Mar 10, 2020 - Sale 2533

Sale 2533 - Lot 322

Price Realized: $ 5,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
BROADSIDE IN NAHUATL (MEXICAN IMPRINT--1810.) Venégas, Francisco Javier. Ayamo moyolpachihuitia in Totlatocatzin Rey D. Fernando VII. Letterpress broadside, 16 3/4 x 12 inches, printed on sealed paper dated 1810-1811, signed in type by Venégas as Viceroy of New Spain, docketed on verso "N. 109 / 130"; folds, 6 x 1-inch area cropped from left margin (apparently where it had been bound), 2-inch closed tear with tape repair; uncut. Mexico, 5 October 1810
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Over the centuries of their rule, the Viceroys of New Spain issued only 5 broadside decrees in Nahuatl, the most widely spoken indigenous language of their dominion. Two of them were issued by the newly arrived Viceroy Venégas in 1810, in an effort to quell the recently declared Hidalgo "Grito de Delores" rebellion. The present broadside announces an end to the payment of tribute taxes by Mexico's Indians, a decree which had already been issued in Spanish that May. By its very existence, the broadside also ended the colony's 40-year ban on the use of Nahuatl in official publications. It also went even further, reading (in translation): "And so every one may know the king's desires, and so they may be realized, may this decree be written everywhere in the Mexican language, the Otomí language, and every other Indian language." It drew on the work of Rafael Sandoval (likely the translator), whose recent Arte de Lengua Mexicana was the first new book in Nahuatl to be published since 1770. See León-Portilla, "Tepuztlahcuilolli, impresos en náhuatl," page 98; and Mark Morris, "Language in Service of the State: The Nahuatl Counterinsurgency Broadsides of 1810," in Hispanic American Historical Review 87:3 (2007), pages 433-470. 4 copies in OCLC, and one other known at auction since 1982 (Swann sale, 26 September 2019, from a different consignor).