Wild or Merciful: Translating Early Modern Mexico

Nadia Cervantes-Perez

Lecturer

Princeton University

Nadia Cervantes Pérez is a Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University, and her field of specialization is Colonial Literature. Her research focuses on the significance of Indigenous epistemologies, specifically Nahua religious thought, within the context of Spanish imperialism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Mexico. In addition to leading the Translating Mesoamerica Project, she is currently working on a book-length manuscript, entitled El archivo expiatorio: El sacrificio azteca y la historia temprana del México Colonial, in which she examines the representation of Nahua sacrificial rituals within the narratives of Spanish transatlantic expansion. Her work uncovers the way in which the language, performative practices, and philosophies of the Nahuas influenced the descriptions of ritual sacrifice during the Early Colonial Period by identifying the textual and ritual traditions of chronicles, códices, treatises, and religious plays written in Spanish and Nahuatl. One of her central arguments is that Nahuatl descriptions of sacrificial rituals differ fundamentally from those written in Spanish, which often obscure and effectively erase Indigenous views on the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds.

Alanna Radlo-Dzur

Alanna Radlo-Dzur is an art historian studying the Indigenous peoples of the American continent. With a background as a lens-based artist and filmmaker, she received a MA in art history from the University of Chicago in 2016 and a PhD in the history of art from Ohio State University in 2023. Since competing her dissertation, Mixtitlan Ayuahtitlan (In the Clouds, In the Mist): The Invisible in Early Modern Nahua Art, she held the position of postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Native North American and Indigenous Studies in the department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University before joining the faculty at the University of Rochester as Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual/Cultural Studies in the department of Art and Art History in 2025. Her contributions to projects including Translating Mesoamerica at Princeton University, the Digital Florentine Codex at the Getty Research Institute, and the K'acha Willaykuna Indigenous Arts and Humanities collaboration at Ohio State University each demonstrate her commitment to Indigenous language revitalization and efforts to increase accessibility to archival material that empowers Native communities in support of sovereignty and cultural equity. She is particularly proud to participate in the Taller Náhuatl-Inglés organized by parents of El Tecomate, Chicontepec, Veracruz in collaboration with the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas (IDIEZ) to encourage young Nahuatl-speakers to maintain their fluency through English courses taught in Nahuatl de la Huasteca as the language of instruction.