“History in the Making: Mexico City, 1564: Nahuatl Protest Songs During a Year of Crisis” by Dr. Peter Sorensen (HKBU)

In 1564, Nahua singers performed three protest songs in Mexico City in the lead up to street riots. This talk will show how colonial period Nahua singers used their song tradition, developed during the precolonial period, to communicate with their own Nahua nobility. The lyrics and performances, when contextualized with other documents, show us that the Nahua singers were pushing their leadership to do more to resist a new tax imposed on the Indigenous residents of the city by the Spanish Crown. The singers and their songs were more than just rumblings of resistance, they were discussions and concerns over the future and the Nahuas place in a new and much larger world.

Speaker bio: Peter Bjorndahl Sorensen is an Assistant Professor of History at Hong Kong Baptist University. Sorensen’s first book is called Five Nahuatl Songs About the Fall of Tenochtitlan from the Cantares Mexicanos and is expected to be published in early 2026 with Dumbarton Oaks. Sorensen’s second project, Nahua Singers: Celebrating an Indigenous Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico City, is currently under review.

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