La Cancion del Colibri

From Aztec princess to slave and concubine, Hummingbird—or Huitzitzilín in her native Nahuatl— recounts her life during the Spanish conquest of Mexico in Graciela Limón’s novel, La canción del colibrí. Translated from the English-language novel originally published in 1996, Song of the Hummingbird, Huitzitzilín describes the wondrous arrival of the four-legged gods and the brutal devastation of her land and her people. She witnessed the obliteration of Tenochitlán and suffered the loss of her identity – forced to discard her traditional garb, to speak a language foreign to her tongue and to forsake her ancestral gods.

Expressing a confidence and freedom that women have strived for centuries to attain, Huitzitzilín passionately relates her tale to Father Benito, the priest who seeks to confess and convert her, to offer her absolution she neither needs nor wants. Instead she forces him to see the conquest for the first time through the eyes of the conquered.

In La canción del colibrí, Limón pays homage to the pre-Colombian woman, celebrates the endurance of the human spirit in the face of cataclysm, and mourns our collective loss of treasures more valuable than all the plundered riches and gold.