The Spaniards typically portrayed the conquest and the fall of Mexico Tenochtitlan as Armageddon, while native peoples in colonial Mesoamerica continued to write and paint their histories and lives, often without any mention of the foreigners in their midst. Their accounts took the form of annals, chronicles, religious treatises, tribute accounts, theater pieces, and wills. Thousands of documents were produced, almost all of which served to preserve indigenous ways of doing things. But what provoked record keeping on such a grand scale? At what point did pre-contact sacred writing become utilitarian and quotidian? Were their text documentaries a form of boosterism, even ingenious intellectualism, or were they ultimately a literature of ruin? This volume - now in paperback - addresses key aspects of indigenous perspectives of the conquest and Spanish colonialism by examining what they themselves recorded and why they did so. *** "In this pathbreaking volume, Susan Schroeder and her colleagues 'unpick' this native cultural treasury and historiography, and thereby reveal the indigenous perspective on the Spaniards' invasion of America through their own testimonies, representations and perspectives." David Cahill, U. of New South Wales, series editor of First Nations and the Colonial Encounter.