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Portraying the Aztec Past: the Codices Boturini, Azcatitlan, and Aubin' H-LatAm Favrot Peterson on Rajagopalan, 'Portraying the Aztec Past: The Codices Boturini, Azcatitlan, and Aubin' Review published on Thursday, December 12, 2019 Angela Herren Rajagopalan. Portraying the Aztec Past: The Codices Boturini, Azcatitlan, and Aubin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Illustrations. xii + 198 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4773-1606-1; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4773-1607-8. Reviewed by Jeanette Favrot Peterson (UC Santa Barbara)Published on H-LatAm (December, 2019) Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University) Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54457 Mesoamerica is rich in sixteenth-century pictorial manuscripts that offer a counter-narrative to the official European reports about Native Americans. Indigenous voices are preserved in these histories, providing a glimpse into how the Nahuas (Nahuatl-speaking peoples) of central Mexico viewed their own past and cultural legacies. Well into the colonial period, indigenous records capture memories central to their origin myths, political dynasties, and ritual practices, preserved, in part, through the retention of their traditional pictographic writing, a glyphic sign system that combined icons, symbols, and phonetic elements. In addition, these manuscripts capture the resilience of a peoples ingeniously adapting to, and even appropriating, introduced sociopolitical and cultural features. Although pictorial manuscripts, including those that form the subject of this study, were “lost” for decades, even centuries, their rediscovery in private libraries and collections far from their Mexican provenance did not prompt scholarly analyses until late in the nineteenth century. However, with an appreciation of their linguistic and ethnographic value, the second half of the twentieth century has seen an accelerated pace of interdisciplinary research, revealing much about the evolving writing systems, cultural habits, and sociopolitical responses of Native Americans grappling with a world turned upside down. Within the “Mexican” corpus of manuscripts, that is, the non-Maya documents, studies in the last half century have synthesized different genres of pictorial manuscripts.[1] More targeted analyses have focused on a single “codex” broadly defined as a hand-painted manuscript that varies in material make-up and format, from an accordion-styled screenfold to a bound book.[2] The comparative study of the Boturini, Azcatitlan, and Aubin codices by Angela Herren Rajagopalan is a unique contribution to this growing literature as the author provides a reading of each individual manuscript in painstaking detail and, more important, examines them in relationship to one another within their wider literary and historical context. In this sense, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as it is in their interrelationship that we glean the survival of traditional values as well as the shifting impact of the European presence, the movement from oral to alphabetic sign systems, and the formation of micro-patriotic alliances to protect their cultural heritage. Rajagopalan organizes her material somewhat chronologically through the three codices, facilitating even an uninitiated reader’s understanding of the shifts in style and content between them. The Codex Boturini (or Tira de la Pergrinación de los Mexica) is the earliest and, not surprisingly, the Citation: H-Net Reviews. Favrot Peterson on Rajagopalan, 'Portraying the Aztec Past: The Codices Boturini, Azcatitlan, and Aubin'. H- LatAm. 12-12-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/23910/reviews/5547019/favrot-peterson-rajagopalan-portraying-aztec-past-codices-boturini Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-LatAm most indigenous in its construction. On native bark paper (amatl) and using black and red pigments in a linear style, the Boturini is a screenfold 549 centimeters long. Its complete dependency on the pictographic writing system date the codex to sometime before or during the immediate contact period, although the author does not venture a definitive assessment of its style by claiming that “the codex has few or no introduced European stylistic traits” (p. 129). Both the Codices Aubin and Azcatitlan are later in date, composed of leaves of European paper that are bound like a Western- style book. Interestingly, in the Azcatitlan, the data presentation flows across two pages, mimicking the older “screenfold” method of organization. Although both rely on the Boturini in their migration sections, they combine older pictographic writing with alphabetic Nahuatl text. The Aubin dates to the mid-sixteenth century although it was bound in 1576, whereas estimates of the Azcatitlan’s production range widely from the late sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries. The introductory and concluding chapters (1 and 7) clearly, if somewhat redundantly, state the book’s major objectives. All three codices share the Mexica migration myth history that began in the northern reaches of Mexico and ended in the central basin with the foundation of Mexico/Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, twin cities on an island in Lake Texcoco and ultimately the capital of the Aztec Empire. These two communities had a common heritage and Nahuatl language; together they are referred to as the Mexica. More specifically, peoples who lived in Tenochtitlan on the southern part of the island self-identified as Tenochca, whereas the inhabitants of Tlatelolco to the North characterized themselves as Tlatelolca. In a complex but intertwined history, the related ethnicities competed, even after they were united politically under the hegemony of the Tenochca in 1473. The codices record the same migratory groups in an identical chronological order over a two hundred-year period (from 1168 to circa 1354) and with aligned geographical itineraries. Rajagopalan underscores one of her major themes: that the migratory journey itself, a mythic history propelled by supernatural prognostications, legitimated the Mexica’s claim for the right to rule. The author’s sensitivity to the ways the three histories evolved from a united “Mexica” perspective on their shared past (in the Boturini) to a more partisan Tlatelolcan view (Azcatitlan) within a Euro- Christian environment (Aubin) is one of her most significant contributions. The author notes other parallels between these three codices including the fact that they were created for and by the indigenous population who deployed, in varying degrees, their traditional pictographic sign system. Although the author-painters, referred to jointly as the tlacuiloque (sing. tlacuilo), were still responsible for creating pictorial manuscripts well into the post-contact period, their training in, and exposure to, European artistic styles and iconographies also introduced new combinations of bicultural traits visible in the codices as well as alphabetic writing. Rajagopalan, however, makes important distinctions between the documents in their materiality, facture or execution, and authorship. In chapter 2, the author executes a close reading of the Codex Boturini and its role not only as a structural model for later sixteenth-century migration tales but also as a paradigm for the formation of Mexica identity. Its glyphic signs are conventional, linking the passage of space marked by toponyms with date cartouches, an association that Rajagopalan, borrowing Federico Navarrete’s term, describes as “chronotopes” (pp. 25-26).[3] These signs act as a visual rhetoric but would have necessitated a specialized orator to communicate their meaning to a larger listening audience in precontact times; the later Aubin Codex inserts an alphabetic text to recite what is described pictorially in the Boturini. In arguing for the Boturini’s paradigmatic role, the author points to a Citation: H-Net Reviews. Favrot Peterson on Rajagopalan, 'Portraying the Aztec Past: The Codices Boturini, Azcatitlan, and Aubin'. H- LatAm. 12-12-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/23910/reviews/5547019/favrot-peterson-rajagopalan-portraying-aztec-past-codices-boturini Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-LatAm pivotal event in the migration narrative when, after eight tribal units leave the place of origin or Aztlan, the Mexica arrive at the place of the broken tree. This place also becomes a turning point and metaphor for the rupture of the “Mexitin” or Mexica, a peoples chosen by their patron deity, Huitzilopochtli (Hummingbird South or Hummingbird Left) shown in his bird-like form. Following the god’s dictates, the Mexica establish their capital city, an event that is well illustrated in the Aubin and Azcatitlan codices, but that is lost in the Boturini since the final folios were likely destroyed sometime between 1804 and 1824. Nonetheless, the Boturini’s primary agenda endures, offering a “unifying vision” of Mexica strength and legitimacy. As Rajagopolan argues, after the formation of the Triple Alliance, there was a need for “promoting a strong, independent and cohesive sense of Mexica identity [that] would have been a potent political tool in a culturally diverse region” (p. 40). Three chapters (3 to 5) are devoted to the Codex Azcatitlan, given this document’s ambitious historical trajectory and the need to account for its “visual heterogeneity” (p. 44). In the fabrication of the Azcatitlan, Rajagopalan discerns the work of a pair of tlacuiloque, Artist A, the master and
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