Quotes from Camilla Townsend

For who can say which is the more empowered, them or us, if we can speak to each other successfully across the chasm of time and difference? Do we ourselves not become wiser and stronger every time we grasp the perspective of people whom we once dismissed?

it is rare, though, that a great wrong is committed by one people against another without some among the perpetrators protesting the deed.

Letters and diaries sometimes bring us close to grand moments or touching scenes in the history of Euro-Americans, but harkening back to the thoughts and feelings of the less powerful, we meet only silence

Perhaps most valuably of all, in the document that has come to be known as the Annals of Juan Bautista, we have the voluminous words of a group of indigenous artisans, church painters, and scribes who had close connections to both pipiltin (noble families) and macehualtin (commoners). These preserved their own thoughts, as well as many statements that others made in their hearing. They crafted a full work of history, a xiuhpohualli, as they understood the term.