[Luis de Velasco (1511-1564)] - Fray Juan de Alameda
Proclamation relating to the administration of the town of Huexotzinco, [Mexico], 24 June 1554
In Nahuatl. Document on vellum, 590 x 365mm, 13-line decorated initial ‘I’ (75 x 60mm), signed by Fray Juan de Alameda and Felipe Asuero, counter-signed by Governor Cristóbal de Guevara and Mayors Calixto de Moscoso and Juan de Almonte. Provenance: Robert B. Honeyman (1897–1987, American metallurgical engineer and book collector); his sale, part III, Sotheby’s, 2 May 1979, lot 1217; Sotheby's, 12 & 13 May 1981, lot 29.

An important documentary source for the study of Mexico in the early colonial period, issued two decades after the Huexotzinco Codex. 16^th-century documents in Nahuatl – the language of the Aztecs – are rare outside of public institutions and this example, formerly in the Honeyman collection, appears to be the earliest offered at auction.

The Nahua Indian people of the town of Huexotzingo – in present-day Puebla, Mexico – allied themselves to the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1521 against Moctezuma, leader of the Aztec Empire; the town and wider region were henceforth governed by the Spanish Crown, with the inhabitants becoming part of the encomienda system (the Huexotzinco Codex, written in 1531, preserves a legal case brought against members of the colonial administration for abuses of this system). Like the Huexotzinco Codex – and, indeed, the majority of public notices and administrative records in early colonial Mexico – our proclamation is written in the Latinised version of Nahuatl developed following the introduction of the Latin alphabet by Spanish colonists and missionaries.

The document is signed by Friar Juan de Alameda, who oversaw the construction of the Franciscan convent in Huexotzinco between 1544 and 1570, on behalf of Luis de Velasco, the second viceroy of New Spain.