As pointed out by Dr. Nancy Fitch in her review of Gruzinski's The
             Conquest of Mexico, authorities disagree over how early the Nahuas adopted
             the Spanish alphabet to render Nahuatl into a written language to produce
             their own codices or written accounts of the conquest (Fitch, 2003).
             The Mexican historian Miguel Leon-Portilla, author of The Broken
             Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, believes that a rare
             French Bibliotheque National manuscript (variously described as "Manuscript
             22", Unos anales historicos de la nacion mexicana, or the Tlatelolco Codex)
             was written in Nahuatl by a group of anonymous natives of Tlatelolco in
             1528, just seven years after the conquest (Fitch, 2003). J. Jorge Klor de
             Alva, who wrote the forward to the English translation of The Broken
             Spears, offers some additional independent primary source evidence that the
             Nahuas were writing in their native language in the 1520s (Fitch, 2003).
             There is evidence that indigenous peoples authored many codices, but
             the Spaniards destroyed most of them in their attempt to eradicate ancient
             beliefs (Fitch, 2003). Moreover, we can gain little sense of how their
             production was shaped by interaction with the Spaniards, since the fourth
             Mexica King, Itzcoatl, apparently destroyed most earlier manuscripts during
             his reign from 1426-1440, in order to preserve his vision of how he
             constructed the Mexica empire; still others simply disappeared, without
             being published or preserved (Fitch, 2003).
             The Spaniards believed language and evangelization were the keys to
             making the natives "Spanish", in their understanding of the world (Fitch,
             2003). Many sons of caciques in sixteenth century New Spain were sent to
             the priests to be taught to read and write in Spanish, and to be
             indoctrinated in Catholicism (Fitch, 2003; Kartutten, 1998). As Zhenja La
             Rosa argued, the Spaniards assumed t...