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In her analysis of Clavijero’s work, Rolena Adorno (2011, 15; see also Marchetti 1986) has highlighted that it “sought to recover the lost Mexican nation and defend it against the European Enlightenment thinkers who underestimated its worth and importance under the pretense of cultural and natural inferiority … often, Clavijero has been considered a precursor to Mexican independence. Doubtlessly, his ‘criollo’ patriotism and his apology of America in opposition to contemporary European thinkers have fixed the profile we recognize in his famous Historia Antigua de México”. In recognizing the role and ideological context of Clavijero’s works, and in particular of Historia Antigua de México and, consequently, of the Codex Mendoza, this work invariably fits within a genre of Latin American patriotic literature that Jesuit priests created towards the end of the eighteenth century (Brading et al. 2015, 34).

In 1831, Henry King, Viscount Kingsborough, brought the manuscript to the fore once more as part of a yet more ambitious narrative. Its inclusion in Kingsborough’s Antiquities of Mexico echoed one of the hypotheses that guided the evangelizing project of the sixteenth century: namely, the idea that the peoples of the New World descended from the lost tribes of Israel. This, in turn, led to a new era of reproductions of the Codex Mendoza. Accordingly, in the sixth book of Antiquities of Mexico, Kingsborough found reason after reason to aver that the peoples of Mexico descended from the lost tribes of Israel. If Clavijero’s actions ought to be understood against a backdrop of incipient independence movements that were beginning to take shape towards the end of the eighteenth century, the historical moment of Antiquities of Mexico places the Codex Mendoza within the context of the calls for emancipation of Catholics, Jews, and Africans within the British Empire.6