Colmenares Presents at ASE Conference
David Colmenares, Assistant Professor of Spanish, presented at this year’s conference of the American Society for Ethnohistory. His paper, titled “Remember Chapultepec: History of Emotions and Emotive Histories Among the Nahua,” was part of a panel on “Emotive Readings of the Aztec/Nahua Codices.”
From the abstract:
“A theatrical form of crying marked every important personal and social transition among the Nahua. One would cry because of births, deaths and misfortunes, but also as part of religious ceremonies, the preparation for war or the enthronement of new rulers. By all accounts, such acts of crying or lamentation were highly formalized, conducted with a prescribed decorum and, as the codices suggest, with choreographed movements and gestures. Crying appropriately and under the right circumstances was deemed so important that one of the ritual obligations of a new tlatoani, as Sahagún suggests, was to weep correctly. This presentation builds on the research of scholars such as Almere Read and Graña Behrens by investigating the role of crying—and emotions in general—in the context of historical accounts and migration stories.”