Omens of the Conquest of Mexico: Oral Tradition in Chronicle X

Chronicle X comes from a hypothesis advanced by Robert Barlow in 1945 about the possible existence of an original source, written in Nahuatl, now lost, which should have been translated and served as the basis for the composition of a group of works from the 16th century which main subject is the history of the late postclassic Mexica people. The group of works associated with chronicle X are: Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana e islas de la tierra firme by Fray Diego Duran, the Cronica mexicana by Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, the Codice Ramirez and the Manuscrito Tovar by the Jesuit Juan de Tovar, and the Historia natural y moral de las Indias by Father Jose de Acosta. Starting from a theoretical-methodological approach that combines textual criticism, hermeneutical analysis and stylometry, this article studies the handling of the theme of the omens of the Conquest of Mexico in the two main works of the corpus, from which the rest derive. Through the analysis of the omens collected by Duran in the Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana e islas de la tierra firme and by Tezozomoc in the Cronica mexicana, this work proposes the hypothesis that the variants between the works originate in the oral record that characterized the reading-writing processes of codices in the pre-Hispanic world. In other words, the fact that the codex, the material support of a narrative, had a mnemonic function to accompany the oral discourse memorized and transmitted generationally, was decisive for the chroniclers to document extremely similar versions, but with important variants, whose origin, we propose, lies in the Nahua oral tradition.