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  • The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain by Lori Boornazian Diel
  • Álvaro Ramírez
Boornazian Diel, Lori. The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain. U of Texas P, 2018. Pp. 216. ISBN 978-1-47731-673-3.

In the Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain, Lori Boornazian Diel sheds light on an enigmatic indigenous text composed between the late 1570s and early 1580s by a series of indigenous “intellectuals” who survived the initial holocaust of the conquest. Though it is a short codex that has received scant attention, the author methodically gleans from it a wealth of information concerning the Aztec world prior to the arrival of the Spaniards as well as the transitional post-conquest period during which a colonial identity and sensibility began to take shape.

In the first chapter, Boornazian Diel establishes the relationship of the Codex Mexicanus to the Spanish Reportorios de los tiempos of the Early Modern Period that functioned as almanacs that provided information on calendric time, religion, history, and medicine. The Mexicanus [End Page 122] served the same purpose for the indigenous population of New Spain which was in dire need of a guide to help them negotiate their way in the state of anomie of the post-conquest period. The pictograph painters and writers that composed the text seemed to be conscious of their function as creators of a new way of being demanded by the transition into colonial life. By taking an active role in this undertaking, the author argues, they were able to fuse much of their culture and knowledge with that of Europe; in doing so they legitimated the hybrid culture and identity required to make sense of the new existence in a colonial society, distinct from that of Spain.

The measuring of time is the focus of the second chapter, where the author meticulously lays out the manner in which the Mexicanus reconciled two different calendrical systems, one indigenous and the other European, in a somewhat surreptitious way to avoid the Inquisition. The chronological hybridity that ensued allowed the indigenous creators of this codex to salvage much of their religious culture and to produce a way of counting the passage of time that differentiated New Spain from Europe. Here Boornazian Diel finds the genesis of Mexican cultural identity, especially in the way Catholic religious celebrations such as Día de los Muertos, brought from Europe, took on a different meaning. However, she does not explain why the apparition of the Virgin de Guadalupe is not mentioned in the Mexicanus, an event that would become an essential element in the definition of Mexicanness. Still, her point is well-taken: measuring calendrical time is a question of power and the tlamatinime (wise men) that created the Mexicanus were able to assert themselves in the new society by embedding their sacred time into the Christian calendar.

In the third chapter, the author elucidates the similar ways in which the Aztec tonalamatl (divinatory books) and Spanish Reportorios connected astrology and medicine, paying special attention to the natives’ gradual adoption and adaption of the zodiac and its relation to the body and medicine. Boornazian Diel speculates the creators of the Mexicanus perceived European medical knowledge as superior to their own ways of curing in view of the fact that Spaniards were affected less by the many plagues that decimated the native population. Additionally, the translation of the zodiac in the pictorial fashion of the Aztecs demonstrates that the authors of the Mexicanus were interested in European medical ideas but were also keen on making this knowledge easily comprehensible to an indigenous reader.

Interestingly, the fourth chapter deals with the Spanish notion of “limpieza de sangre” appropriated by the contributors to the Mexicanus to bolster Tenochca nobility that had recently lost power over Tenochtitlan, a city they had ruled since the fourteenth century. Boornazian Diel carefully shows how the codex substantiates an unmixed noble lineage linking the Aztec emperors to a divine ancestor. Once again, the contributors mimic the Reportorios that included Spanish kingship lineages, and by emphasizing their own version of “limpieza de...

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