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 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).

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 (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. Suddenly the tlacuilo found him or herself working for Spanish patrons and incorporating the events of the conquest into their new socio-cultural realities.

In order to render the appearance of the new arrivals, tlacuiloque had to quickly develop new iconographies. The genre itself, of historical picture-making, was nothing new for the tlacuiloque who had trained in the creation of the xiuhtlapohualamoxtli, or

7 “book of years.” Of the three manuscripts analyzed here, only the Codex Telleriano-

Remensis features a fairly traditional format for the historical annal. The other two

(Durán’s Historia and the Codex Azcatitlan), however, also clearly draw from parts of

Mesoamerican history painting tradition.

The Codex Telleriano-Remensis was written a generation after the conquest, and was largely copied from prehispanic texts, the images drawn by two artists.20 The codex is made up of three traditional manuscript types: the ritual calendar of monthly feasts called veintenas; the tonalamatl, or divinatory almanac; and the xiuhtlapohualamoxtli, a historic chronicle of Mexica history.21 The historic annal records more than 350 years of

Nahua history beginning with the migration from Aztlan in the twelfth century to the

conquest and colonial period up to its mid sixteenth century creation. The artist-scribe of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis likely consulted a prehispanic xiuhtlapohualamoxtli and expanded it to include the conquest and early contact period.22

While the ritual sections are as tightly organized as they would be in a prehispanic

manuscript, the historic annal deviates drastically from its traditional source,

necessitating new iconography to render the arrival of Spaniards and the subsequent

events and reordering of society, evident in the people, objects, animals, and the

introduction of new modes of representation. The African, like the natives and Europeans

throughout the codex, are rendered with conventional Nahua figuration emphasizing

figure type rather than individual physiognomy. Figures are shown in isomorphic form in

profile with large heads, frontally faced eyes, and with large, protruding facial features.

Changes to differentiate between groups are encoded in skin color: natives are given a

medium brown, Spaniards a light tan, and the singular African is rendered in a deep

8 brown. Hair and headgear are also signifiers, with indigenous male commoners shown

with a straight fringed bob while Spaniards are typically rendered with beards and a

variety of hats or hairstyles including tonsures, helmets, miters, and crowns. The African

figure notably has cropped and curly hair, a notation of the appearance of African hair

texture.

This modification of hair to suit an African phenotype shows the artist’s

observation of difference. Indigenous artist-scribes took note of African bodies, not only in such images but also in written form. The Florentine Codex, commissioned by

Bernardino de Sahagún, was an ethnographic study of the culture and history of the

Mexica. Sahagún and his former students interviewed elder informants in Nahuatl, which

was recorded alongside Spanish translations and accompanied by some two thousand

illustrations.23 While the images within the codex conspicuously omit the presence of an

African soldier, the accompanying text written in Nahuatl mentions that some of the

invaders had “tightly curled [hair]—ocolochtic.” The Spanish translation, written

opposite the Nahuatl, further explains “Among the Spaniards came Blacks, who had

crisply curled dark hair.”24 Notice that the Nahuatl text emphasized only the hair texture without mentioning skin color. Much as the artist lavishes great attention on European headgear throughout the annal, the curly hair of the African figure serves as a prime marker of difference that separated the figure from Spaniards and most obviously from the Nahuas themselves, who had straighter hair.

Curly hair, in fact, was considered a negative trait for the Mexica. During the festival of Toxcatl, the ixiptla (ritual impersonator) of the supreme god Tezcatlipoca was according to Sahagún “without defects,” and amongst the list of traits it is noted that “he

9 was not curly haired.”25 Straight hair was a sign of beauty while curly hair was considered unattractive. This parallel did not exist in regards to skin color: lighter skin in the Mexica worldview was not more beautiful than dark skin, which in fact had numerous

positive associations. Evidently, the finely curled hair of Africans was a more striking

difference than skin color, which was not so notably different than that of natives

themselves, being just a few shades darker.

All of these conventions were developed by the tlacuiloque of the manuscript who

recreated the events of the recent past using their powers of observation and recording.

While European artists had previously depicted Africans, it was a new phenotypical subject for the tlacuilo.26 Recording different ethnic identities, however, was nothing new

in Mesoamerican visual culture. Indigenous artists in Mexico used markers such as dress

and material culture to convey ethnicity since as early as the Classic period (c. AD 150-

650).27 With stratified societies, the depiction of distinct ethnic or racial groups was key

in the effort to order and codify power. With the Spanish conquest and development of a

multi-racial society, notions of difference and new social orders emerged. First referred to

informally as géneros de gente (types of people) and later codified into a sistema de

castas, colonial citizens were grouped based on the amount (or lack) of Spanish blood.28

While these notions of difference are rooted in Spanish worldview, the tlacuiloque also clearly noticed and recorded the diverse types of people in the new colony and their related hierarchies.

José Rabasa describes the artist-scribe’s inventive depictions of European objects and people and even the occasional adoption of European perspective as instances in which “…the observer found himself observed…a return of the tlacuilo’s gaze that

10 exposes the gaze of the missionary.”29 In the images of Spanish friars, for example, he suggests that the image may have been read as caricatures of the very friars who supervised the creation of the manuscript. This inventiveness indicates that while created under Spanish aegis, the tlacuiloque of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis had relative

autonomy in the painting of the manuscript, exhibited in not only its indigenous pictorial

style, but also in the development of new iconography and adoption of European visual

devices.

The Codex Telleriano-Remensis is remarkable amongst the group discussed in

this paper for its indigenous style, including Nahua glyphic and visual conventions. It

stands out as well for its iconography: it is the only example showing the repercussions of

a rebellion, while the other early images of Africans showed them as members of the

Hernán Cortés’s convoy.

Alliance, Revolt, and Punishment in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis

The figure in the Telleriano-Remensis shows the hanged individual as a symbol of

the repercussions of a major slave uprising that took place in in 1537.

The figure and annotation record events enumerated in Antonio de Mendoza’s letter to

King Charles I of Spain. Mendoza, the first viceroy, writes of the election of an African

king who plotted with native allies to overthrow the Spaniards and take over the lands of

New Spain.30 In order to quell the fledgling uprising, Mendoza sent natives to round up

rebel African leaders in Mexico City and the mines of Amatepacque for execution.

Mendoza reveals many of the anxieties of the period within the letter, expressing concern

about knowledge received by both Africans and Indians in the colonies and concerns about the paucity of boats arriving from Spain. Mendoza suggests an increase in Spanish

11 ships as well as a decrease in the importation of Africans, stressing that too many would

heighten their ability to rebel.

Both Mendoza’s letter and the annotation in the codex indicate how early on

Africans rebelled against their enslavement. We may think of the image of the hanged

African as an indication of centuries of discord to play out throughout the Americas

through enslavement, uprising, escape, and various forms of corporal punishment. Rather

than configure the image as symbolic of only the vanquished slave, we might think

instead of the figure as indicative of the many individuals who rose up against the

conditions of slavery. Furthermore, considering the authorship of the image, it may

indicate indigenous sympathies with the plight of Africans.

The annotator reports the rebellion of negros and the subsequent hanging of their leaders as well as the “smoking star” (comet) and violent earthquake of that year. An ollin glyph representing movement of the earth through seismic activity is placed below the hanged figure. Beside him, also connected to the date sign above by a thin black line is the “smoking star.” Both earthquake and comet were natural phenomena associated with bad omens.31 All three images- hanged man, earthquake, and comet, are further indicators of the unrest of the early colonial period that punctuates the historical annal.32

Mendoza mentions an allegiance between the Indians and Africans, and perhaps

the prominent inclusion of the African alongside the foreboding comet and earthquake

signify the incorporation of Africans and their circumstances into the system of signs and

portents that characterized the Nahua illustrated histories. Such evidence of alliances

between Africans and indigenous peoples was rarely recorded, and in fact, colonial

12 documents tended to focus on instances of African-native hostility rather than

coexistence and alliance building. 33

Consequently, whatever documentation of interaction between Africans and

native peoples there was tended to be negative, thereby reflecting Spanish self-interest. In

the case of the 1537 slave revolt, Mendoza’s letter indicates the anxiety of the conspiring between the two groups, just the type of “flagrant violation,” using Carroll’s terms, that would be recorded. And while the codex does not depict an alliance, speaking only of the

negros revolting, it does point out the “smoking star” and the terrible earthquake of that

year, thus associating typically Nahua concepts of unrest with the chaos of the squelched

rebellion. Furthermore, the iconographic conventions that accompany the glyph reveal

the ways in which the indigenous tlacuilo imbued the hanged figure with both Nahua and

Spanish symbols.

The platform at the base of the typically European scaffold resembles a Mexica

stepped pyramid, manmade sacred “mountains” topped with temples to the gods. The

Nahua written convention for recording a city’s conquest features a toppled temple platform, seen at the bottom of the frontispiece of the Codex Mendoza, an early colonial document that features typical indigenous glyphic representation (See Fig. 2). Similar to prehispanic militaristic conquest, the Spaniards who conquered Central Mexico also destroyed the great pyramids, at times erecting their Christian churches directly atop them. This symbolic gesture of the vanquished god superseded by the victor’s god was replicated in miniature in what Christian Nahuas called the momoxtli, an altar upon which a cross is erected, seen in the Testerian catechism of 1614 that translates the Lord’s

Prayer into a rebus for the instruction of indigenous Christian neophytes (See Fig. 3).

13 Before the arrival of the Spanish conquerors, momoxtli referred to a platform, stage, or altar for human sacrifice.34

Figure 2. Codex Mendoza, frontispiece. Courtesy Bodleian Library, University of

Oxford.

14 Figure 3. Egerton Codex, Lord’s Prayer in Testerian hieroglyphics with Nahuatl

translation. Courtesy British Museum.

Much as the stepped pyramid served as an altar-stage for the ritualistic act of human sacrifice, the early colonial momoxtli presented the symbol of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. The African in folio 45 recto is rendered with this same convention, the scaffold upon which he hangs shown mounted atop the momoxtli. Furthermore, the toppled temples in and around the Mexica capital may still have been visible. The enormous Templo Mayor complex was not entirely dismantled for quite some time after the entrada, despite the fact that the earliest Spanish maps depict an entirely hispanized city center. The Codex Mendoza, for instance, records the Mexica leader Tlacotzin’s efforts to preserve Tenochtitlan’s indigenous infrastructure.35 Folio 64 recto of that

manuscript credits him with maintaining streets and bridges that are depicted as leading

to an adjoining temple pyramid. Clearly these structures were still seen, at least in part, in

many of the most prominent parts of the city. The massive Templo Mayor still cast its

shadow over the Plaza Mayor where Cortes set up gallows in the months after the

conquest. Here the indigenous residents who had been exiled by the Spaniards were

publically punished if they attempted to move back into the center of the city.36 We can

imagine then that alongside the figure of the hanged African in the Telleriano-Remensis,

that the momoxtli, temple base, and main plaza are conflated into a single space,

harkening back to the sacrificial victims who died atop the great pyramids and

representing the human deaths that occurred now within the same central urban space.

Even when hanged for disobeying Spanish authority, both indigenous and African victims were given the chance to accept Christianity and repent, following Spanish

15 custom. The Telleriano-Remensis African is clearly shown with a cross in hand,

indicating he died in a state of grace, having been granted confession and absolution prior

to execution. In the Old World as in the New, Africans were believed to have been

corrupted by exposure to Islam, a religion that the friars were eager to eradicate following

the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula.37 Indigenous people, by contrast, were seen as

pure and eager to be molded into true Christians. For this reason it was argued that the

Indians should not be enslaved while Africans were natural slaves.38

As the colonial hierarchy evolved, Africans were placed into the Republica de

Españoles rather than the Republica de Indios. Though this placement may read as a sign

of higher status for Africans, in fact it offered them few advantages and subjected them to

greater control. They were associated with the Spaniards, often living in close proximity

to them as slaves, which differentiated them from natives who were pushed to the

outskirts of Mexico City and placed in reducciones in other parts of the Viceroyalty. As

members of the Republic of Spaniards, they were expected to be true Christians and yet

they were often not afforded the rights and privileges that were the lone domain of the

peninsular Spanish and later creole Spanish overlords. Indigenous people, while

undoubtedly exploited, were in some instances paternalistically protected by Spanish

authorities. Africans thus occupied a liminal “in-between” space of being associated with but not fully regarded as Spanish. This ambivalence, the ambiguous way that groups viewed each other, was particularly notable to the tlacuiloque who were perhaps unsure how to categorize the negros who arrived alongside the powerful Spaniards, a sentiment

that is crystalized in the second category of first African images: those of the black

conquistador.39

16 Black in the Codex Azcatitlán and Durán’s Historia

The Codex Azcatitlán is a manuscript created in the mid sixteenth century by

tlacuiloque from the city of Tlatelolco. It chronicles the migration of the Mexica from their ancestral home in Aztlán to found the cities of Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlan. Of interest to the present study is plate twenty-three “The March of the Spaniards into

Mexico,” which records the Spanish army led by Cortés and Malinche, a Nahua noblewoman who became Cortés’ interpreter (See Fig. 4). The two leaders are followed by numerous armed henchmen and a trailing group of native porters bearing heavy loads.

The soldiers wear armor and carry lances and shields, their faces obscured by their helmets. The singular African in the group stands out markedly: he is placed near the front with only one soldier between him and Cortés.

Figure 4. Codex Azcatitlan, “The March of the Spaniards into Tenochtitlan,” folio

23. Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The figure may be a reference to one Juan Garrido, an African auxiliary in Cortés’ militia.40 Garrido famously petitioned Charles I of Spain for recognition of his

involvement in the conquest of Mexico.41 He was born in Africa, travelled to Portugal,

17 and eventually arrived in Seville before setting off to the New World, becoming one of

the first Africans to reach American shores, arriving in as early as

1510.42 It is likely, in fact, that Garrido was one of a group of Africans involved in

Cortés’ mission. Restall explains: “The proportion of black armed auxiliaries in expeditions such as that of Cortés is thus difficult to assess, as Spanish conquest accounts tend to ignore them or mention them only in vague or passing terms.”43 Clearly, however,

for the tlacuilo of the Codex Azcatitlan, the African soldier was distinctive and worth

recording.

While the porters in back (the Tlaxcalan allies of the Spaniards) are shown

floating in space, Malinche, Cortés, the African figure (Garrido?) and the henchmen are

shown illusionistically along a path with a rolling horizon line following European

pictorial conventions. Federico Navarette argues that such changes in the manuscript’s

perspective were purposeful. Spanish figures and the portions most relevant for a Spanish

audience were rendered with European conventions while the narrative sections

concerned with indigenous matters use their own style and modes of representation.44

This line of reasoning is interesting to consider in light of plate twenty-three, where

Garrido is shown entrenched within the Spanish army and given a prominent position

near the front. He exists within the “Spanish” space of the image, as does Malinche, the

indigenous interpreter. It is only two of the three Tlaxcalan porters who hover in space,

divorced from the perspectival scheme of the rest of the composition. While a subtle

difference, Garrido’s inclusion with the Spanish group rather than as a lowly servant like

the Tlaxcalans indicates an intermediary, liminal position. Although part of the Spanish

18 retinue, the figure is clearly singled out as different and given a prominence not accorded

to the indigenous males within the entourage.

Painted a dark brown skin tone with curly black hair, the figure wears fine and

colorful clothing: a yellow hat and doublet with red breeches and tights. He holds both a

spear like that of the other soldiers and the reigns of the singular horse belonging to their

dismounted leader, Cortés. His bright clothing and lack of armor distinguish Garrido

from the Spaniards, yet his spear matches that of some of the trailing armored soldiers.

The figure may perhaps be identified as Cortés’ servant, perhaps a groom or page,

holding the leader’s reigns and spear in either hand. The figure is clearly shown as an auxiliary, though possibly one who was himself unarmed.

19 Figure 5. History of the Indies of New Spain and the Islands of Tierra Firme,

“The Encounter of Cortés and Moctezuma.” Courtesy Biblioteca Nacional de España.

The black conquistador as auxiliary is similarly rendered in Dominican friar

Diego Durán’s The History of the Indies of New Spain, written between 1574 and 1581

(See Fig. 5).45 Durán and his indigenous assistants travelled the Basin of Mexico collecting accounts of Mexica history and the events of the conquest. Durán’s “Juan

Garrido” similarly holds the leader’s horse, wears fine clothing that distinguishes him from both Mexica and Spaniards, and holds an almost identical spear. The figure of

Cortés, just like in the Codex Azcatitlan, has dismounted his horse and removed his hat as a sign of respect. In Durán’s text, however, the image of Moctezuma is illustrated on the same folio rather than the following (missing) page as in the Codex Azcatitlan. Two pages earlier, the Spanish leader is shown on horseback receiving the peaceful Tlaxcalans

(Fig. 6). Here the Spanish soldiers are absent, showing the black conquistador’s distinctive role in this image as a servant of Cortés.

20 Figure 6. History of the Indies of New Spain and the Islands of Tierra Firme,

“The People of Tlaxcala Receive Cortés in Peace.” Courtesy Biblioteca Nacional de

España.

Even before the entrada, Nahua scouts sent by Moctezuma to survey the troops on the coast noted their varied skin color. According to Sahagún, Moctezuma was convinced that the Spaniards were gods, perhaps the return of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.46 The Nahuatl account in Sahagún’s Florentine Codex reads: “They (the

Spaniards) were called and given the name of gods who have come from heaven, and the blacks were called soiled gods.” 47 While the Spanish translation makes no differentiation between the color of the black skin of the conquistadors themselves (los negros) and the concept of black gods (dioses negros), the Nahuatl translation differentiates between these two concepts.48 The Nauhatl word tliltque means “black people” or “black men,” a term that was likely invented in this early contact period from the root word tlilli, meaning soot or black.49 Yet when referring to the gods, the Nahuatl text describes them as tliltique teucacatzacti, or “soiled gods.” This description of the black conquistadors as soiled gods likely derives from Mexica associations with blackened deities. Alfredo

López Austin notes that there was a clear relationship between darkness and holiness and that the Nahuatl word teotl, which translates as god or sacred essence, also refers in some cases to blackness.50 Mexica priests often painted themselves black to honor male deities and to embody the sacred prestige associated with blackness. This is seen in an image of a priest performing a ritual sacrifice in the Codex Tudela, a sixteenth-century Mexica manuscript (fig. 7).51 The priest is shown with a dark brown skin tone that contrasts with

21 the tan coloring of the sacrificial victim, indicating the use body paint likely derived from poisonous or hallucinogenic plants and animals. This paint associated the body with not only the potency of the color black, but could also could provide bodily protection during harmful activities such as entering caves, sacred places of emergence and portals to the underworld.

Figure 7. Codex Tudela, “Priest Performing Sacrifice.” Courtesy Museo de

América.

At times of turmoil or change these same salves were placed on the Mexica ruler himself, allowing passage through ritualistic liminal zones.52 The most powerful figures, were routinely depicted as black following Nahua conventions as a sign of their male sacred power and leadership. In this context it is not surprising that the tlacuiloque noted

22 the African physiognomy that was noticeably darker than that of the Spaniards and

perhaps conjured preconquest notions of blackness and its connection to the divine.

In contrast, Europeans associated blackness with ugliness and sin while whiteness

was seen as beautiful and holy.53 As Erin Rowe points out: “When meditating on the black skin color of sub-Saharan Africans, Franciscan missionary Juan de Torquemada

(d.1624) decried blackness as a deformity—so ugly it was clearly a punishment from

God.”54 These earliest images of Africans, then, indicate that the Spanish hatred of

blackness was not understood by indigenous tlacuiloque, as such a binary distinction did

not exist in Nahua cosmology.55 Africans in fact are given prominent places within the

narrative of the entrada and its consequences. As the Mexica became entrenched in the

colonial order, however, Africans were soon recognized as subordinates to their Spanish

rulers.

Omission of the African Presence

While notable in indigenous accounts, the African presence was often ignored in

Spanish chronicles of the entrada.56 Instead the conquest was envisioned as an epic clash

between Spaniards and Indians with the valiant Spaniards envisioned as heroes.

Numerous Spanish conquest accounts completely ignore African contributions, and those

that mention it often do so only in passing. 57 These chronicles were often used for social

advancement, and the inclusion of Africans in the narrative was therefore peripheral to

that goal. As Africans were captured and brought to the Viceroyalty in increasing

numbers, their involvement in the conquest faded further from memory.

By the late seventeenth century Antonio de Solís’ 1684 Historia de la conquista

de México became the most popular account of the conquest on both sides of the

23 Atlantic.58 Solís’ text details the encounter of Cortés and Moctezuma and the fall of

Tenochtitlan, compiled using Cortes’ letters (1519-1525) and narratives written by Bernal

Diaz del Castillo (1552-1580) and Francisco Lopez de Gomara (1553). Despite other

evidence to the contrary, both Cortés and Diaz del Castillo fail to mention the presence of

Africans during the conquest. Lopez de Gomara, however, does mention an African

member of Cortes’ retinue who he blames for introducing smallpox and measles to the

fledgling colony. A classic example of Spanish scapegoating, the African is mentioned

only as the cause of discord.59 Lopez de Gomara’s account, like that of Solís, was secondhand, compiled from the accounts of conquistadors. Despite never setting foot on

Mexican soil, it was only he who mentions the Africans who participated in the entrada, if only pejoratively. Africans were largely left out of the most popular narratives of the conquest.

This omission is evident as well in the visual record of the period. Perhaps one of the most famous images of the conquest of Mexico is in the seventeenth century biombo, or painted screen, now housed at the Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City.60 One side of

the biombo offers an idealized view of Mexico City and its environs devoid of its human

inhabitants. The opposite side shows a panoramic scene of the conquest that includes events from battles in multiple cities. The view offers a continuous narrative pulsating with Spaniards and natives locked in combat. Gauvin Bailey points out that the two groups are rendered as equals in number, military might, and splendid regalia.61 Biombos were commissioned for wealthy Viceregal palaces as part of the process of cultivating a sophisticated criollo identity. Inspired by Asian models, incorporating European styles of

24 painting, and rendering Mexican subjects, they crystalize the global reach of Viceregal

Mexico. Despite this, the African presence is notably absent.

Not one African conquistador is depicted on the biombo that is full of hundreds of figures. The conquest scene is based on Solis’ Historia de la Conquista which would have been well known amongst the learned elites of Mexico City at the time of the creation of the biombo.62 This painted screen thus celebrates the popular narrative of the

entrada, which by this point fails to acknowledge the presence of Africans within the

Spanish retinue. By ignoring the presence of Africans in early conquest battles, Spanish

narratives as Bennett describes, “den[ied] the complexity that characterized the initial

ethnography of the Nahua.”63 While the iconography of the black conquistador quickly

faded, the extant images within contact period codices showcase both the keen

observations of the tlacuiloque and the active role that Africans played in the formation

of Viceregal New Spain.

Conclusion

While much of the Viceregal visual record ignores the black body, the images

located within the pages of the three key manuscripts discussed in this article show that

some indigenous artists in the early contact period found Africans notable and worthy of

recording. These artists were now working under Spanish patronage, combining the

inherited and newly introduced modes of representation. Following the tradition of the

xiuhtlapohualamoxtli, the tlacuiloque recorded the events of the conquest and

colonization of their people. Yet within that encounter lay not two monolithic cultural

groups, but numerous ethnic and racial identities. These images of Africans captured by

indigenous artists obfusgate the hegemony of the Spaniards. An indigenous hand renders

25 an African body, the imagining of a cross-cultural exchange reduced to a few inches within a much larger narrative.

By the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, the iconography of Mexican blackness had been reduced to mythologized or stereotyped types. Africans were pictured as historic Catholic saints, as allegories of the African continent, or (negatively) stereotyped as racial “types” in casta paintings. Despite their visual absence as agentival agents, Afro-Mexicans continued to live, work, and even prosper within a society that denied their very personhood. While under civic law, Africans were seen as chattel, within the Catholic church they were deemed fully human. 64 Africans and their

descendants were able to legally marry within the church, and were able to secure a

degree of legitimacy through the development of their religious and familial lives.65

The archival records studied by scholars like Restall, Bennett, Vinson, and von

Germeten indicate the complex interactions and efforts exerted by Africans to gain their

freedom and live as full citizens.66 This struggle continued into the modern era, when the

African presence remained overlooked in the Mexican collective memory. In the 1920s

José Vasconcelos, the reformist minister of education, declared that the Mexican people

were the “cosmic race,” made up of the best characteristics of the Spanish and Indian

forbearers.67 Vasconcelos insisted that the African influence in Mexico was negligible

and if there was any impact at all, it would have had to be negative.68 Within the process

of Mexican nation building, the stigma against blackness persisted, as it does to the

present day. The subject of the first Africans in Mexico is particularly salient in the wake

of the recent 2015 census which for the first time acknowledged the category of Afro-

26 Mexicans, despite the evident reckoning with alterity in these fascinating early conquest- era Mexica images.

1

27

1 Theodore DeBry’s prints created for translations of New World travel accounts from Spanish, English, Italian and Dutch sources, included some images of New World Africans. These images were produced in Europe, rather than through direct observation in the Americas as in the codices analyzed in this article. Another notable early image of New World Africans is indigenous Peruvian artist Andrés Sánchez Galque’s Mulato de Esmeraldas (1599), a portrait of Afro-Indian rulers of Esmeraldas, Ecuador. These examplesare later than the dates of both the Telleriano- Remensis and Durán images. See Michiel van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages, 1590-1634 (Leiden: Brill, 2008) and Tom Cummins, “Three Gentlemen from Esmeraldas: A Portrait Fit for a King,” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, ed. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

2 Anthropologist Ivan Van Sertima claimed in 1976 that the Olmec heads were images of Nubian overlords who had sailed to the Americas around 700 B.C. This claim, while popular amongst some Afrocentrists, has been dismissed by Mesoamerican archaeologists. The falsity of Van Sertima’s claims does nothing to undermine the impact of Africans in the Americas, who first arrived not in the eighth century, but in the late fifteenth. See Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, and Warren Barbour, “Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima’s Afrocentricity and the Olmecs,” Current Anthropology 38, vol, 3 (June 1997), 419-441. And Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (New York: Random House, 1976). 3 See Matthew Restall, “The New Conquest History,” History Compass (February 2012), 151- 160. 4 To the author’s knowledge the only other scholar to point out that the first images of Africans in the Americas were in Mexican codices was Ricardo E. Alegría, who mentions this point briefly in a larger text on the life of the black conquistador Juan Garrido. He mentions only the Durán and Azcatitlan images. Ricardo E. Alegría, Juan Garrido, el Conquistador Negro en las Antilla, , México y , c. 1503-1540 (San Juan: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de y el Caribe, 1990), 114-120. 5 For more on this see “The Identity Nexus: Social Categories and Self-Understandings” in Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara, eds., Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 15-23. 6 W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publicaitons, 1903), 38. 7 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 6. 8 Jonathan Spicer, “Introduction,” Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2012), 9. 9For example, Edward Sullivan writes “The earliest surviving depictions of Africans in the Americas are in paintings by Europeans.” In “The Black Hand: Notes on the African Presence in the Visual Arts of Brazil and the Caribbean,” in The Arts in Latin America 1492-182, Joseph J. Rishel and Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, eds. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2006), 40. 10Larissa Brewer-García, “Imagined Transformations: Color, Beauty, and Black Christian Conversion in Seventeenth-Century Spanish America,” in Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, ed. Pamela Patton (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 111. 11 David Bindman, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Karen C. C. Dalton, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 12 For more on casta painting see Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth- Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press), 2004.

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13 Krista Thompson, “A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of Art History in the United States,” Art Journal (Fall 2011), 10. 14 Thompson, 11. 15 Miguel León Portilla, “Aztec Codices, Literature and Philosophy,” in Aztecs, eds. Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and Felipe Solíce Olguín (New York: Abrams Books, 2002), 64. 16 Diana Magaloni Kerpel, The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2014), 18. 17 Miguel Léon-Portilla, La filosofía náhuatl estudiada en sus Fuentes, 9th ed. (Mexico City: Uiversidad Nacional Autónoma de México 2001), 66-67. See also Elizabeth Hill Boone, Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). 18 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Early Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 29-103. 19 Magaloni Kerpel offers a useful discussion of Baxandall’s theories of perception as related to Mesoamerican picture making in The Colors of the New World, 17. 20 Eloise Quiñones Keber, Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1995), 123. 21 Quiñones Keber ,111. 22 Quiñones Keber, 123. 23 Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, ed. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press and the School of American Research, 1950-1982). 24 The Nahuatl text reads: “…cocototzique ocolochtic…” which translates as “[The Negroes’ hair] was kinky, it was curly.” The Spanish accompanied text reads: “…y de como venja algunos negros entre ellos, que tenja los cabellos crespos, y prietos…” See Sahagún, Book Twelve, Chapter Seven, 19. 25 Sahagun, Book Three, 66. 26 David Bindman, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Karen C. C. Dalton, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 27 Esther Pasztory, “Identity and Difference: The Uses and Meaning of Ethnic Styles,” in Cultural Identity in the Visual Arts, eds. Susan Barnes and Walter Melion (London: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 15-38. 28 Robert C. Schwaller, Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016); Magali Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); María Elena Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 61, no. 3 (July 2004): 496-97; and Laura A. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 29 José Rabasa, Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 1-2., 47. 30 Report of Antonio de Mendoza, Viceroy of New Spain, to King Charles I of Spain, accessed April 12, 2016, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/settlement/text6/SlavePlotMexico.pdf. 31 “Méxica/Aztec Chronicle, Codex Telleriano-Remensis, accessed April 12, 2016, http://historyproject.ucdavis.edu/ic/image_details.php?id=1101026. 32 James Lockhart, We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 51- 53.

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33 For more on conflict and cooperation of Africans and indigenous people during the sixteenth century see Schwaller, Géneros de Gente, Colin Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico 1570-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 119-44. Patrick J. Carroll, and “Black-Native Relations and the Historical Record in Colonial Mexico,” in Beyond Black and Red: Africans-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America, ed. Matthew Restall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 252.

34 Santiago de Orduña, “The Tree, the Cross, and the Umbrella: Architecture and the Poetics of Sacrifice,” in Chora 6: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, eds. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 219. 35 Barbara Mundy, The Death of Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 81. 36 Mundy, 2015, 76. 37 María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 96. 38 The Valladolid debate (1550-51) was a debate over the status of insigenous people. Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas argued that Amerindians were rational beings who should have equal rights, while theologian Juan Ginés de Spúlveda claimed that they were sinful natural slaves. 39 Matthew Restall describes a similar phenomenon, of blacks living connected to yet in between Spanish and indigenous worlds in The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009). 40 Restall 2000, 175. 41 Juan Garrido’s probanza (petitionary proof of merit) dated September 27, 1538 and housed in the Archivo General de Indias, Seville, México 204, f. 1, was published in Alegría, 127-138. 42 There is disagreement over whether Garrido was ever enslaved. All sources, as well as Garrido’s probanza, indicate that he was free at the time of his arrival in the Americas. See Gherard, 452 and Alegría, 19-22. 43 Restall 2000, 179. 44 Navarette, 145-6. 45 Diego Durán, History of the Indies of New Spain, ed. Doris Heyden (Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), xxviii. 46 Restall debunks this “Desolation Myth” as a Eurocentric revision promoted by the Franciscans. Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 100-130. 47 “ic tocaiotiloque, teteu ilhuicac auh in tliltique teucacatzacti mitoque” Chapter Eight of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex translated in Lockhart, 82. 48 “…y el lo mando hazer porque tenia que aquellos erá dioses que venian del cielo: y los negros pensaron que eran dioses negros.” Chapter Eight of the Florentine Codex translated in Lockhart Lockhart, 82. 49http://whp.uoregon.edu/dictionaries/nahuatl/index.lasso?&dowhat=FindJustOne&theRecID=11 5651&theWord=tlilli. 50 López Austin, 145.

51 Codex Tudela http://ceres.mcu.es/pages/ResultSearch?Museo=MAM&txtSimpleSearch=C%F3dice%20Tudela %20o%20del%20Museo%20de%20Am%E9rica&simpleSearch=0&hipertextSearch=1&search=s imple&MuseumsSearch=MAM%7C&MuseumsRolSearch=11&listaMuseos=%5BMuseo%20de %20Am%E9rica%5D (Accessed September 5, 2016).

30

52 Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “Perceiving Blackness, Envisioning Power: Chalma and Black Christs in Colonial Mexico,” in Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World, ed. Dana Leibsohn and Jeanette Favrot Peterson (Burlington and Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 61.

53 For more on early modern notions of blackness see Andrew Curran, The anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), Erin Rowe, “Visualizing Black Sanctity in Early Modern Spanish Polychrome Sculpture,” in Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, ed. Pamela A. Patton (Leiden: Brill, 2016), and Victor Stoichita, “The Image of the black in Spanish Art: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art,. 54 Juan de Torquemada, Primera parte de los veinte i un libros rituales i monarchia Indiana (Madrid: Nicolas Rodríguez, 1724), 611. As quoted in Rowe, 57. 55 For more on notions of racism in the early modern period see Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, eds. The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 56 Restall, 184. 57 Restall, 179. 58 Antonio de Solís, Historia de la conquista de México: Poblacón y progreso de la América septentrional conocida por el nombre de Nueva España (Madrid: Bernardo de Villa-Diego, 1684). 59 Restall, 176. 60 See Sofía Sanabrais, “From Byobu to Biombo: The Transformation of the Japanese Folding Screen in Colonial Mexico,” in Art History 38, issue 4 (September 2015), 778-791. 61 Gauvin A. Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America (London: Phaidon Press, 2006), 159. 62 Barbara Mundy, “Moteuczoma Reborn: Bimobo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico,” Winterthur Portfolio 45 (Summer/Autumn 2011), 166. 63 Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 213. 64 Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 1. 65 For more on Afro-Mexican Christian community formation, see Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006); and Joan Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007). 66 Africans also used military service as a means of advancing in the Viceregal society. See Ben Vinson III’s Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 67 José Vasconselos, La Raza Cósmica (Mexico D.F.: Espasa Calpe, 1948). 68 Cesário Moreno, The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present, (Chicago: Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 2006), 15.

31

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