Laura Matthew is associate professor of history and director of Latin American and Latinx studies at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A. Her first books, Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (coedited with Michel Oudijk; University of Oklahoma Press, 2007) and Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala (University of North Carolina Press 2012; Spanish translation 2017), addressed the role of indigenous allies of the Spanish, most of them central Mexican speakers of Nahuatl, in the invasion of Central America. Currently she is researching Mesoamerican trade and migration along the southwestern Pacific coast at the end of the sixteenth century.
