Around 1545, Bernardino de Sahagun and Nahua collaborators began gathering the materials that became the Florentine Codex. The work recorded language, ritual, history, medicine, daily life, and memories of conquest in Nahuatl and Spanish. Its peculiarity is that Indigenous informants helped preserve a world being dismantled by colonial rule.

The codex preserved Nahuatl expression, metaphor, and testimony that might otherwise have been erased. For later poets of Indigenous and mestizo identity, it became an archive of interrupted voices and a reminder that colonial literature often contains hidden collaboration beneath European names.