Codex Mendoza is a pictographic and alphabetic book produced in City, formerly the Aztec capital of México-, between 1542 and 1555 at the latest.

From its origin it was conceived to be sent to Europe as a demonstration of the splendor and civilization of the empire of the Mexica (the correct name for ), characterized according to the values of the times by its “policía y buen gobierno”, “polity and good governance”.

The Codex is divided into three distinct but well articulated sections. The first tells the history of the Mexica empire and its royal dynasty; the second, presents an exhaustive list and atlas detailing all the tributes received by the Empire; and the third contains a description of the civilized family life, lawful customs and hierarchical social institutions of the Aztecs before the conquest. The pictographic pages of the document strictly follow the visual and narrative conventions of other Aztec and Mesoamerican written and visual histories. An alphabetic text Spanish explains and narrates each pictographic page, and was accorded equal space in the original planning of the book.

In the 18th century Francisco Clavijero attributed the patronage of this work to

Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, the first such ruler of (1535-1549) and called it

Códice Mendoza, a name that has become universal. However, most recent authors have refuted this direct attribution.

An annotation on the last page of the document provides us with invaluable and contradictory information about the authorship of the Codex:

El estilo grosero e interpretación de lo figurado en esta historia supla el lector, porque no se dio lugar al interpretador de ningún vagar y como cosa no acordada ni pensada se interpretó a uso de proceso. Así mismo en donde van nombrados alfaquí mayor y alfaquí novicio fue inadvertencia del interpretador poner tales nombres que son moriscos. Ha se de entender por el alfaquí mayor, sacerdote mayor y por el novicio, sacerdote novicio. Y donde van nombrados mezquitas ha se de entender por templos. Diez días antes de la partida de la flota se dio al interpretador esta historia para que la interpretase el cual descuido fue de los indios que acordaron tarde y como cosa de corrida no se tuvo punto en el estilo que convenía interpretarse, ni se dio lugar para que se sacara en limpio limando los vocablos y orden que convenía y aunque las interpretaciones van toscas no se ha de tener nota sin vala sustancia de las aclaraciones, lo que significan las figuras, las cuales van bien declaradas por ser como es el interpretador de ellas buena lengua mexicana.

The reader must make up for the rough style and the interpretation of the drawings in this history. Because the interpreter did not have time or work at all slowly; and because it was a matter neither agreed upon nor thought about, it was interpreted as is done in a [legal] process. Likewise, it was a mistake for the interpreter to use the Morisco words alfaquí mayor and alfaquí novicio. Sacerdote mayor, should be understood instead of alfaqui mayor, and sacerdote novicio for the novice. And where mezquitas is written, templos is to be understood. The interpreter was given this history ten days prior to the departure of the fleet, this carelessness is the fault of the Indians, who came to agreement late; and so it was done in haste and there was no way to find a style suitable for the interpretation, nor was it any place for making a clean copy polishing the words and presenting the suitable order. And although the interpretations are crude, one should not dismiss the substance of the explanations that explain the meaning of the drawings, which are correctly presented, because the interpreter of them is well versed in the Mexican language. I read this comment in full because it is key to my whole reading of the Codex and allows to identify the different participants in the process of writing the book:

—The Aztec tlacuilome who painted the pictography and who took their time. We can assume they had full control in the elaboration of the initial part of the Codex, the pictographic plates.

—Other members of the native elite who “came to agreement late” about the contents of the oral history that should accompany the visual history, but finally presented both to the interpreter in a performance.

—The interpreter ,who translated the Aztec oral and visual discourses from their native Náhuatl into Spanish as “is done in a legal process” and using “Morisco words”. —Also, clearly, a scribe who wrote down the translation of the interpreter, and also the final comment, without having “place” to “polish” the words.

—Finally, I propose that the final commentary, dismissing the Moorish words, could not have been made by the interpreter nor but the scribe, but was dictated another official who took a dim view of their work. I will call him the “nameless bureaucrat”.

Besides the actors mentioned in these text we can also assume that the book was commissioned by or produced unter the patronage of some Spanish authority or authorities (possibly Viceroy Mendoza himself). They put pressure for it to be ready in time to leave with the fleet. The Nameless bureaucrat could have been one them, or one of their rivals in the Viceregal administration, as we shall see.

This comment, even in its dismissiveness, demonstrates the complex nature of this intercultural product. It is at the same time a masterly instance of Mesoamerican pictographic writing and visual narration, and a fully functioning and perfectly understandable book in Spanish language in the Latin script, including Morisco words.

Indeed from its conception the book accorded both systems of writing equal space and importance, in an attempt to establish their equivalence. This parity served to demonstrate that Mesoamerican pictographies were a perfectly translatable system of writing, and thus could be utilized as a legitimate source for the transmiting historical and juridical truths. So in a sense, this book is not simply a translation of the history of the Mexica, but also a brilliant demonstration of the validity of their pictographic writing. It also showcases the abilities of both Mexica tlacuilome and Viceregal interpreters to carry out valid legal translations between this writing system and Latin script. Finally, the text contains Moorish elements that should not be there according to the commentator.

So why were there Morisco words involved in this process of translation between

Náhuatl and Spanish and between Mesoamerican and Latin scripts in New Spain in the

1540s? And why would that be a problem?

Let us first detail the process of elaboration of the Spanish text.

First of all the translation was done “a uso de proceso”, “as if in a [legal] process”.

This means that it was neither a written translation of another written text in Náhuatl, nor a copy of a previously extant text in Spanish, but rather a transcript of an oral presentation, such as the ones carried out in a trial where participants argued their cases and presented written and visual evidence to support it. Such presentations were also a central feature of Mesoamerican historical traditions, which conjoined the exhibition of visual and pictographic histories with the recitation of oral traditions in highly ritualized performances. We can assume that some kind of such performance was carried for the translation of this book. This means also that the interpreter and scribe knew how to utilize the prevalent practices, technologies and conventions for the elaboration of this kind of transcripts in legal settings, most likely because they worked in the Viceregal tribunals.

Secondly, the whole process of writing down the abundant and detailed information, extending to 35 folios of tightly written Spanish text, amounting to over

145,000 characters, was carried out in just 10 days. A recent analysis of the handwriting, by Jorge Gómez-Tejeda and Barbara Mundy, confirms this information.

According to the nameless bureaucrat his meant that the interpreter had to work in haste and this led him to employ Morisco terms to refer to Aztec religious priests and temples. This would suggest that these terms were normally used in legal translations contexts to establish equivalences between Indigenous institutions and Muslim ones.

In order to complement these elements, we need to take into account the following precedents:

In the Iberian peninsula between the 8th and 15th centuries, Islamic and Christian rulers, judges and intellectuals had been constantly obliged to read and translate juridical and other documents written in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew script. Therefore they developed techniques for translation that involved not only the recognition and knowledge of different languages and systems of writing, but also of different juridical and governmental traditions firmly rooted in their respective religions. In order to adjudicate and rule, they developed a common ground between them, or rather a set of equivalences that glossed over, or set aside, their religious differences. The negotiation of non-religious equivalences between Christian, Muslim and Hebrew customs and juridical institutions, as well as other forms of knowledge, was fundamental for governance and for the working of these multicultural societies.

We know that Spanish explorers and brought with them interpreters and translators that spoke Hebrew and Arabic, regarded as potential universal languages also spoken in the Indies. These interpreters were the heirs of the long established Iberian tradition of coexistence of translating between these languages and their respective scripts.

We also know that Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza was the son of Íñigo de Mendoza, who had been Capitán general of the recently conquered Islamic caliphate of Granada, the last remnant of the Islamic regimes in the Iberian peninsula. Mendoza was also the child of a converted Jewish woman and lived many years in Granada, in the Alhambra no less, and was known to wear Moorish clothes in his youth and to admire Moorish culture. Some historians have proposed that Mendoza was sent to the recently conquered New Spain to apply there some of the policies and techniques of governance developed by his father in dealing with non-Catholic subjects in Granada after 1492, which maintained for a brief period of time some semblance of coexistence and relative tolerance between different religions, though these were rapidly overwhelmed by the imposition of Catholic intolerance.

Therefore we could propose that the Codex Mendoza is a late and geographically distant product of this venerable Iberian tradition, brought to New Spain by Mendoza and the officials that accompanied him, in order to set the bases for the institutionalization of Spanish rule over recently conquered Mesoamerica.

By the 1540s, the Mexica and other inhabitants of Mesoamericas had over two decades of experience in presenting their cases to the recently established Spanish tribunals. They are frequently described as eager litigants, willing to bring all cases to court, particularly to contest the abuses of Spanish colonizers. The interpreters, scribes and judges in the Spanish courts had developed techniques for dealing with these ceaseless petitions: they had recognized the juridical value of pictographic writing, had identified Indigenous legal institutions and practices and established their equivalence to Spanish ones.

Taking into account all these elements, the use of Morisco terms can be interpreted as an index for several features of this early processes of translation and communication. I shall call them:

—The Morisco scribe

—The Morisco analogy

—The Morisco framework, and

—The Morisco moment.

The “Morisco scribe” points to the possible involvement of Morisco individuals (that is Muslim converts to Catholicism) possibly brought to New Spain by Mendoza as personnel specialized in dealing with non-Christian subjects and institutions. This possibility could be confirmed, or dismissed, by further research.

The “Morisco analogy”, refers to the translation practices that produced expedient equivalencies between Muslim institutions and Mesoamerican one. These analogies had two different but complementary uses. The first one not posited and equivalence between Mesoamericans and Muslims as non-Catholic but civilized peoples. The second, helped define specific political and juridical relations between Spanish

Christian rulers and their non-Christian subjects, in Spain or New Spain. Thus calling a

Mexica temple a mosque meant not only that it was “like” a mosque (a sacred site of a false religions), but also that the Spanish authorities should relate to Mexica temples in simliar ways as they related to Muslim Mosques, by desecrating, destroying and transforming them into Christian sacred places. Thus “Morisco analogies” were not simply means for explaining Indigenous societies, but first and foremost tools for governing them more efficiently. Also, as we shall see below, the analogy could also allow older Iberian practices and ideas for dealing with religious diversity to be transplanted from Spain to New Spain. This would be incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy, which could have provoked the indignant dismissal by the Nameless bureaucrat.

The “Morisco framework” is the assemblage of these elements in a complex of juridical practices, of technologies of writing and translating that allowed for the coexistence of different scripts, discursive and legal practices. This framework prioritized the building of agreements between the different traditions in order to facilitate and carry out governance and domination. It also managed to somehow set aside religious differences and incompatibilities, bracketing them, glossing over them, in order to build a common ground for human and social life based on “natural” reason, centered on “policía y buen gobierno”, public order and laws, and a strict and just patriarchal authority that fostered private virtues and punished vices.

However before claiming that such a framework lies behind the translation of Codex

Mendoza, we must take into account the agency of the mexica tlacuilome and writers who participated in the elaboration of the Codex Mendoza. It is my contention that they took advantage of the Morisco framework to establish key accords with the interpreter and the scribe in the interpretation of their own history and laws, customs and personalities. In doing this they must have aslo utilized the existing Mesoamerican frameworks for such cultural and political negotiations, but that is the matter for another paper and discussion.

In order to prove this claim we must begin by recognizing that Códice Mendoza is first and foremost as a legal document: its historical section deals mostly with the establishment of legitimate dynastic rule, the origins of laws, and most importantly the conquest of foreign polities and the imposition of relations of vasalage and tribute payment. The tribute section is an exhaustive and pragmatic catalogue of the payments legally due to the Aztec rulers by their vassals as a result of these conquests. The final social section describes the laws and institution founded by historical rulers, in order to demonstrate the exemplary governance of . Religion is remarkably absent from all these accounts.

We can assume that the members of the Mexica elite who wrote and presented our

Codex were mostly born before the Spanish conquest and were members of the noble families who held power at the time, so in presenting this idealized version of their institutions they were promoting their position as a valid aristocracy within the New

Spanish political and legal system. They presented themselves as the legitimate rulers of the Mexica population and territory and as the only legal intermediaries in the extraction of tribute from them. Finally they were offering their power and technologies

(writing, record keeping, and geographical knowledge for tribute collecting) to the service of the Spanish king, as would any other nobility in any part of his Empire.

The consistency, exhaustiveness and effectiveness of this idealization could only be the result of a succesful negotiation between the Mexicas performing their history and the Viceregal interpreter and scribe setting it into Spanish text. One example allows us to reconstruct how these accords worked. We can agree that for both the Mexica and the

Spaniards it was important to establish the dynastic succession of Mexica tlatoque, or kings, as a key element of their legitimacy. However, the Pre-Columbian tlatoque had been famously polygamous, having hundreds of wives and concubines, which went against the Catholic morality and genealogical purity. In Codex Mendoza, this non-

Catholic practice is presented alternatively as a requisite of the office, a sign of majesty, a political duty that could not be declined, or as the result of the personal inclination or vices of some of the rulers; some kings, in contrast, are presented as more virtuous because they married less women. Thus a kinship system that would be totally condemnable from a religious point of view, is presented as a custom of state or as the result of the vices or virtues of individual rulers. This allows the Codex to establish a clear distinction between legitimate marriages and offspring, which were able to transmit hereditary rights, and the other unions.

Within the Morisco framework, the Mexicas and the Viceregal officials could agree on the need and expediency of underplaying the role of religion. The former had been forced to convert to Catholicism in the 1520s and 1530s as the result of an extremely violent campaign of destruction of buildings, objects and books, as well as public executions of recalcitrant individuals, carried out by the Catholic missionaries. The traumatic consequences of this imposition, and also the pragmatic recognition that religious intolerance was central to Spanish colonial rule, would surely make them wary of discussing their former religious beliefs and practices. For the Viceregal officials the omission of religion was pragmatic: they wanted to demonstrate that the Aztecs could be governed indirectly, through their natural rulers, by establishing an equivalence between their rational and virtuous laws and customs and the Spanish ones, between their writing system and the Latin one, between their institutions and the

Spanish ones. This could be defined as the ultimate goal of the Morisco framework, that people of different cultures and religious backgrounds be accepted under Spanish rule, even at the prize of compulsory conversion, but still allowed to preserve their rulerships, their properties, their natural rights. In other words, the Morisco framework allowed for the conceptualization and defense of the rights of converts, be they former

Muslim or former practitioners of the Mesoamerican religions.

I do not think that the carefully drawn equivalences, the delicate distinctions, the subtle arguments that were needed to build such a compelling picture of the empire could have been accomplished in the space of 10 days, as the Codex was being presented, performed, translated, and written down. Rather they were constructed in the previous decades, through legal processes, political negotiations, endless dialogues, starting with the interactions between the Spanish conquistadors, their allies and their enemies in 1519. In this sense Codex Mendoza could be considered as the ultimate product, the most spectacular achievement of this early accommodation between the institutions and needs of Aztec elites and those of the Spanish administration, following a well established Iberian tradition of translation and negotiation.

The “Morisco moment” refers to the fact that these possibilities of accommodation and coexistence existed only briefly, in the earliest period of Colonial domination, both in Granada and New Spain, and were soon overwhelmed by the imposition of the racist policies of Catholic exclusivism, central to the constitution of the modern Spanish state and of the Catholic Universal Monarchy. In the 1540s, the last years of the reign of

Charles 5th, just as this Codex was produced, the policies of religious intolerance were already hardening. The values of “pureza de sangre”, blood purity, were increasingly exalted, and persons of Muslim, Jewish, and also of Mesoamerican ancestry, were increasingly suspected and persecuted for “apostasy” or “superstition” after their compulsory Christianization.

We can observe this growing suppression in the words of the Nameless bureaurat .

He asks the Christian reader to “make up” for the Morisco words, which he associates with an incorrect and improper style, lacking “polish”. More striking, his final phrase, seems to accord more importance to the script of the Indians than to the deficient

Morisco-laced Spanish writing of the interpreter.

Given that Codex Mendoza was conceived as a spectacular present to be sent to the king by the Mexica elites and the viceroyal officials of New Spain, the presence of such words would be troublesome for the emerging ideology of racial purity and intolerance.

In the best possible view of his intentions, the Nameless bureaucrat may have sought to diminish their negative impact by acknowledging their presence and asserting nonetheless the fidelity of the translation and the validity of Indigenous writing. In a more dismal one, he could have sought to taint some of the Spanish participants in the elaboration of the document with that shameful mark, and maybe implicitly condemn their relatively tolerant attitude towards Indigenous institutions and mores. In any case, the decades following the writing of our Codex Mendoza witnessed the obliteration of the “Morisco moment”. In Spain, Morisco converts were gradually deprived of most rights and finally expelled from the Peninsula between 1609 and 1613.

In New Spain the traditional forms of Indigenous governance exalted by this book were substantially altered by the consolidation of viceroyal authority and the imposition of the institutions of the república de Indios; also, the enforcement of tribute payment in money, or forced labor, destroyed the traditional forms of tributatation described by the authors; finally, the increasing knowledge, education, and control exerted by Catholic priests over Indigenous societies substantially altered the culture of the Native ruling elite. This new regime of Colonial control, did not eliminate Indigenous populations like Moriscos in Spain, but mostly because their labor force was essential for the survival of Colonial society. However, they were relegated to a status of permanent subservience, defined for ever as “new Christians”, prone to idolatry and apostasy, who should be excluded from positions of authority and power, and should forever remain under the patronage of Catholic missionaries.

This is why the famous histories of Mesoamerican peoples produced by missionaries such as Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego Durán emphasize the generalized presence of religious practices in Indigenous societies, which they sought to identify and describe systematically in order to extirpate and destroy.

What is more striking, even surprising, is the fact that the mandate of our Nameless bureaucrat to “make up for” the Morisco words by substituting them for the correct

Spanish terms, has been faithfully carried out by the legion of Modern scholars that have studied Codex Mendoza. Indeed I am not aware of any profound discussion of this Morisco angle in the myriad of editions and papers about this book. The few authors who acknowledge a Morisco possibility usually reduce it to the “Morisco analogy” in its first restricted meaning.

Nicholson, author of one of the most erudite essay on the origins of the Codex, does not even discuss this information and its possible implications for the identification of the authors of the book. At the same time, he proposes a Christian origin for the book, using a s slight textual likeness between a passage of the historical section of the Codex and the Historia Eclesiástica Indiana by Franciscan Jerónimo de Mendieta, written 50 years later, as a strong indication that both texts have to be related to Fray Andrés de

Olmos, the first Franciscan historian of the Aztecs, who was active in the 1530s and

1540s. He even proposes that this erudite priest could have been the interpreter of the

Codex. Such a possibility however appears to be totally negated by the Nameless bureaucrat: a well educated Franciscan like Olmos would hardly have used Morisco words, now matter how hasty or careless he was, nor would is it likely that he would be described in such derogatory terms as the interpreter. Was this the reason why

Nicholson ignored the Morisco element?

In 2012, Jorge Gómez-Tejada presented a PhD dissertation in Art History about the

Códice Mendoza. The central aim of his work is to totally discredit the content of the final commentary by refuting all the statements of the Nameless bureaucrat regarding the timing, the authorship and the procedures of elaboration of the Codex. Instead, combining art historical and textual analysis he proposes that the book was written by

Indigenous students of the Franciscan Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (an institution of higher learning for the Indigenous elites of Mexico), and that they followed the Aristotelian argumentation of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas in order to demonstrate the virtues of Native societies. He takes Nicholson’s Christian origin hypothesis one step further and proposes that the lost history written by Andrés de Olmos was used as the source of the Spanish text of the Codex. Finally he proposed that the book was sent to Spain for a purpose that is not clear and under circumstances he has no knowledge of, but which were meant to contribute to the benevolent campaign led by Las Casas in favor of Indigenous rights. However, what interests me here is a recurrent detail of his scholarship. In his thesis, he quotes the comment of the Nameless bureaucrat four times, and in every instance he totally elides the mention to the Morisco words with a simple ellipsis.

It is difficult to explain such a glaring suppression. Was it inadvertent? That would seem disconcerting, particularly when this particular piece of evidence may go against his main argument. Also we should ask if such sloppiness would have gone unnoticed, and uncorrected, if it concerned the Spanish and Christian elements which the author seeks to exalt.

Another possibility is that the Morsico words were deemed so unimportant that they could simply be erased. However academic rigor dictates that such decisions be made explicit and defended. Particularly so, when the information calls into question the interpretation proposed by the author.

Could it be argued that this element was not relevant for the discussion of the thesis, because it lies beyond the scope of the work art historian? Perhaps, if we take a very narrow definition of that discipline, but the same author uses textual analysis in many occasions to bolster his alternative theory on the book.

The only remaining possibility is that the Morisco words were so incompatible with the Christian interpretation put forth by the author, that they had to be elided, like a mistake is erased, like a taint is purified. But why must scholarship in the 21st century continue the religious prosecutions of the 16th? The obsession for Christian purity that led to the destruction of the Morisco framework has become part of the epistemic program of some modern historiography.

Since the publication of Robert Ricard’s The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico in the 1930s, many historians and art historians have endorsed his idealization and defence of forced

Christianization as a civilizing crusade, led by benevolent friars who were concerned, first and foremost, by the welfare of the Indians and who educated, nurtured and protected them, rescuing them from their own backwardness and from the abuses of

Spanish colonizers. This view glosses over the many acts of violence, and the unmeasurable cultural destruction that accompanied compulsory conversion.

Incorporating Codex Mendoza into the archive of Christian texts is part of this operation. With the use of a simple ellipsis it becomes another act of forceful purification, a continuation of the Catholic intolerance of the 16th century.

I will now proceed to briefly debunk the Christian hypothesis for the origin Codex

Mendoza.

First of all this, this hypothesis is not based on any internal evidence in the documents that mentions, or even suggests, the involvement of Missionaries in the process of its writing. Also, it can only be posed by ignoring the extant internal evidence, starging with the Morisco words.

Thus the hypotesis can only work by inventing an external genealogy for Codex

Mendoza, and it is not by chance that this genealogy is circumscribed to texts in Latin script and Spanish language. We have seen that involves some pretty large leaps in time and similar leaps in faith, to affirm the involvement of Andrés de Olmos. The only way to claim this external explanation has more plausibility than the internal evidence in the

Codex, is to assume the primacy of alphabetic sources over every other form of historical memory, so that a text can only come from another text. Also the only way to proposes that Missionaries and their texts were in control of the textual production in

Codex Mendoza is to take for granted the primacy of Spanish priestly histories over

Indigenous ones, be they oral or pictographic. Such assumptions, of course, reduce

Indigenous agency in the production of this book and subordinate it almost totally to the influence of the priests. The idea of Franciscan education at the mythical college of

Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco often serves to turn Indigenous authors and politicians into faithful and obedient pupils of their priestly mentors.

Beyond these idealizations, we can also identify the differences between the Codex

Mendoza and Christian works produced by missionaries or by Indigenous authors under their sponsorship:

—Most Christian works were produced much later than Codex Mendoza, in the

1560s and later.

— Christian works contain abundant and exhaustive information on the ancient religion of the Mesoamericans, a fundamental topic of interest for missionaries intent on finding and rooting out every trace of this tradition.

— Christian works were produced using the written traditions and techniques of religious scholarship and humanism: repeated copying and correction, exegesis and allegory, the establishment of authority and the practice of commentary, the use of conceptual translation that seeks to convey the profound meanings of texts. The

Nameless bureaucrat criticizes the Spanish text of Codex Mendoza precisely because it did not follow this tradition, but used the more pragmatic juridical techniques of writing where Morisco elements could survive. —Christian texts deal with the Conquest and the subsequent imposition of

Catholicism, since they were conceived to help in that enteprise, while our Codex totally ignores these subjects.

—Christian texts are full of allegorical historical interpretations, a central feature of

Christian historiography, which is totally absent from Códice Mendoza, which centers on establishing juridical and political equivalences.

To finish this presentation I would like to make four methodological points that underpin my work, and which need to be made explicit:

1) From the 16th to the 21st centuries, the Morisco words have been made invisible, or rather they have been “made up for” following the injunction of the Nameless bureaucrat. The possibilities of reading and interpreting Codex Mendoza in the light of this evidence have also been suppressed. Invisibilisation is one of the main ways in which racism operates, both in real life and in the constitution of the archive. In the particular case of Mexican history, the insistence on privileging the relation between

European Christians and Indigenous peoples, have led to a series of invisibilizations of other groups: Moriscos, Afromexican, Chinese Mexicans, Jews, and now Central

American migrants.

2) Who do we attribute agency to? Historical explanations hinge on the attribution of agency, initiative, cultural capabilities, success, to certain actors and the denial of the agency of others, who are subordinated to the former. These attributions are deeply rooted in our own racialized conceptions of power, knowledge and culture, which are themselves the result of five centuries of colonialism. In the Mexican Colonial history the prevailing practices attribute most agency to European actors, and particularly the idealized Missionaries, and tend to diminish or deny the agency of Indigenous, Moriscos, Africans, etc. This is why it may appear credible, even necessary, to find the hidden priests behind any cultural production of the 16th century.

3) Many of our own textual practices as historians, and also art historians, derive directly from the humanist and Christian scholarship of the late Middle Ages and Early

Modern period. This origin generates an implicit bias that leads us to grant unwarranted importance and undemonstrated influence to texts written in Spanish in

Latin script, and to assume that all if not most texts of the 16th century were produced within the Missionary framework.

4) The archive of early Colonial cultural production in New Spain is far from being closed, or even stabilized. The complexity of the intercultural books and texts produced during this period belies any simple characterization. We must move beyond the prevailing dichotomies between Indigenous and European, Mesoamerican and

Western, cultural continuity and acculturation, and incorporate other actors (Moriscos,

Africans, etc). We also should understand them not as dynamic and open products of complex exchanges and relations that are still going on to this date, so that their meaning cannot even today be stabilized or fixed.

5) Colonialism and racism are relations, they exist because they involve different agents in dynamics of power and knowledge. These relations were established in the

16th century and prevail to this day. Our academic production is part and product of these relations and cannot operate outside them, even if we pretend to produce objective knowledge. Therefore, an act of suppression in the 21st century must be understood as a continuation and confirmation of similar acts of power and discrimination in the 16th century. Also, as we have seen, in order to prevail the suppression demanded by the Nameless bureaucrat must be enforced again and again by contemporary scholars. This means of course that all is not lost: questioning this suppression in the present, also puts it in doubt in the past and destabilizes the colonial relations of power through knowledge, then and now.