MEXICO CITY.- The letters of Hernán Cortés, the elusive Crónica X, speeches before the Holy Office and other key documents from New Spain will come under renewed scholarly scrutiny during the International Colloquium New Spanish Manuscripts: Multifaceted Horizons and Veins to Explore.

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The meeting will bring together 12 specialists from academic institutions in Mexico, Spain, Italy, Chile and Argentina, who will share new research on manuscripts that continue to shape how the history of Mexico’s colonial period is read, questioned and understood.

Organized from the perspectives of history, ethnohistory and literary criticism, the colloquium will take place on June 9 and 10, 2026, from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., at the Directorate of Historical Studies of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). The in-person format is intended to encourage direct exchange among researchers, students and members of the public interested in New Spanish documentary culture.

Mexico’s Secretary of Culture, Claudia Curiel de Icaza, said these research spaces are essential for understanding “how Mexico’s historical memory was written, interpreted and disputed.” She noted that the study of New Spanish manuscripts makes it possible to return to foundational sources, recover voices and layers of meaning that remain open, and recognize documentary memory as part of the public’s right to understand the past.

Coordinated by researchers Leopoldo Martínez Ávalos, Annia González Torres and Clementina Battcock, the colloquium will present unpublished findings related to works compiled or written by Nahuatl-speaking scholars and chroniclers, including Bernardino de Sahagún, Andrés de Olmos, Juan Bautista Viseo and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl.

For Battcock, the task of historians, ethnohistorians and other humanities scholars is not simply to read these documents, but to question them. Every manuscript, she explains, carries an intention: why it was written, who it was meant for, when and where it was produced, and what intellectual or political foundations shaped it.

One of the central themes will be the so-called Crónica X, a lost source that scholars have long believed may have influenced several major 16th-century texts. The idea, proposed by Robert Barlow eight decades ago, helped establish links among the Manuscrito Tovar, Book VII of José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies, the Códice Ramírez, the historical section of Fray Diego Durán’s History of the Indies of New Spain and the Islands of Tierra Firme, and Hernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc’s Crónica mexicana.

Paloma Vargas Montes, from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, will present a stylometric study of those five sources carried out by the Digital Humanities research group and its Cultural Heritage line, which she coordinates. The work forms part of a collaboration with INAH’s Directorate of Historical Studies to better understand how 16th-century manuscripts may have drawn on Mexica accounts of the conquest wars in the Central Highlands after the fall of Tenochtitlan.

The program will also include Sergio Botta, from Sapienza University of Rome, who will speak on The Second Life of the Codex Vatican A. Leopoldo Martínez Ávalos, from the DEH, will close the colloquium with a paper titled Emotional Vestiges in 18th-Century New Spanish Judicial Sources.

Emeritus scholars Jesús Bustamante García and Patricia Escandón Bolaños will also participate. Bustamante García will examine the history and transformations of Fray Diego Durán’s work between 1581 and 1637, while Escandón Bolaños will analyze an anonymous Jesuit manuscript and the unlikely idea of Germanic colonization in America.

The colloquium highlights the increasingly collaborative nature of New Spanish manuscript studies. Participants including Daniel Astorga Poblete, Valeria Añón, Berenice Alcántara Rojas, Sergio Vásquez Galicia and Mario Alberto Sánchez Aguilera will show how researchers from universities and institutions in Latin America and Europe are bringing together traditional archival work, literary analysis, ethnohistory and digital tools to revisit documents that still hold unanswered questions.

In doing so, the event places New Spanish manuscripts not as closed records of the past, but as living sources—texts whose meanings continue to unfold as new methods, questions and voices enter the conversation.


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