Painting Prophecy: Mapping a Polyphonic Chicana Codex Tradition in the Twenty-First Century

This article examines the work of the Chicana artist Sandy Rodriguez, who created the Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón, an ongoing project begun in 2017 that consists of botanical illustrations and large-scale maps of California and northern Mexico. Rodriguez's Codex draws on pre-Hispanic, colonial, and Chicana/o/x antecedents, most notably the Florentine Codex (sixteenth century) and the Chicana/o/x codices of the early 1990s, produced in the context of the quincentenary of Columbus's voyage. This article posits Rodriguez's Codex as a polyphonic text that exceeds both the linguistic of the literary and the visual of the artistic, drawing on a multiplicity of sources, both historical and contemporary, visual and textual, oral and aural, in her mapping of California's land and history. The Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón collapses precolonial, colonial, and contemporary histories to underscore continuities between the ruptures of conquest and our dangerous geopolitical moment.