(Re)Writing History in Mesoamerican Painted Manuscripts

Revising Mesoamerican painted manuscripts was not unusual. This is especially true for the post-conquest books, tiras, manuscripts, and lienzos that visualized historical events of the pre- and post-Invasion worlds. Alterations, including added-in rulers, modified place glyphs, and erased time markers, redirect the historical content in varying degrees and lie upon and below the material surfaces of such objects, as seen in in the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa de Quetzalecatzin, and the Tira de don Martín. Hallmark tools of art historical analysis—including the study of style, iconography, and materiality—can be mobilized to identify instances of editing the past. However, drawing meaning from the rewritings presents interpretive challenges that require examination beyond recognizing the tangible traces of interfacing. In this roundtable, I plan to pose and address the following questions: Was revision conceptualized as part of the process of creation for Indigenous painter-scribes? What kind of editing constitutes “remaking” of an object and its histories? Was amending the past a process that responded to colonial impetuses or was it a pre-Invasion practice? What are the potentials and limits of interpretation of re-writings, as in how can art historians assign ownership or motives for such changes? How should erasure be read and acknowledged with a mind towards its Indigenous agents? How did Indigenous authors conceptualize a collaborative, diachronic artistic production practice? Overall, I will explore, through targeted discussion of a selection of sixteenth-century painted histories, notions of Indigenous collaboration and revision in dialogue with other artmaking enterprises in colonial Latin America.