Pedro Arenas' "Vocabulario manual de las lenguas castellana y mexicana" is a vocabulary and phrase book aimed at helping monolingual Spanish speakers communicate with speakers of Nahuatl. The book includes select vocabulary and everyday phrases that the authors deemed useful to common communication needs of Spanish speakers in their interactions with Nahuas. It was published in 11 editions from 1611 to 1887 – attesting to its widespread use -- and in 1982 Ascención Hernández León-Portilla published a facsimile version with an introductory study. By analyzing the contents of the manual, we can infer aspects of everyday interactions between Nahuas and Spaniards, and to reconstruct the types of situations in which its contents would have been put to use. The John Carter Brown library has a complete collection of all 11 editions, which allows us to track changes between editions, which may tell us something about the changing relations between Nahuas and Spaniards over the two centuries of the manual’s use. We analyze the social forms encapsulated in the manual using the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope, and show how the manual documents, and at the same time enregisters, a particular set of colonial relations. The manual in this way has a dual function of both enabling and also structuring interactions between Spanish speakers and Nahuas.