Carlos Macías Prieto

Scholarship/Creative Work

Professor Macías Prieto received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley in 2020. Prior to his graduate studies at Berkeley, he completed a master’s degree in American Studies from Purdue University. Professor Macías Prieto’s current book project, Nahua Writing at a Moment of Crisis: Domingo Chimalpahin’s Preservation of the Cemanahuac Archive in Colonial Mexico, examines the writings of don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin (hereafter Chimalpahin), a Nahua scribe who produced the largest body of written texts in Nahuatl and Spanish among Nahua writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It traces an Indigenous intellectual project that diverges from that of European authors who sought to appropriate native history to legitimize themselves as the rightful rulers of the land. Nahua Writing at a Moment of Crisis argues that Chimalpahin’s oeuvre reveals a unique Indigenous intellectual project, written in Nahuatl for Nahua readers of the future. And it shows that Chimalpahin’s project safeguarded the Indigenous history of Cemanahuac—the Indigenous world as seen by the Nahuas—, making it possible for future generations of Nahuas to reclaim their Indigenous history, language, and land. Professor Macías Prieto’s study makes two major contributions to literary and historical scholarship on colonial Latin America. First, it highlights Indigenous voices resisting colonial impositions during a time period (1590-1650) often neglected or seen as static and uneventful. Second, this project recognizes Nahua writing as an intellectual project in its own right, challenging the scholarship that has long overlooked Indigenous intellectual production. Nahua Writing at a Moment of Crisis, thus, situates Chimalpahin as part of an intellectual community that preserved the histories of Nahua ancestors and documented the reality of Nahua peoples under Spanish rule, advancing an alternative political and cultural history that dates back to the first millennia. Professor Macías Prieto’s research draws from New Historicist criticism, discourse analysis, and theories of the archive.