Flickering Creations: Concepts of Nahua Precious Art, Allison Caplan, 2026, Princeton University Press
The Bundle: Unwrapping Nahua Religious Traditions, Molly H Bassett, 2026, University of Texas Press
From the perspective of economic development, it may have been no coincidence that the birthplace of the “Green Revolution” was Mexico.
In collaboration with United Nations agencies and US scientific institutions, after 1940 the country sought to raise agricultural productivity to solve its lack of food self-sufficiency.
A series of rural development projects greatly raised yields to such an extent that by 1950 Mexico no longer needed to import food (for the first time since the 1910-17 Revolution) and by 1964 was exporting a large surplus of wheat.
If we were to insert this phenomenon into a now celebrated debate between the economist Louis Putterman and a team under Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson, we would see that it almost certainly had political antecedents.
Mexico’s achievement was largely possible because of the highly centralised and bureaucratic nature of power in the country under the single party rule of the PRI in that period.
This, in turn, may not solely have been a product of the institutional dynamics inherited from the Revolution but, in accordance with the ideas of Putterman, might have reflected in part the fact that modern Mexico is built on ancient foundations.
Cradle states with an antiquity such as Mexico exhibit forms of political behaviour distinct from “newer” states that do not have pre-colonial antecedents, not least well-established traditions of centralisation, indigenous settlement and socio-political patterns.
In the debates of Putterman, Acemoglu and Robinson this was relevant to their ability to maintain physical and social infrastructure and market networks through periods of significant change.
Boiled down to its bare bones, Putterman’s position identified ancestral human capital by which development in the long-term occurs across generations of people rather than the control of land and resources.
Small wonder then that until recently it was not uncommon in Mexico for commentators to invoke the metaphor “Tlatoani”—a Nahuatl (aka Aztec) word referring to a supreme leader—when describing the presidency’s unchallenged and centralised authority.
In short, the historical impact of the Nahua continues to be discernible in modern Mexico, and this in turn makes the study of the country’s largest indigenous group, which today numbers three million people, highly relevant.
Two recent books, Allison Caplan’s Flickering Creations: Concepts of Nahua Precious Art and Molly Bassett’s The Bundle: Unwrapping Nahua Religious Traditions, reflect the continuing fascination with what these people and their history can tell us today.
Relations of power and between spiritual and material worlds are very evident in the first of these titles, Allison Caplan’s Flickering Creations, which examines the role of jewellery and fine artisanry in Nahua society.
An absorbing examination of tlazohtli, a word denoting people or objects that were regarded as precious, the author examines the jewellery and artwork that fall within this category—including featherwork, lapidary art and precious metallurgy.
Precious media in all of their forms—jadeite, turquoise, conch, mother‑of‑pearl, amber, gold, flowers and feathers—were brought together in rich displays that had an innately social function and often, particularly the finest pieces, denoted relations of power.
Caplan writes: “Although they were highly varied, precious goods were distinguished by shared aesthetic qualities and forms of sociality that made them recognisable as tlazohtli.
“As a group, precious things carried a strong ideological connection to the nobility, or pipiltin, and were often said to be their natural possessions and to share nobles’ own aesthetic traits.”
The author’s focus is the way in which Nahua writers and artists, owners of objects and those who saw them were influenced by special physical and ethical considerations, and her aim is to contribute to the development of a Nahua theory of precious art.
This matters, because this important industry within Aztec society was inevitably destroyed by the Spanish conquest which led to the seizure of Indigenous valuables—including precious art—as a key feature of colonial extraction.
The vandalism was shocking: Cortés, Spanish officials and mendicant friars arriving in central Mexico after 1521 shipped precious art to Europe in payment of the Crown’s tax on the spoils of war and mineral resources.
After initially displaying these pieces of precious regalia as symbols of dominance over a foreign sovereign, the Spanish monarchy then pursued a policy of melting them down to use as bullion or coin, and very few works have survived.
Even so, such was the devastation in Mexico itself that the few objects that remain in European collections are in many cases the only major surviving examples of such tlazohtli today—and even how these are displayed contradicts their original social purpose.
Caplan writes: “Indeed, the very context in which precious art exists and is experienced today runs deeply counter to its original context of use and display among Nahuas of the Aztec Empire … museums in Europe, the United States, and Mexico that steward Nahua precious artworks normally present them in environmentally controlled, glass enclosures as standalone objects …
“Such display practices construct an environmental, sensory, and social context for these works that diverges fundamentally from their intended modes of interaction: worn on the body alongside other works of precious art and in contact with the changing environment and embodied senses and emotions of their community.”
Early victims of Spanish colonialism were well aware of this, with the author noting that “colonial Nahuas criticised the improper ways in which they saw the Spanish interacting with precious things, calling out how the newcomers devalued turquoise, jade, and quetzal feathers by ‘seeing them as nothing’, while simultaneously starving for gold ‘like pigs’ and grasping after it ‘like monkeys’.”
The complexity of Nahua social practices and beliefs is also evident in Molly Bassett’s The Bundle: Unwrapping Nahua Religious Traditions, a fascinating study of spiritual rite in the era of Tenochtitlán understood through tlaquimilolli or “sacred bundles”.
These were manifestations of deities through cloth and animal pelts binding a stick skeleton with a greenstone heart that made them corporeal entities, living effigies, for those who carried these otherwise unremarkable objects in backpacks.
A radiant animating energy called tonalli, akin to a life force, permeated these bundles, and this alongside their ritual manufacture enabled these deity bodies to lead and counsel their devotees.
As Bassett points out, tlaquimilolli originated in stories through sacred narratives but also as sacred matter shaped by ritual specialists. They reflected a belief that vitality imbues a wide range of entities, including what non-Nahua might regard as inanimate objects.
The author argues that the layers of cloth and corresponding knots required to create such bundles offer a model for understanding Nahua culture and its continuity.
She writes: “The knot sections create connections and address problems in the historiography of Nahua religious traditions. In particular, I attend to how non-Native conceptions of religion influence scholars’ expectations of Nahua traditions.
“Like tlaquimilolli, which carry history into the present (and future), the knotty sections integrate the historiography of sacred stories, centres, symbols, and structures in the bundle method, an approach that emphasises narrative, materiality, and making.”
Bassett proceeds to unwrap dimensions of Nahua belief much like a bundle, exploring this culture’s ecological science, graphic communication, creative use of language and social or familial relationships.
In each case, the bundle serves as a vantage from which to examine how non-native scholarship has sought to explore these themes over time, often reflecting for example Catholic iconoclastic theologies or their intellectual antitheses.
The books ends with a reflection by the Nahua scholar Abelardo de la Cruz on how his interpretations of Indigenous religious practice draw on his own experiences as a Nahua person. As Bassett writes: “Collaborations like this one acknowledge that Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing are distinct and, in some senses, incompatible, and thus have the potential to be generative through their juxtaposition.”
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Categories: Mexico, North America