Script and Glyph: Pre-Hispanic History, Colonial Bookmaking, and the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca (review)

In this scholarly study of the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, Dana Liebsohn carefully takes the reader through the complex nature of the work, which as she notes uses both the pre-Hispanic tradition of pictographic representation and European alphabetic writing. The Historia, housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, is just one of several pictorial manuscripts produced in the village of Cuauhtinchan in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. It marks an important moment in the process of literary transculturation when two independent writing systems came to interact with one another. Liebsohn looks at the context of the creation of the work, its contents, and even the mechanics of its construction to inform the reader about the complex cultural environment that gave it birth.

The Historia was commissioned by don Alonso de Castañeda, a hereditary noble of Cuauhtinchan, sometime around 1560. One can infer that it was created in order to provide documentary evidence for claims made by him and his colleagues regarding land and rights to leadership within their polity. It marks a departure from earlier works insofar as it was written on European paper rather than the traditional bark paper (amate). As such, it marks an important turning point in the development of Mesoamerican writing schemes.

Liebsohn divides her study into four chapters, along with a very solid introduction to the work and the historiography of its interpretation and two appendices. The first chapter summarizes the history contained in the work and looks at the people and places described in it. She begins by looking at Cuauhtinchan as it existed in the sixteenth century, the artistic tradition evidenced in its parish church, and the role of don Alonso de Castañeda as a historical figure. She also places the work in the context of other similar documents from colonial Mexico. In the second chapter, Liebsohn analyzes how the pre-Hispanic past influenced the document. A large portion narrates the migration of the Chichimeca people from their ancestral homeland and the various encounters they had with divine beings and other peoples along the way.

The book also has genealogical content, in which central characters give rise to lineages prominent in Castañeda's day. The third chapter looks at the land itself and analyzes the interaction between territory and history. The important feature is that the lands were depicted not in a geographical sense as one would imagine a road map, but rather described in terms of the historical relationship of the community to the land. While in other sections Liebsohn recognizes that the alphabetic text can parallel and intersect with the pictographic, she understands that in dealing with physical space the two manners of communication do not cooperate so easily.

The last chapter seeks to discover the purpose of the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca. While we can never know exactly what don Alonso's intentions were, Liebsohn notes that the vision of the pre-Hispanic past held by don Alonso and the scribes who wrote the book is far different from our own. Moreover, don Alonso and company were using and interpreting the past for purposes of their own. They were seeking to recover the past, just as we are, but in a manner very different from the way of today's scholar.

The appendices provide a context in Cuauhtinchan for the Historia. One of them reproduces the major paintings from the Historia with extensive commentaries. The other gives an account of other manuscripts produced in Cuauhtinchan, which helps the reader to understand the fuller context of the book. This is a very important work. It is a fine companion to other studies of the Cuauhtinchan manuscripts, such as David Carrasco and Scott Sessions's Cave, City and Eagle's Nest (2007). Quite clearly, the analysis of early colonial pictorial manuscripts has reached a very high level of sophistication. These studies go a long way...