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This manuscript was first published in Beyond the Codices, eds. Arthur J.O. Anderson, Frances Berdan, and James Lockhart (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1976), Doc. 14, 96–97. However, the transcription, translation, and a new introduction presented here come from Lockhart's personal papers. The original is found in the McAfee Collection, UCLA Research Library, Special Collections. [Introduction by James Lockhart:] BY 1700 OR BEFORE the municipal organizations of many central Mexican altepetl, especially larger ones, had absorbed so much of the concepts and procedures of Spanish law that they were producing legal documents in all the same genres the Spaniards used, arranging the elements in exactly the same order, with close equivalents of the Spanish formulas and other vocabulary. The present text is of this type.* But such texts usually retained many traces of traditional Nahua traits, and they were not always as well informed about things Spanish as they seem to be. The example here is in the Spanish genre of a notification of penalties, and the phrase in Spanish is actually used as a label for the text. However, it is backwards, speaking of a penalty of notification. The situation is that the Spaniard Andrés González has been disputing over certain lands with the inhabitants of the district of San Simón (Pochtlan), the same entity where Doc. 5, the 1695 testament of Angelina, was issued. He now concedes that a large piece of 100 quahuitl belongs to the indigenous people, but the main thrust of the document is that they are to make no further claims about the land that has been in dispute, and heavy, indeed probably rather unrealistic penalties are set as a deterrent against any of them trying to reopen the matter. Andrés González (without “don” and probably a pretty humble person in the Spanish world) is not specifically termed a Spaniard, but that is conveyed in this context by his being called “señor.” The family is gradually accumulating land in the San Simón district; Andrés is the father of the land purchaser in Doc. 17, also concerning San Simón, issued in 1738. A typical traditional feature of the proceedings here is the important role of an anonymous group of district inhabitants. Though San Simón is referred to in the Nahuatl as a barrio (line 3), the attending group is called tlaxilacaleque (line 4), based on the traditional term tlaxilacalli, constituent district of an altepetl. Very likely the group consisted entirely or mainly of officials or leaders of the district, for “tlaxilacaleque” meant both inhabitants and leaders of the entity. This is Stage 3 Nahuatl, but there is little occasion for anything specific to that stage to appear here. In line 9 the strange form “niacmo” may contain the popular loan particle ni, “nor,” thus being the equivalent of ni aocmo and meaning “nor any longer.” The o of aocmo, “no longer,” is omitted in other places in the text as well. A fuller demonstration of the contact phenomena of the time is seen in Doc. 17 and is discussed there. One of the main signs of Stage 3 orthography is that z becomes s. Here, despite the date, that has not yet quite happened. Syllable-final [s] is still mainly written z. But the merging of s and z as [s] has indeed taken place, as we can tell from the fact that standard s is usually hypercorrected to z, for example in “coztaz” (line 17) for costas, “costs.” In line 18 s and z are inverted, “asotez” for azotes, “lashes.” As Stage 3 proceeds, we see ever more of an extra y added to the beginning of preterit verbs, as here in line 11, “yoconanque,” “they took it,” and line 13, “Yomacoque,” “they were given it.” Perhaps the y is from ye, “already,” and still has something of that meaning. Most preterits here have only the standard o-. In line 2, the word tecpan, which originally meant the palace of the lord or ruler of an entity, now means its government building, and the change is not great, since the palaces had public functions and in a sense belonged to the whole entity. The form “Audensi” for audiencia, “court in session,” is quite often seen; Nahuas tended to omit the second of any two final vowels in a Spanish loan noun. In line 16, “tzauhtiyez” is the equivalent of tzauctiyez, “will be enclosed.” In line 19, a syllable was inadvertently omitted: the intention of “tiliztli” is “neltiliztli.” The intention of “Açoquitla” (lines 9–10) and “açoquitlan” (line 12) is aço oc itla, “perhaps something more.” In line 31, notice the notary don Antonio Valeriano, with the same name as the famous governor of Mexico Tenochtitlan in the late sixteenth century, from Azcapotzalco, and his grandson of same name who was governor of both Azcapotzalco and Tenochtitlan in the early seventeenth. *The document numbered 17 in Beyond the Codices is a fuller illustration. Another example is in Karttunen and Lockhart, “Textos en náhuatl del siglo XVIII,” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, 13 (1978): 153–75. It is true that a very significant infusion of Spanish legal lore had already taken place early in Stage 2, as the corpus of Nahuatl governmental texts from Tlaxcala for example shows very clearly. Yet at that time the point-by-point correspondence with Spanish genres and wording was far less close than later.