Renaming the Cuicatec Knowledge in the Codex Porfirio Díaz

Abstract

Mesoamerican books inhabit multiple visual and bibliographical spaces that defy simple descriptions and straightforward categorization. Historical annals, divinatory calendars, speeches, poems, and songs informed the history, culture, and ritual life of pre- and post-contact societies. Since the sixteenth century, reproduction of Mesoamerican books has played a role in shaping ideas about race, ethnicity, and culture, as well as effects of settler colonialism in the Americas. Efforts to replicate Mesoamerican books for new audiences, however, have not always followed the same principle. Narratives of exploration, empire, and state formation have often appropriated the Mesoamerican book to fulfill political or religious agendas that have decontextualized the original use of pictorial and alphabetic manuscripts. The themes explored in this Dialogues propose new ways to think about analytical frameworks used to make sense of the content of Mesoamerican books in the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries. Who possessed the intellectual credentials to write about and copy pictorial records? What aspects of Mesoamerican books have made the replication process so complex and contested? How have naming, cataloging, and preservation of manuscripts and their fragments shaped our understanding of ideas of authenticity, originality, authorship, and knowledge? How can digital technologies reshape our experience with pictorial records? Contributors engage with these questions not only to historicize violence and displacement associated with Indigenous books after European contact but to highlight the way the publication of facsimiles helped and continues to help establish intellectual credentials, center historical narratives and popular ideas about culture, and generate funding for individuals and institutions.