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Mexican Manuscripts and the First Images of Africans in the Americas Elena FitzPatrick Sifford Ethnohistory Abstract Africans in the Americas were first visually recorded by tlacuiloque, or indigenous artist- scribes in mid sixteenth century Central Mexican manuscripts such as Diego Durán’s History, Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and Codex Azcatitlan. These figures, while often peripheral to the central narrative and never mentioned specifically by name, are nevertheless rendered as active agents in the shaping of a new colonial society. The article examines these images of Africans to reveal their ethnographic complexity and the development of concepts of alterity in the early contact period. Key Words Africans in Mexico Afro-Mexico Tlacuilo Juan Garrido Telleriano-Remensis Azcatitlan Durán Historia 1 A dark skinned man with tightly curled hair hangs from a noose tied to a wooden scaffold. Rendered in profile, he wears a red tunic and holds a cross in hand. His hanged body slumps downwards, back and head sunken. This image, on folio 45 recto of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, may well be the very first rendering of an African in the Americas. It was painted by an indigenous artist in the mid sixteenth century, just a few decades after the conquest of Mexico (See Fig. 1). <Insert Fig. 1 Here> Figure 1. Codex Telleriano-Remensis, folio 45 recto. Courtesy Bibliotheque National de France. 2 It is perhaps surprising that it was in Mexico, a country not typically known for its African population, that Africans in the Americas were first visually recorded several decades before elsewhere. This precedent can be credited to the ingenuity of Mexica (Aztec) tlacuiloque (artist-scribes) who had trained in the creation of the xiuhtlapohualamoxtli, or historic annal, a literary genre produced in Central Mexico since long before the Spanish conquest. The earliest extant first-hand visual depictions of Africans in the Americas were therefore made by indigenous artists, not Europeans.1 These images, seen in the Codex Azcatitlan (c. 1550), Codex Telleriano-Remensis (c. 1550), and Fray Diego Durán’s History of the Indies of New Spain (1581), are some of the very first images of African people in the Americas.2 Studying them adds to the field of New Conquest History that problematizes accounts of the conquest as the triumph of Spaniards over the indigenous peoples through examining alternate narratives and viewpoints.3 This article contributes to this history by looking at the ways in which indigenous artist-scribes described and recorded the Africans who arrived as part of the Spanish entrada into Tenochtitlan. The indigenous reaction to Africans provides a visual alternative to the dominant European gaze, revealing not only the Spanish, indigenous, and African triangulation of the colonial encounter, but the ethnographic skill and artistic adaptation of the indigenous artists.4 The examples highlighted in this article show the ways in which tlacuiloque pictured and recorded “others,” both Spanish and African, and how those categories, while familiar in Europe, were only beginning to be defined on American soil. These images showcase the processes of social categorization from outside, Africans recorded not by Spaniards who are credited for setting the rules of the new colony, nor by 3 themselves, but by indigenous people.5 The act of being represented as the other would later be described by the African-American theoretician W.E.B. DuBois who wrote of “a particular sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”6 But what if those “others” were not Europeans, but members of another marginalized group (in this case, indigenous Central Mexican artists who had recently been conquered and colonized)? These images from colonial codices offer the possibility of blackness that was not tainted with the pejorative notions that surrounded blackness on the European continent and would soon continue within Western culture in the Americas. Toni Morrison developed the term Africanism to describe “the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people.”7 These Eurocentric readings of Africans saw an upswing in the fifteenth century with the reconquest and expulsion of Moorish (black and Arab) populations from the Iberian Peninsula and the increase of the African slave trade in Europe.8 Because of the slave trade that would soon stretch across the Atlantic to the New World, Africans came to be seen as natural servants as well as heretics who were stained by exposure to Islam on the African continent. In later centuries Mexican artists, displaying European derogatory associations with blackness, depicted Africans as biblical or allegorical subjects, or as stereotyped figures at the peripheries of Viceregal society. These earliest images, however, are neither idealized nor stereotyped. The Africans depicted by indigenous tlauciloque, while 4 often peripheral to the central narrative and never mentioned specifically by name, are rendered as active agents in the shaping of a new colonial society. Despite this, art historians have looked to the work of European artists as the progenitors of the earliest images of Africans in the Americas. Scholars studying images of Africans in colonial Latin American art have tended to focus on Brazil and the Caribbean as the primary sites of the African experience in the Americas, citing artists like Albert Eckhout, a Dutch painter who travelled to Northeast Brazil in the mid seventeenth century as the first to record the appearance of Africans in the New World. 9 Others have examined both European and local prints that depict Africans as Magi and various religious figures as the earliest examples.10 The ground breaking multi-volume Image of the Black in Western Art similarly overlooks the early contributions of the indigenous people of Central Mexico to the rendering of Africans in the Americas. These early colonial works by the tlacuiloque are indeed some of the earliest examples of “Western” art in the Americas, showcasing the melding of Western European and indigenous American literary and pictorial traditions. Nevertheless, the early modern tome overlooks the codices and focuses on European traveller art as well as depictions of black saints, the black Magus, and the personification of the African continent as the iconographic conventions for blackness.11 In Mexico by the seventeenth century artists had adopted similar schemes for rendering black Africans as magi, saints, or allegorical figures. By the eighteenth century some of the most famous images of New World Africans were casta paintings that depicted the racial mixing between Spaniards, Indians, and Africans. 12 Some casta paintings negatively portray African descended people, particularly women, as violent 5 and pernicious or as culprits in the degradation of Spanish blood. While much of the Viceregal visual production ignores or stereotypes the black body, the images located within the pages of the three key colonial manuscripts discussed in this article show that the tlacuiloque, not privy to the Hispanic history of racial categorization, rendered black bodies in key positions within these compositions. By offering a visual alternate to the often negatively stereotyped images of blackness perpetuated in the Americas, these earliest images, though few, offer a glimpse into an African diasporic history untainted by what Krista Thompson describes as the perpetuation of imagery that rendered Africans as “noncitizens, nonhumans, as not representable, or as unworthy or incapable of art.”13 Whether through negative imagery or the lack of representation of them in Western art, African diasporic peoples have been intimately acquainted with the inherent connection between the visual and the self. As Thompson aptly explains: “Who knew better the meaning and uses of the visual in Western society than those who were defined as black, as other, as property, based on the surface appearance of their skins?”14 The very visibility of black skin became codified as the identifier of African-ness, inferiority, and servitude. Yet in these conquest-era tlacuiloque images such negative associations are largely absent. Within them we see a glimmer of possibility that exists beyond (or before) the racism that would come to define the black experience and the representation of blackness on the American continent. Manuscripts, Pre and Post-Hispanic Aesthetic Practice, and the Tlacuilo’s Development of New Iconography All three manuscripts under discussion were commissioned by Spaniards and created by now anonymous indigenous tlacuiloque (artist-scribes). These individuals 6 were trained in the Aztec-Mixtec writing tradition, a technique that combined ideographic, phonetic, pictographic, and mathematical elements to create what Miguel León-Portilla describes as “true works of literature.”15 Much as alphabetic writing functioned elsewhere, the image in the Mesoamerican world was used to document and disseminate knowledge.16 In Nahuatl, cultural knowledge and wisdom were described as in tlilli in tlapalli, which translates to “the black ink, the colors.” 17 This describes the convention in which tlacuiloque created images outlined in black and filled in with color. Erudition and aesthetic practice were intimately linked, not only linguistically, but mythically as well. The artist-scribe’s patron was the divine hero god Quetzalcoatl, the bringer of both art and knowledge to humanity via the Toltecs who in turn transmitted these skills to the Mexica (Aztecs). The making of images was thus intimately linked with the recording and acquisition of wisdom. As Michael Baxandall has established, a society’s way of viewing itself and the world is communicated through picture making.18 The stylistic conventions of a cultural group reflects its understanding of the world around them, mirroring the society’s values and interactions.19 After millennia of developing in tlilli in tlapalli, the conquest and colonization fundamentally altered the cultural dynamics behind image making.

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