Barbara E. Mundy - The Codex Mendoza - new insights

As in Brittenham’s and Mundy’s work, the veiled permanence of traditions, modes of expression, and notions of communication that transcend what is made explicit by text or images articulates the context in which Frances Berdan discusses Mexican glyphic writing in regards to the Codex Mendoza. The codex is not only a document charged with the politics of redemption in the context of the early viceroyalty, as I have suggested. The codex’s pictographic interweaving also reveal the Mexica-Huasteca-Mixteca cultural and political relations of the pre-Columbian world—a world in which dominion is expressed both by means of the representation of conquest and by the translation and appropriation of the geographical names for the conquered territories. The Codex Mendoza is a colonial document that takes on many forms. It is colonial in the immediate context of its production (the 1540s and 1550s), but it is also a document that registers Mexica colonialism, which gestures and resources seem to echo each other. Tamapachco, “the place of palms” in Huaxtec, becomes, by means of Nahua pictographic adaptation, the “place of seashells,” thus detracting from the ancestral specificity of its name (Mundy and Magaloni, this volume). Similarly, Tenochtitlan is phonetized and distorted when rendered in sixteenth-century Spanish—becoming “Temistitan” in the most egregious of cases and, even when its name is correctly alfabetized, it loses both its semantic equivalence and its cultural, historical, and ritual specificity. Simultaneously, the Tenochtitlan wherein the Codex Mendoza is produced is, on one hand, the altepetl that claims for itself the title of center of the world. As Diana Magaloni shows, this is the place where notions of cosmic centrality dating back to the Olmec mid-formative period are embodied. On the other hand, the indigenous cabildo of this colonial city are governed by a surviving Tenocha elite striving to retain their land and influence. The double axis of text and images in the tripartite history of the Codex Mendoza negotiates this complexity and articulates a narrative that transcends the 1325-1521 period, and intelligibly inserts the Mexica world into the multicultural context of the early viceroyalty.

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