Rethinking Time: Zapotec and Nahua Cycles after the Conquest

Missionaries and spanish conquerors brought Christian time to Central Mexican societies not merely as new sacred observances, but also as novel timekeeping practices that forced a rethinking of time in the colonial order. A conquest of time measurements took place as Indigenous writers and notaries began to use the European year. But more tantalizing fare, European divination, was also an early arrival. In June 1520, as the need for Cortés’s army to flee Mexico Tenochtitlan became evident, Blas Botello, “who thought himself astrologer or necromancer,” insisted that the Spaniards had to leave on a particular hour and night, for otherwise