Figures of Speech: Pictorial History in the Quinatzin Map of about 1542

Abstract

The Quinatzin Map of about 1542, a Nahua pictorial history from Tetzcoco (Mexico), represents the pre-Hispanic past of the city and its royal dynasty. After the Spanish Conquest in 1521, indigenous rulers and their families absorbed Spanish and Catholic culture, but they never stopped being or seeing themselves as Nahuas. Commissioned by members of an indigenous royal family, the Quinatzin likewise could be two things at once, and it encompasses the same distinctively colonial range of experience and expression. The manuscript must be read in light of both indigenous systems of meaning and its primarily Spanish public context.