University of Iowa Professor Amber Brian and two colleagues from other institutions have published a translation and critical edition of a 17th-century text, The Native Conquistador: Alva Ixlilxochitl's Account of the Conquest of New Spain, by Mexican historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl.

Brian is an assistant professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, part of the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. She and her colleagues produced the translation in the summer of 2013, with the support of an Interdisciplinary Research Grant sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.

The book is part of Penn State University Press’s Latin America Originals series. In the text, Ixtlilxochitl narrates the conquest of Mexico from Hernando Cortés's arrival in 1519 through his expedition into Central America in 1524. The protagonist of the story, however, is not the Spanish conquistador but Alva Ixtlilxochitl's great-great-grandfather, the native prince Ixtlilxochitl of Tetzcoco.

With the Native Conquistador translation completed and published, Brian and colleagues – Bradley Benton of North Dakota State University, Pablo Garcia Loaeza of West Virginia University, and Peter Villella of the University of North Carolina-Greensboro – have begun a new project, translating another text by Ixtlilxochitl. Funded by a 2014 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Scholarly Editions and Translations grant of $248,678, the group will collaborate over a three-year period to translate Rise of the Chichimeca: Translation of Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl's History of Ancient Mexico.