In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl: Painting Manuscripts, Writing the Pre-Hispanic Past in Early Colonial Tetzcoco, Mexico (review)

The city (altepetl) of Tetzcoco (modern Texcoco) gained a near-mythic status during the colonial period thanks to the efforts of the descendants of its royal family not only to assert their claims as traditional rulers but also to glorify their homeland in contrast to a Tenochtitlan-centric history inherited from the Aztecs. Eduardo de J. Douglas analyzes the painted manuscripts created in the middle of the sixteenth century as part of this larger effort as he seeks to separate the pre-Hispanic from the colonial and to study how the two interacted. In particular, he focuses on three codices known as the Codex Xolotl, the Quinatzin Map, and the Tlohtzin Map. These works are based on the pre-Hispanic pictorial writing system, called "iconic script" by Douglas (p. 3). The Spanish recognized that these works were documents and accepted them as evidence in suits.

Unfortunately, all of the pre-Hispanic records were destroyed in the early evangelization, but within two decades of the conquest, native elites began to produce new documents to underscore their traditional rights and privileges, genealogies, and land claims. However, the resulting documents are mixed in their impact in that they also paint the rulers, descendants of Nezahualcoyotl and his son Nezahualpilli (the legendary rulers of pre-Hispanic Tetzcoco), as loyal vassals of the Spanish crown and good Christians. These were important documents insofar as the succession to the throne of Tetzcoco became extremely complicated and hotly contested in the early colonial period as different branches of the family emerged. Douglas posits that these manuscripts need to be read as colonial documents that cannot be understood or interpreted in a purely pre-Hispanic context. While these pictorial documents do use iconic script, they must be read according to the literate culture that produced them. They are an extension and expression of language.

This book contains four chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter looks at the physical aspects of the manuscripts. This allows Douglas to place two of them, Quinatzin and Tlohtzin, in the first part of the 1540s. They were clearly drawn with an eye to making them appear to be from the pre-Hispanic tradition. In general, the pieces are cartographic histories, a combination of map and genealogy. Following on this, Douglas looks in his second chapter at the pieces as representations of Mesoamerican cartography. To a greater or lesser degree, the documents evidence two notable tendencies: cartography (the map as map) and landscape (the map as representation). They also look at the land as representing history; genealogy is geography. Douglas analyzes each of the documents in great detail, teasing out specific examples from each. The function of the documents as genealogies serves as the theme of the third chapter. After considering the role of genealogy before and after the conquest, Douglas analyzes the three documents in terms of the narratives they provide. The documents also reflect indigenous notions of time that are based on the ritual calendar in use in Mesoamerica, as well as the cyclic view of the creation and destruction of the world. Needless to say, the genealogies are rooted in the dynastic claims of the descendants of Nezahualcoyotl in the post-Conquest world. The fourth chapter then looks at the history contained in the pictorial narratives.

While the Xolotl serves as the example of a more complete and sustained narrative, the other two documents are more episodic and disjointed. Douglas considers the narrative form of each work, whether it is explicit in its presentation of historical data or merely implies certain things. Again, he draws heavily on the images and details of each work as he develops his conclusions. Finally, Douglas makes a strong case that these documents represent another aspect of the dialogue that occurred between the Spanish...