Introduction Destruction and Preservation: Continuities and Discontinuities

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For the Nahuatl accounts, see James Lockhart, ed. and trans., We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 122, 192, 212, and 224. This is from book 12 of the Florentine Codex of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and includes the original Nahuatl with an English translation, Sahagún’s Spanish version with an English translation. For the Spanish “conquistador” version, see Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España, 2 vols., ed. Ramon Iglesia (Mexico City: Editorial Nuevo Mundo, 1943), especially 1:43, 284–88, 2:140, for descriptions of the “idols,” towns, and sacred buildings, and 2:12–13, 121–28, 148–56, and 161–63, for the military tactics, destruction of idols, draining of canals, and so on.Google Scholar

Quoted in Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572, trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 107, originally published as La “Conquête Spirituelle” du Mexique (Paris: University of Paris, 1933).Google Scholar

Clarification and a revision that presents a more subtle picture than earlier assumptions (cf. Ricard) about the conversion of Mesoamerica have been persuasively demonstrated by James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); see also Jaime Lara, City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2004).Google Scholar

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Arguments are overstated and complexities are sidestepped; nonetheless, classic statements on this topic are Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991); for the medieval situation see Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).Google Scholar

See Bevan, Destruction of Memory. The idea of “collective memory” (“mémoire collective”) was developed first by Maurice Halbwachs in Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1952), published originally in 1925, and published in English as On Collective Memory, ed., trans., and intro. by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Also, for the role of libraries in creating or destroying collective memory, see “Introduction,” in Lost Libraries, 1–40, for the fate of libraries in some of these cities.Google Scholar

See W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2004).Google Scholar

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Published in David Freedberg, Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarssen: Gary Schwartz, 1985); see also David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).Google Scholar

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See Rem Koolhaas, “Preservation is Overtaking Us,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory and Criticism 1, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 1–3, for hints of this problem; and David Lowenthal, “Why Sanctions Seldom Work: Reflections on Cultural Property Internationalism,” International Journal of Cultural Property 12 (2005): 393–423.Google Scholar

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