In Tariacuri's Legacy: The Prehispanic Tarascan State, Helen Perlstein Pollard draws upon ethnohistoric documentation, ecological data, and archaeological research, including her own recent work in the region, to provide the first comprehensive overview of the Tarascan state, one of the two great political powers the Spanish encountered when they arrived in Mexico in the early sixteenth century. The Tarascans dominated western Mexico - in a state founded, according to legend, by the mythical Tariacuri - as fully as the Aztecs dominated the central Valley of Mexico, but until recently they have been little studied and poorly understood. There are several reasons for this neglect: Spanish chroniclers recognized but did not focus on the Tarascans, who were far from the heart of the Spanish administration in Central Mexico; nineteenth-century archaeologists were more drawn to the spectacular monumental sites of the Maya area and of Central Mexico; and, in the twentieth century, the Aztec model was the paradigm for civilization against which other Mexican states were measured. In more recent years, however, the Tarascan state has become a subject of growing interest, and in the last decades the work of Helen Perlstein Pollard in particular has revealed much about this remarkable civilization. Pollard's survey of Tzintzantzun has led her to identify specialized zones and to define the urban character of this central administrative city, as well as its economic, political, ecological, social, ideological, and cultural relationship to other parts of the Tarascan state. She emphasizes the importance of metallurgy, in particular, as a marker of elite social status and a major source of wealth for the ruling dynasty. Placing the Tarascan state in the larger context of Mesoamerica, Pollard shows one complex and brilliant variant of archaic civilizations. The text is accompanied by twenty-three maps and thirty-four photographs.

In Place of Gods and Kings presents a new reading of an important manuscript that has long been considered the foremost colonial-era source for information related to the indigenous inhabitants of the Mexican state of Michoacán. Drawing on recent trends in literary studies that call into question the universal validity of notions such as the unitary author and the primacy of alphabetic writing over oral and pictorial traditions, Cynthia L. Stone shows how this early relación (c. 1538-41) weaves together narrative strands representing the distinctive voices of four primary contributors. According to the Franciscan compiler, Jerónimo de Alcalá, the manuscript is a testament to enlightened colonial officials who recognized that some familiarity with native customs and beliefs would further the goals of evangelization and Spanish rule. This symbolic bridge between prehispanic and colonial times was articulated differently by the friar’s indigenous collaborators, however, who refused to accept their alleged cultural inferiority or fully renounce their previous allegiances. Thus, the drawings of the indigenous painters, reproduced in this volume in both color and black and white, evoke the sacred Mesoamerican tradition of “writing in pictures.” The epic history narrated by the former high priest pays tribute to the great regional culture hero, Taríacuri. And the account of the Spanish conquest provided by the indigenous governor converts the military defeat of his people into a moral victory and a paradigm for cultural survival.

Fifth Sun offers a comprehensive history of the Aztecs, spanning the period before conquest to a century after the conquest, based on rarely-used Nahuatl-language sources written by the indigenous people.

An anthology presenting the history and heritage of Mexican Americans from the early Indian cultures in Mexico to today's Chicano striving for an identity in an Anglo-American society.