dakin (Chapter 2) explains the historical diversification of Nahuatl from other Uto-Aztecan languages and argues that Eastern and Western branches of the language both ultimately influenced the Central forms recorded in the colonial period. In Chapter 3, Mercedes Montes de Oca offers a detailed study of diphrases, or semantic couplets, focusing on their use in place names. According to Montes de Oca, diphrases used to designate geographical, mythical, and conceptual spaces all play important roles in Nahuatl discourse. Rosa H. Yáñez Rosales examines documentation of Nahuatl from southern Jalisco and Colima, paying special attention to the legacy of twentieth-century priests and more recent scholarly fieldwork (Chapter 4). In a thoroughly interdisciplinary chapter (5), Magnus Pharao Hansen examines language surveys and censuses from 19th- and 20th-century Morelos, challenging the idea that the use of Nahuatl in the region declined over time since the colonial period and proposing instead that its speakers were victims of the violence of the Mexican Revolution. John F. Schwaller examines the practice of running in the Mexica world (Chapter 6), explaining the use of different words for running and their significance in the social and economic spheres as well as their role in festivals; the chapter concludes with a comparative discussion of the quotidian and ritual significance of running among the Hopi and the Rarámuri peoples. In Chapter 7, Mary L. Clayton examines the so-called Vocabulario trilingüe (held by the Newberry Library), a Spanish-Latin-Nahuatl dictionary based on the Spanish-Latin dictionary by Elio Antonio de Nebrija. Clayton details the different approaches to glossing used by the anonymous author—whom she proposes ‘was most likely a native speaker of Nahuatl’ (154)—to deal with new concepts in the dictionary, moving from instances in which there is simply no Nahuatl equivalent for entries from Nebrija's dictionary to equivalents based on creative approaches to the Spanish or Latin entries or both, sometimes resulting in interesting misunderstandings. Ben Leeming (Chapter 8) analyses an instance of Nahuatl religious literature beyond what was explicitly sanctioned and overseen by the clergy: a manuscript by Fabián de Aquino held by the Hispanic Society of America containing a contemptus mundi that, Leeming suggests, may be based on the Libro de la oración y meditación by Fray Luis de Granada. In a comparative study of the portrayal of notaries in Nahua Passion plays, Louise M. Burkhart (Chapter 9) suggests that the representation of notaries on stage both highlighted the social importance of literacy and offered an image of notaries as honest functionaries, even when their services were used in the sentencing of Christ. Chapter 10 provides an overview of ritual paper cutting in the Huasteca region. Alan R. Sandstrom and Pamela Effrein Sandstrom present some of their decades-long research on this practice, explaining its social and religious meaning and arguing that paper-figure arrays constitute a semasiographic communication system. The final chapter, by Kelly S. McDonough, is a transhistorical survey of Nahua intellectuals from the colonial period to the present day. McDonough emphasises how Indigenous intellectuals have employed diverse media, genres, and forums to preserve and promote their language and culture. Through the range of topics covered, the expertise of contributors, and its consistent grounding in questions of language, this volume eloquently conveys the breadth and vibrance of the field today. For anyone working on Nahuatl, this is an indispensable volume. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.