Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (review)

Damian Baca begins Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing by reminding readers that “Writing systems do not ‘evolve’ so much as they shift and migrate across territories, technologies, and digital cultures” (7). The “digital” culture Baca explores is one of Indigenous ingenuity and narrative manipulation across geographies of space and culture. By providing a study in composition and rhetoric written from a Mesoamerican and Mexican American historical perspective, he examines the various storytelling systems and the technical details of narrative production in highly sophisticated, but underrepresented cultures. We think of murals as contemporary; he tells us of sacred scripts found in murals five hundred years old. We think of the lengthy folds of a codex existing in the past; he tells us of twentieth-century codex collaborations. Baca describes the “immense plurality that remains obscured on American Indian land” in both the present and the past (xviii).

In a move both political and rhetorical, Baca begins with a “Pronunciation Guide and Brief Chronology.” Rather than allow readers to filter unfamiliar consonant combinations through the lens of their first language, he requires them to slow down and experience new sounds and learn new rules. Similarly, he begins the conversation of composition in 50,000 BCE, when pictographs began to represent thought and narrative in Piaui, Brazil. Gradually, he brings readers through time past the establishment of Mayan urban culture in 1000 BCE; past the creation of Epi-Olmec writing in 300 BCE; past the establishment of the Aztec imperial city, Tenochtitlan, in 1325; to the year 1491, a moment in time when an estimated 40 million people lived in Mesoamerica. This is the point when the existing Indigenous population experienced a 90 percent decline. However, as this book demonstrates, the continent remains connected to the scripts and practices of a culture that utilized a series of new techniques to move from the past into the present. Technology is merely the newest technique, and we are reminded that the modern Western world was once schooled by impressive ancient artistry. The wonder is not that ancient civilizations produced complex systems of understanding but that these systems were able to survive despite the onslaught of colonization.

Another asset of this text is the expansion of Mestiz@ identity, which Baca defines as “the fusion of bloodlines between American Indians and Spanish Iberian conquerors under colonial situations” (2). What this actually refers to is a continuum of identity from those who understand their individual and communal identity as Indigenous to those who view themselves primarily as Spanish. Stories are composed across a spectrum of identity. Lived experiences are compared across time and across borders. For instance, there are ways the story is the same in the United States and Mexico, and ways in which it is vastly different. The scripts Baca cites work to problematize linguistic and literary differences. He explains: “There is no singular Mestiz@ or Mexican, Mexican-American or Chicano culture. Mestiz@s and their communities are interacting and connecting with each other and with the larger world around them, forming intricate cultural networks of persons and communities” (61). Furthermore, “as an umbrella term, Mesoamerica is employed not to suggest a sweeping generalization, but in recognition of long processes of interrelated yet diverse cultures in a constant state of transformation” (34). One of the book’s primary lessons is that identity and technology are interrelated concepts dependent upon the shifting goals of communities constantly adapting.

Baca grounds his own theories in a network of scholarship about Mestiz@ rhetoric and writing. He of course includes references to cultural critic Gloria Anzaldúa, who wrote, “let’s all stop importing Greek myths and the Western Cartesian split point of view and root ourselves in the mythological soil and soul of this continent.”¹ But Baca also crosses disciplines to include the thinking of art historians Donald Robertson and Elizabeth Boone Hill, whose work provides historical context for the production of texts...