José Luis de Rojas – författare

Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec empire before the Spanish conquest, rivalled any other great city of its time. In Europe, only Paris, Venice, and Constantinople were larger. Cradled in the Valley of Mexico, the city is unique among New World capitals in that it was well-described and chronicled by the conquistadors who subsequently demolished it. This means that, though centuries of redevelopment have frustrated efforts to access the ancient city’s remains, much can be told about its urban landscape, politics, economy, and religion.While Tenochtitlan commands a great deal of attention from archaeologists and Mesoamerican scholars, very little has been written about the city for a non-technical audience in English. In this fascinating book, eminent expert José Luis de Rojas presents an accessible yet authoritative exploration of this famous city interweaving glimpses into its inhabitants’ daily lives with the broader stories of urbanisation, culture, and the rise and fall of the Aztec empire.

Fragments of the Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Census from the Jagiellonian Library: A Lost Manuscript provides a missing chunk of the sixteenth century Marquesado census—one of the earliest known texts in Nahuatl. In the critical edition of this manuscript, Julia Madajczak, Katarzyna Granicka, Szymon Gruda, Monika Jaglarz, and José Luis de Rojas reveal how it traveled across the Atlantic only to be lost during World War II and then rediscovered at the Jagiellonian Library, Poland. When connected to other surviving fragments of the Marquesado census, now held in Mexico and France, the Jagiellonian Library manuscript sheds new light on pre-contact and early colonial Nahua society. The authors use it to discuss the concept of calpolli, family life, and the production of administrative documentation in the early colonial Tepoztlan of today’s Morelos.