José Rabasa uses Codex Telleriano-Remensis folio 46r as a starting point for an exploration of the encounters that marked the early colonial period in New Spain and the debates these encounters sparked in Spain at the same time. He is interested in how indigenous intellectuals challenged the European ethnographic project into which they had been brought and compelled to participate. These ethnographies were carried out in highly charged political and religious contexts, but they were not one-sided. Both Europeans and Nahuas tried to understand each other, and in the process, Rabasa argues, both cultures were changed.Codex Telleriano-Remensis was commissioned by Dominican friars seeking to learn about Nahua culture. Its content is both religious and historical, with information recorded pictorially by a native tlacuilo, the Nahuatl term for a painter-scribe. Space was left for alphabetic annotations that provide readings and commentary on the imagery. One friar in particular, Pedro de los Ríos, has been identified as the major patron of the work, even adding his own annotations directly to the manuscript. Rabasa focuses on the interactions between Rios and the tlacuilo, whom he describes as female. He does so because the Telleriano-Remensis pictures a woman holding a brush and kneeling before the Aztec sign for book; a Spanish annotation identifies this woman as “la pintora.” Accordingly, by referring to the scribe as “she,” Rabasa calls attention to a tendency to generalize a masculine identity for native artists, even when confronted with evidence that women could also be painters. At the same time, Rabasa comments on the colonial encounter, using gender to further stress the contrast between colonized and colonizer, or native tlacuilo (female) and Spanish patron (male).As Rabasa explains, the relationship between the Dominican patron and the native tlacuilo was a charged one, forcing the tlacuilo to perform an act of “ethnosuicide.” That is, the native scribe was asked to describe and objectify her Nahua culture for missionaries seeking to destroy that culture. Nevertheless, Rabasa maintains that her ability to occupy two worlds enabled the tlacuilo to evade the ethnosuicide inherent in her project. He uses the term elsewheres to define the space from which the tlacuilo worked and also the position from which modern viewers must engage her work. The concept of elsewheres is a key idea throughout the book, and Rabasa always italicizes it, perhaps to stress its foreignness. For Rabasa, elsewheres are not just spatio-temporal locations, they are cultural constructions that shape what we can say or show about the world and how we can say or show it.The implications of the tlacuilo’s elsewheres come into focus when she is called upon to record the history of the colonial period. To do so, she had to create a new pictorial vocabulary, perhaps nowhere as meaningfully as on folio 46r. Here, the tlacuilo visually juxtaposed a Dominican friar with his Franciscan counterpart in such a way as to emphasize their major doctrinal differences. To Rabasa, the accuracy of her representation reveals a reversal of the colonial gaze. The observed became the observer and in so doing threatened her patron, who soon after removed her from the project. Nevertheless, her visual record remains and offers Rabasa an entry point into an analysis of the evangelization effort in New Spain, focusing on the doctrinal differences between the Dominicans and Franciscans, as so eloquently visualized by the tlacuilo. Rabasa traces these differences to medieval Christian theology and the contrasting philosophic traditions of the two orders. Also playing a role in these theological debates was the role of art itself, especially the nature of representation and perspective. Rabasa considers how all of these debates impacted the Christianization of the New World from the perspective of both Europeans and Nahuas.Throughout the book, Rabasa uses this interplay between tlacuilo and friar, colonized and colonizer, to explore a number of issues pertinent to the colonial project in New Spain and also to Western conceptions of history more globally. The chapters are cohesive but individual chapters also can be read as separate philosophical treatises on the colonial encounter and the privileging of Western categories of history and perception. Recent scholarship has created a more nuanced understanding of the colonial encounter by focusing on the pictorial and alphabetic records of life under colonial rule left by the Nahuas. Rabasa’s book builds upon this recent scholarship by considering its larger implications. Latin American specialists will appreciate that Rabasa does not just call for scholars to reconceptualize history through a decentering of Europe and modernity but also provides a useful model for doing so.
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Feb 7, 2023
Mariano Fernandez-Fairen + 15
Open Access
