Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (review)

Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs. By ELIZABETH HILL BOONE. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xix, 296 pp. Cloth, $38.00.

Elizabeth Boone has written a book that is remarkable in many ways, a work that historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians will realize they have been in need of once they have delved into it. In an unparalleled effort, she takes the reader through dozens of central Mexican and Oaxacan manuscripts, broadly speaking, the "pictorial histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs," according to her subtitle; most of them were made just before the Spanish invasion of Mexico in 1519 or in the first few generations after. At the end, the reader not only knows what is in a given manuscript, according to Boone's reading, but also how to find one's own way through a manuscript.

Heretofore the decipherment of manuscripts has been a highly specialized art, one open only to the advanced scholar. Interpretations of individual manuscripts lie in scholarly articles, the occasional monograph in either Spanish or English, and in the commentaries that accompany the facsimile editions of manuscripts that research libraries acquire. Even those studies often presuppose a knowledge not easy to extract from what has been written. But what Boone has produced is neither compendium nor how-to manual, for she offers fresh interpretation at almost every turn. For the Mixtec ruler 8 Deer, for example, she provides a historical solution to the different roles he plays in various manuscripts, and she explains his success through selective assassinations and marriages, the latter yielding the legitimate heirs who came to tell his story in a favorable light. Boone makes her arguments--and arguments they are indeed, for she recognizes that there may be other explanations--through lucid illustrations and charts that guide the reader at every turn. For my own teaching, I also seized on the guidelines that clarify the reading order of say, the Mapa Sigüenza, or the relationship between ruler lists and place names in the Lienzo of Ihuitlan: these reading guides close the gap that makes these works so daunting to the first-time observer.

One of the problems that has afflicted the study of pre-Columbian and early colonial art of Mesoamerica in the United States is that most books on the subject emerge from dissertations. Such books tend to be narrow, and they usually presuppose an informed reader. Others accompany an art exhibition and are tailored to the works on view; additionally, most such volumes have multiple authors and often have no effective voice. The sustained effort of the mature scholar is in fact the anomaly (although Esther Pasztory's Aztec Art comes to mind, as does Linda Schele, Joy Parker and David Freidel's Maya Cosmos). This maturity of mind is in evidence here, as Boone freely ranges across dozens of manuscripts, selecting details as she needs them, but never narrowly building her case nor ignoring damaging evidence. One has the sense in reading this book that her 30 years of looking at these works has allowed her to see what is important, and given her the tools to present the case, all within some sweeping historical frameworks that many scholars rarely risk.

In Stories in Red and Black, Boone writes generously, engaging any reader on a number of topics. How is it that we come to define writing? Here she is eager to stake out special status for the peoples of central Mexico, whose writing encoded history, topography, and genealogy, but without a system that represented speech. As a Mayanist, I have to wonder why the Mayan script, which could have been used to represent spoken Nahuatl and spoken Mayan, never found proponents in central Mexico: was one of the subtle intentions of central Mexican scripts to unify a multiethnic world, and thus not...