The Spanish concept “family” had no equivalent in Nahuatl, and none was ever borrowed. Household complexes, for example, continued to be divided into separate dwellings for the constituent nuclear families. The household and land regime remained much the same in its organization despite reductions and losses. The status and duties of the commoners remained distinct from those of the nobles, who manned the local Hispanic-style government of the altepetl as they had filled offices in preconquest times.
The Nahuas accepted Christianity and built large churches for themselves, but those churches had the same function as preconquest temples, acting as the symbolic centre of the altepetl, and the saints installed in them had the same function as preconquest ethnic gods. The local state, the altepetl, with its rotating constituent parts, remained viable as a functioning autonomous unit and as bearer of all major Spanish structural innovations, not only the encomienda but also the parish and the indigenous municipality. These records reveal that the Nahuas were not overly concerned with the Spaniards or the conquest, which seemed to them at first much like earlier conquests they remained preoccupied to a large extent with their internal rivalries. The Nahuas of central Mexico are the people whose postconquest experience is best understood because of the voluminous records they produced in their own language. The peoples of the temperate highlands, however much they may have diminished in numbers, survived in the sense of retaining their local units, their language, much of their cultural heritage, and the essence of their social organization. Only in hot, low-lying areas, such as the Peruvian and Mexican coastal regions, however, were losses as disastrous as those of the Caribbean islands. The most obvious development was drastic demographic loss in a process marked by periodic large epidemics, the population declined through the 16th century and on into the 17th century to a small fraction (impossible to determine with precision) of its precontact size.
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