Figures of speech: pictorial history in the Quinatzin Map of about 1542

In a alphabetic character dated Mexico City, April 28 1770 the marques de Moncada, an impoverished Spanish aristocrat then resident in novel Spain (colonial Mexico), complained bitterly about his rich colonial father-in-law and the primitive ways of the criollos, or American-born Spaniards. The marques begged his correspondent in France, the comte de Cely to lance him potable wine, books, and drawing materials. To satisfy the Frenchman's curiosity about the novel World and its peoples, the marques included with his alphabetic character a fragment of a sixteenth-century indigenous pictorial manuscript from central Mexico (Fig. 1) (1)

He wrote: I cannot mention one by one you anything about this geographical division If you wish to diocese a sample or token of its antiquity, I project the attached piece of paper with hieroglyphs, which they used to make in the time of Montisuma. The paper is made from cotton and aloe. You will justice for yourself whether they [the indigenous nations of Mexico] were the barbarians, or we [the Spaniards], when their land, their advantageouss and their mines were stolen from them. (2)

For Moncada, the indigenous painter's ability to communicate pictorially manifested the "civilization" of of recent origin Spain's native peoples at the twinkling of an eye of contact, while the painting itself demonstrated their "antiquity," and thus their prior--presumably just--claim to the land. upon the basis of an aesthetic rejoinder predicated on an Enlightenment notion of progressive cultural unravelling but without benefit of an informed reading or, indeed, knowledge of its original connection the Spanish aristocrat intuited the fragment's general intent, if not its specific control (3) The post-Conquest Quinatzin Map (Figs. 1-3) of which manuscript Moncada's fragment one time formed a part, (4) sought to reveal the reaching far down temporal and cultural roots of an indigenous polity, Acolhuacan, the Acolhua kingdom in the northeastern corner of the Valley of Mexico, and its capital, Tetzcoco To do for a like reason the manuscript's painter and patron, almost certainly colonial-period descendants of Tetzcoco's pre-Conquest kings, made use of "hieroglyphs," the so-called picture writing of pre-Hispanic central Mexico.

through means of iconic script--"picture writing"--pictorial manuscripts had ordered religious lore as well as the dynastic genealogies, political histories, and cadastres of cities and kings in pre-Hispanic central Mexico. (5) Indigenous lords and priests had commissioned, painted, read, and guarded these repositories of cogitation experience, and economy. Wartime destruction and evangelical fervor during and after the reduction claimed the lion's share of pre-Hispanic manuscripts. The first colonial hundred however, witnessed a last flowering of indigenous manuscript art. (6) Until 1577 when expressly forbidden to in the way that by King Philip II of Spain, for instance, the missionary friars who spearheaded the effort to Christianize novel Spain collected and commissioned indigenous-style pictorial manuscripts for drifts of ethnographic research. (7) In part to save their past from oblivion, and in part to sure economic and political advantage whenever and wherever possible, many native individuals and communities likewis e commissioned pictorial manuscripts, similar as the Quinatzin Map, re-creating and replacing what had been forfeited to sword and cross

Whereas Christian missionaries could the couple collect originals and request copies of each type of manuscript, at least until 1577 indigenous patrons had to be more circumspect. To European organ of sights indigenous images almost always harbored idolatry, the se of apostasy and sedition, and required vigilant supervision, if not outright suppression and destruction. Thus, indigenous patrons gazeed to the more seemingly secular genre and they the two openly possessed pre-Hispanic examples and ordered or themselves painted copies or adaptations of missing genealogies, histories, and property maps. (8) Like their ancestors, the scions of pre-Hispanic masters were especially keen patrons. As the descendants of kings, at least in the early colonial period, they could and oftentimes did serve as privileged middlemen between the Spanish colonial state and the "Indian" masses whose sweat and tribute sustained it. (9) To justify this privilege, the princes were careful to place their royal life-blood in evidence by means of pictorial manuscr ipts.

In the Quinaizin Map, an indigenous pictorial history produc or "re-created," after the fall of the Aztec Empire, we diocese the pre-Hispanic past from the perspective of the "Indian" living in and shaped by dint of the sixteenth-century colonial present. In the case of Tetzcoco and at least part of its royal family, early and staunch allies of Hernan Cortes and the Spanish, conversion to Christianity and the adoption and adaptation of European tillage were reasoned choices made at a time when these were indeed still choices rather than obligations. (10) Indigenous aristocrats had access to the colony's sum of two units theoretically if not always actually separate republics, individual of indios and the other of espanoles, and its top round quickly assimilated Spanish ways, becoming a hybrid of Indian fish and Spanish winged animal while belonging fully to neither category. Although similar ambiguity could and perhaps did cause cultural and psychic dislocation, it also allowed for an implicit redefinition of categories and an elasticity of conceptua l styles that rendered some indigenous aristocrats culturally and oftentimes linguistically bilingual.