Teaching “Aztec Classicism”: Early Modern Myths in the Twentieth-Century Classroom

History has long been regarded a vital tool for emergent nation-states and subsequent nationalist regimes in unifying disparate groups around a common historical memory. And nowhere can such a memory be more effectively instilled in a population than in its schools, where the textbook gives state-approved narratives an unimpeachable authority in children’s minds. This essay traces the canonisation of a colonial, Classicised narrative portraying pre-Columbian Anahuac as the Mexican national past through its monumentalisation in state-approved textbooks until well into the twentieth century. By focusing on mythical Greco-Roman representations of the Acolhua monarch Nezahualcoyotl that emerged shortly after the Spanish Conquest and were consolidated in the early years of Independence, I contend that the projection of Mexican identity in schoolbooks rests upon a fictionalised, unifying conception of history steeped in European Classicism but used as a strategy of identification against the European. In doing so, this essay opens up a reading of history textbooks as Mexican sites of memory: sites which reflect the lost Indigenous cultures of Mexico yet simultaneously offer an ingrained European reading of those very cultures.