The year 2013 marked the tercentennial of Fr. Junípero Serra’s birth. That same year, historian Steven Hackel anointed Serra (1713-1784) California’s Founding Father, thereby echoing the glory attached to such American greats as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson. But Hackel also noted that Serra remains “America’s least understood founder,” with a legacy that is today decidedly “divisive … contentious and contested.”

In 1825, a Maxakali Indian and soldier named Inocencio walked several hundred miles from northeastern Minas Gerais to the royal court in Rio de Janeiro, seeking an audience with Emperor Dom Pedro I. Accompanying him were 14 Indians from the vicinity of Belmonte, a town located on the border of Bahia and Minas Gerais. The journey, requiring several weeks, took Inocencio through thickly forested hilly terrain with few established roads.

The status of Catholicism in Guatemala is truly deplorable,” remarked one Vatican diplomat as he gathered information about the Catholic Church in Guatemala in the 1920s. Its sorry condition, another papal representative contended, originated from the Liberal reform of the 1870s.

“Is fashion in fact such a trifling thing? Or is it, as I prefer to think, rather an indication of deeper phenomena—of the energies, possibilities, demands, and joie de vivre of a given society, economy and civilization?” So wrote Fernand Braudel in The Structures of Everyday Life.

Since the seventeenth century, the Crónica Mexicayotl, an invaluable account documenting the Mexica Tenochca history, has been attributed either to Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtle-huanitzin, to Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc, or sometimes to both. To examine these attributions, we focus here on the way the document as we know it today was written, pointing out the fact that it was made by assembling material from several heterogeneous sources, among which we find the famous and now lost Crónica X. Important passages allow us to emphasize the role played by Tezozomoc in the composition of the original Crónica Mexicayotl, and to propose with reference to the later version that has reached us, that a considerable number of insertions can be attributed to Chimalpahin. In that regard we present two different hypotheses regarding the relationship of the Crónica Mexicayotl to other works, as well as to the authors Tezozomoc and Chimalpahin.