Hayley Woodward Department of Art History – Tulane University

Experiencing the Codex Xolotl in

Thanks to the generous support of the Stone Center, I was able to travel to Mexico City for two and a half weeks this summer. The purpose of this study was to observe firsthand the natural landscape of the to better understand the Codex Xolotl (the subject of my thesis project) as a cartographic document. Using Mexico City as a base, I planned to recreate the itinerary of the travels undertaken by Xolotl and the nomadic Chichimecs in the codex to better understand their movements through space, how they perceived the geography of the Valley of Mexico, and how the natural environment and geography of the Valley of Mexico may have affected their itinerary decisions. This project explored spatial relationships between sites represented in the Chichimec migration story, carefully considering the natural landscape and topographical features depicted and excluded from the Codex, and in the end, resulted in my better understanding of the Codex Xolotl as evidence of Nahua cartography.

Using Mexico City as the hub of my travels, I was able to execute a number of day trips to sites notated in the Codex Xolotl, including , Teotihuacan, Tenayuca, and Cholula. My trips to these sites included a visit to the archaeological sites and their museums, which resulted in my better understanding of the built environment, lived space, and visual culture of the pre-

Hispanic settlements who interacted with the Chichimecs. My visits to these pre-Hispanic sites were fruitful to my studies, as I was able to document similarities and differences in architecture and sculpture across the Valley of Mexico. Of particular interest was my trip to the site of

Tenayuca, one of the first pyramids built in the Valley and the first permanent settlement of the

Chichimecs notated in the Xolotl. At Tenayuca, I observed consistent visual iconographic details throughout the site and in the objects in its museum, iconographic details that persist in the

Xolotl. This visit helped me connect the visual representations of the Codex Xolotl with the lived space of the pre-Hispanic Nahua of Central Mexico. In addition, I visited the archaeological sites and museums of ’s Templo Mayor and Tlatelolco, and Chapultepec Park, all sites notated on the later pages of the Codex Xolotl and located within Mexico City.

While my time physically spent at each site was vital to my project, the interstitial time traveling between sites, whether by taxi, bus, or metro, was just as important to my understanding of the spatial geography of the Codex Xolotl. During these trips, I was able to observe and record how the topography of the land changed between places, observing firsthand the land that the Chichimecs traversed throughout the pages of the Xolotl. While much of Mexico

City has been built up over the colonial and modern eras, the mountainous landscape surrounding the Valley remains. Trips through the hills by bus, such as to the sites of Tula and

Cholula, enlightened me to the long and arduous extent of the Chichimec’s travels in the Xolotl.

These observations were only made possible by my firsthand travels to the region; using an ichnographic ground plan of the Valley of Mexico obscures certain elements of the landscape, which must be viewed (and experienced) from the ground.

I also prioritized taking time to observe the natural landscape from high vantage points throughout the metropolis of Mexico City. This included visiting the hill of Tepeyac to the north, the Castillo of Chapultepec to the west, and the viewing deck of the Torre Latinoamerica in the center of the city. From these vantage points, I was able to map the mountainous landscape that would have surrounded the five lakes of the pre-Hispanic Valley of Mexico from the same perspective as potential indigenous cartographers in the pre-Hispanic and colonial period (in the case of Tepeyac and Chapultepec). These visits led me to notice various inconsistencies between the actual environment and that which was depicted in the Xolotl. This has aided my thesis project, which examines the strategic representation of place in the codex.

In addition to the sites I included in my grant proposal, I visited a number of museums in

Mexico City in order to better my understanding of the visual culture of the and colonial artists. I was able to carefully examine and photograph every object in the Sala Mexica of the

Museo Nacional de Antropología, which will aid in my research as a scholar of Aztec and early colonial art in the future. I also visited the Museo Nacional de la Cartografía, the Museo de la

Ciudad de México, the Museo Franz Mayer, and the Museo Nacional del Virreinato, where I documented various examples of colonial paintings, maps, architecture, and sculpture. During these visits, I established a foundation for future research by creating my own database of art objects from the Valley of Mexico, which will undoubtedly color my future scholastic endeavors.

This trip was successful on numerous fronts. Unfortunately, I was not able to visit

Texcotzingo due to logistical and safety concerns. While I hope to visit Texcotzingo during future trips to Mexico City, overall, my recreation of the itinerary was complete. I was able to visit sites throughout the Valley of Mexico, thereby recreating the itinerary and migration undertaken in the Codex Xolotl. The biggest result from my travels was the observation of the discrepancy between the hilly natural environment of the Valley and the conventionalized single eastern mountain range represented in the Codex Xolotl. While Nahua scholars consider the

Codex Xolotl to be one of the more realistic and objectively true cartographic histories in the indigenous mapping tradition, my fieldwork revealed the glaring and strategic inconsistencies between the actual and represented landscape of the Valley of Mexico.