i need help
hoilday111
FitzpatrickSiffordMxMsAfricansAzcatitlan.pdf
Mexican Manuscripts and the First Images of Africans in the Americas
Elena FitzPatrick Sifford, Muhlenberg College
Abstract. Africans in the Americas were first visually recorded by tlacuiloque, or indigenous artist-scribes, in mid-sixteenth-century Central Mexican manuscripts such as Diego Durán’s History, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and the Codex Azcatitlan. These figures, while often peripheral to the central narrative and never mentioned specifically by name, are nevertheless rendered as active agents in the shaping of a new colonial society. The article examines these images of Africans to reveal their ethnographic complexity and the development of concepts of alterity in the early contact period.
Keywords. Africans in Mexico, Afro-Mexico, Tlacuilo, Juan Garrido, Telleriano- Remensis, Azcatitlan, Durán’s Historia
A dark-skinned man with tightly curled hair hangs from a noose tied to a wooden scaffold. Rendered in profile, hewears a red tunic and holds a cross in hand. His hanged body slumps downward, back and head sunken. This image, on folio 45 recto of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, may well be the very first rendering of an African in the Americas. It was painted by an indigenous artist in the mid-sixteenth century, just a few decades after the conquest of Mexico (see fig. 1).
It is perhaps surprising that it was in Mexico, a country not typically known for its African population, that Africans in the Americas were visually recorded several decades before elsewhere. This precedent can be credited to the ingenuity of Mexica (Aztec) tlacuiloque (artist-scribes) who had been trained in the creation of the xiuhtlapohualamoxtli, or annals, a literary genre produced inCentralMexico long before the Spanish
Ethnohistory 66:2 (April 2019) doi 10.1215/00141801-7298747 Copyright 2019 by American Society for Ethnohistory
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
Figure 1. Codex Telleriano-Remensis, folio 45 recto. Courtesy Biblioteque National de France.
224 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
conquest. The earliest extant firsthand visual depictions of Africans in the Americas were therefore made by indigenous artists, not Europeans.1
These images can be seen in the Codex Azcatitlan (ca. 1550), the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (ca. 1550), and Fray Diego Durán’sHistory of the Indies of New Spain (1581).2 Studying them adds a new perspective to the field of New Conquest History, which problematizes accounts of the conquest as the triumph of Spaniards over the indigenous peoples through examining alternative narratives and viewpoints (see Restall 2012). This article contributes to this history by looking at the ways in which indige- nous artist-scribes described and recorded the Africans who arrived as part of the Spanish entrada into Tenochtitlan. The indigenous reaction to Afri- cans provides a visual alternative to the dominant European gaze, revealing not only the Spanish, indigenous, and African triangulation of the colonial encounter but also the ethnographic skill and artistic adaptation of the indigenous artists.3
The examples highlighted in this article show the ways in which tla- cuiloque pictured and recorded “others,” both Spanish and African, and how those categories, while familiar in Europe, were only beginning to be defined on American soil. These images showcase the processes of social categorization from outside—showcasing Africans recorded not by Spaniards who are credited for setting the rules of the new colony, or by themselves, but rather by indigenous people.4 The act of being represented as the other would later be conceptualized by the African-American theo- retician W. E. B. DuBois, who wrote of “a peculiar sensation, this double- consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (DuBois [1903] 1994: 38). But what if those “others” were not Europeans, but, instead, members of another marginalized group (in this case, indigenous Central Mexican artists who had recently been conquered and colonized)? These images from colonial codices offer the possibility of blackness that was not tainted with the pejorative notions that surrounded blackness on the European continent and would soon continue within Western culture in the Americas.
Toni Morrison developed the term Africanism to describe “the deno- tative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, andmisreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people” (Morrison 1992: 6). These Eurocentric readings of Africans saw an upswing in the fifteenth century with the reconquest and expulsion of Moorish (black and Arab) populations from the Iberian Peninsula and the increase of the African slave trade in Europe (Spicer 2012: 9). Because of the slave trade that would soon stretch across the Atlantic to the New World, Africans
First Images of Africans in the Americas 225
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
came to be seen as natural servants as well as heretics who were stained by exposure to Islam on the African continent.
In later centuries Mexican artists, displaying European associations with blackness, depicted Africans as biblical or allegorical subjects, or as stereotyped figures at the peripheries of Viceregal society. These earliest images, however, are neither idealized nor stereotyped. The Africans depicted by indigenous tlauciloque, while often peripheral to the central nar- rative and never mentioned specifically by name, are rendered as active agents in the shaping of a new colonial society.
Despite this, art historians have looked to thework of European artists as the progenitors of the earliest images of Africans in the Americas. Scholars studying images of Africans in colonial Latin American art have tended to focus on Brazil and the Caribbean as the primary sites of the African experience in the Americas, citing artists like Albert Eckhout, a Dutch painter who traveled to northeastern Brazil in the mid-seventeenth century as the first to record the appearance of Africans in theNewWorld.5
Others have examined both European and local prints that depict Africans as Magi and various religious figures as the earliest examples (Brewer- García 2015: 111). The groundbreakingmultivolume Image of the Black in Western Art similarly overlooks the early contributions of the indigenous people of Central Mexico to the rendering of Africans in the Americas. These early colonial works by the tlacuiloque are indeed some of the earliest examples of “Western” art in the Americas, showcasing the melding of Western European and indigenous American literary and pictorial tradi- tions. Nevertheless, the “Age of Discovery” tomes overlook the codices and focus on European traveler art as well as depictions of black saints, the black Magus, and the personification of the African continent as the iconographic conventions for blackness (Bindman, Gates, and Dalton 2010–14).
By the seventeenth century, artists in Mexico had adopted similar schemes for rendering black Africans as magi, saints, or allegorical figures. By the eighteenth century, some of the most famous images of New World Africans were casta paintings that depicted the racial mixing between Spaniards, Indians, and Africans.6 Some casta paintings negatively portray people of African descent, particularly women, as violent and pernicious or as culprits in the degradationof Spanish blood.Whilemuch of theViceregal visual production ignores or stereotypes the black body, the images located within the pages of the three key colonialmanuscripts discussed in this article show that the tlacuiloque, not privy to the Hispanic history of racial cate- gorization, renderedblackbodies in key positionswithin these compositions.
By offering a visual alternative to the often negatively stereotyped images of blackness perpetuated in the Americas, these earliest images,
226 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
though few, offer a glimpse into an African diasporic history untainted by what Krista Thompson describes as the perpetuation of imagery that ren- dered Africans as “noncitizens, nonhumans, as not representable, or as unworthy or incapable of art” (Thompson 2011: 10). Whether through negative imagery or the lack of representation of them in Western art, African diasporic peoples have been intimately acquainted with the inherent connection between the visual and the self. As Thompson aptly explains, “Who knew better the meaning and uses of the visual in Western society than those who were defined as black, as other, as property, based on the surface appearance of their skins?” (Thompson 2011: 11). The very visi- bility of black skin became codified as the identifierofAfrican-ness, inferiority, and servitude. Yet in these conquest-era tlacuiloque images, such negative associations are largely absent. Within them we see a glimmer of possibility that exists beyond (or before) the racism that would come to define the black experience and the representation of blackness on the American continent.
Manuscripts, Pre- and Post-Hispanic Aesthetic Practice, and the Tlacuilo’s Development of New Iconography
All three manuscripts under discussion were commissioned by Spaniards and created by now-anonymous indigenous tlacuiloque (singuar tlacuilo). These individuals were trained in the Aztec-Mixtec writing tradition, a technique that combined ideographic, phonetic, pictographic, and mathe- matical elements to create what Miguel León Portilla describes as “true works of literature” (Léon Portilla 2001: 64). Much as alphabetic writing functioned elsewhere, the image in the Mesoamerican world was used to document and disseminate knowledge (Magaloni Kerpel 2014: 18).
In Nahuatl, cultural knowledge and wisdom were described as in tlilli in tlapalli, which translates to “the black ink, the colors” (Léon Portilla 2001: 66–67; see also Boone 2000). This describes the convention in which tlacuiloque created images outlined in black and filled in with color. Eru- dition and aesthetic practice were intimately linked, not only linguistically but mythically as well. The artist-scribe’s patron was the divine hero god Quetzalcoatl, the bringer of both art and knowledge to humanity via the Toltecs who in turn transmitted these skills to the Mexica (Aztecs). The making of images was thus intimately linked with the recording and acquisition of wisdom.
AsMichael Baxandall has established, a society’s way of viewing itself and the world is communicated through picture-making (Baxandall 1988: 29–103). The stylistic conventions of a cultural group reflects its under- standing of the world around it, mirroring the society’s values and
First Images of Africans in the Americas 227
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
interactions.7 After millennia of developing in tlilli in tlapalli, conquest and colonization fundamentally altered the cultural dynamics behind image- making. Suddenly the tlacuilo found him or herself working for Spanish patrons and incorporating the events of the conquest into their new socio- cultural realities.
In order to render the appearance of the new arrivals, tlacuiloque had to quickly develop new iconographies. The genre itself, of historical picture- making, was nothing new for the tlacuiloque who had trained in the cre- ation of the xiuhtlapohualamoxtli, or “book of years.” Of the three man- uscripts analyzed here, only theCodexTelleriano-Remensis features a fairly traditional format for the annal. The other two (Durán’s Historia and the CodexAzcatitlan), however, also clearly draw fromparts ofMesoamerican history-painting tradition.
The Codex Telleriano-Remensis was written a generation after the conquest, and was largely copied from pre-Hispanic texts, the images drawn by two artists (Quiñones Keber 1995: 123). The codex is made up of three traditional manuscript types: the ritual calendar of monthly feasts called veintenas; the tonalamatl, or divinatory almanac; and the xiuhtlapohuala- moxtli, a chronicle of Mexica history (Quiñones Keber 1995: 111). The text records more than 350 years of Nahua history beginning with the migration from Aztlán in the twelfth century to the conquest and colonial period up to its mid-sixteenth-century creation. The artist-scribe of the Codex Telleriano- Remensis likely consulted a pre-Hispanic xiuhtlapohualamoxtli and expan- ded it to include the conquest and early contact period (QuiñonesKeber 1995: 123).
While the ritual sections are as tightly organized as they would be in a pre-Hispanic manuscript, the annals deviate drastically from their tradi- tional source, necessitating new iconography to render the arrival of Spaniards and the subsequent events and reordering of society, evident in the people, objects, animals, and the introduction of new modes of repre- sentation. The African, like the natives and Europeans throughout the codex, is rendered with conventional Nahua figuration emphasizing figure type rather than individual physiognomy. Figures are shown in isomorphic form in profile with large heads, frontally faced eyes, and large, protruding facial features. Changes to differentiate between groups are encoded in skin color: natives are given a medium brown, Spaniards a light tan, and the singular African is rendered in a deep brown. Hair and headgear are also signifiers, with indigenous male commoners shown with a straight fringed bobwhile Spaniards are typically renderedwith beards and avariety of hats or hairstyles including tonsures, helmets, miters, and crowns. The African
228 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
figure notably has cropped and curly hair, a notation of the appearance of African hair texture.
This modification of hair to suit an African phenotype shows the artist’s observation of difference. Indigenous artist-scribes took note of African bodies, not only in such images but also in written form. The Florentine Codex, commissioned by Bernardino de Sahagún, was an eth- nographic study of the culture and history of the Mexica. Sahagún and his former students interviewed elder informants in Nahuatl, which was recorded alongside Spanish translations and accompanied by some two thousand illustrations (Sahagún 1950–82). While the images within the codex conspicuously omit the presence of an African soldier, the accom- panying text written in Nahuatl mentions that some of the invaders had “tightly curled [hair]—ocolochtic.” The Spanish translation, written oppo- site theNahuatl, further explains, “Among the Spaniards cameBlacks,who had crisply curled dark hair.”8 Notice that the Nahuatl text emphasized only the hair texture without mentioning skin color. Much as the artist lavishes great attention on European headgear, the curly hair of the Afri- can figure serves as a prime marker of difference that separated him from the Spaniards and most obviously from the Nahuas themselves, who had straighter hair.
Curly hair, in fact, was considered a negative trait for the Mexica. During the festival of Toxcatl, the ixiptla (ritual impersonator) of the supreme god Tezcatlipoca was, according to Sahagún, “without defects,” and among the list of traits it is noted that “he was not curly haired” (Sahagún 1950–82: bk. 3, 66). Straight hair was a sign of beauty, while curly hair was considered unattractive. This parallel did not exist in regard to skin color: lighter skin in the Mexica worldview was not more beautiful thandark skin,which in fact had numerous positive associations. Evidently, the finely curled hair of Africans was a more striking difference than skin color, which was not so notably different from that of natives themselves, being just a few shades darker.
All of these conventions were developed by the tlacuiloque of the manuscript who re-created the events of the recent past using their powers of observation and recording. Whereas European artists had previously depicted Africans, it was a new phenotypical subject for the tlacuilo. Recording different ethnic identities, however, was nothing new in Mesoamerican visual culture. Indigenous artists in Mexico used markers such as dress and material culture to convey ethnicity since as early as the Classic period (ca. AD 150–650) (Pasztory 1989: 15–38). For stratified societies, the depiction of distinct ethnic or racial groups was key in the effort to order and codify power. With the Spanish conquest and
First Images of Africans in the Americas 229
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
development of a multiracial society, notions of difference and new social orders emerged. First referred to informally as géneros de gente (types of people) and later codified into a sistema de castas (caste system), colonial citizens were grouped based on the amount (or lack) of Spanish blood (Schwaller 2016;Magali Carrera 2003; Martínez 2004; Lewis 2003). While these notions of difference are rooted in a Spanish worldview, the tlacuiloque also clearly noticed and recorded the diverse types of people in the new colony and their related hierarchies.
José Rabasa describes the artist-scribe’s inventive depictions of Euro- pean objects and people and even the occasional adoption of European perspective as instances inwhich “the observer found himself observed, . . . a return of the tlacuilo’s gaze that exposes the gaze of the missionary” (Rabasa 2011: 1–2, 47). He suggests, for example, that the images of the Spanish friars may have been read as caricatures of the very friars who supervised the cre- ation of the manuscript. This inventiveness indicates that while created under Spanish aegis, the tlacuiloque of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis had relative autonomy in the painting of the manuscript, exhibited not only in its indige- nous pictorial style but also in the development of new iconography and adoption of European visual devices.
The Codex Telleriano-Remensis is remarkable among the group dis- cussed in this article for its indigenous style, including Nahua glyphic and visual conventions. It stands out as well for its iconography: it is the only example showing the repercussions of a rebellion, while the other early images of Africans showed them as members of the conquistador Hernán Cortés’s convoy.
Alliance, Revolt, and Punishment in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis
The figure in the Telleriano-Remensis shows the hanged individual as a symbol of the repercussions of a major slave uprising that took place in Mexico City in 1537. The figure and its annotation record events enu- merated in Antonio de Mendoza’s letter to King Charles I of Spain. Men- doza, the first viceroy, writes of the election of an African king who plotted with native allies to overthrow the Spaniards and take over the lands of New Spain.9 In order to quell the fledgling uprising, Mendoza sent natives to round up rebel African leaders in Mexico City and the mines of Ama- tepacque for execution. Mendoza reveals many of the anxieties of the period within the letter, expressing concern about knowledge received by both Africans and Indians in the colonies and concerns about the paucity of boats arriving from Spain. Mendoza suggests an increase in Spanish ships
230 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
as well as a decrease in the importation of Africans, stressing that too many would heighten their ability to rebel.
Both Mendoza’s letter and the annotation in the codex indicate how early on Africans rebelled against their enslavement. We may think of the image of the hanged African as an indication of centuries of discord to play out throughout the Americas through enslavement, uprising, escape, and various forms of corporal punishment. Rather than configure the image as symbolic of only the vanquished slave, we might think instead of the figure as indicative of the many individuals who rose up against the conditions of slavery. Furthermore, considering the authorship of the image, it may indicate indigenous sympathies with the plight of Africans.
The annotator reports the rebellion of negros and the subsequent hanging of their leaders as well as the “smoking star” (comet) and violent earthquake of that year. An ollin glyph representing movement of the earth through seismic activity is placed below the hanged figure. Beside him, also connected to the date sign above by a thin black line, is the “smoking star.” Both earthquake and comet were natural phenomena associated with bad omens.10 All three images—hanged man, earthquake, and comet—are further indicators of the unrest of the early colonial period that punctuates the text (Lockhart 1993: 51–53).
Mendoza mentions an allegiance between the Indians and Africans, and perhaps the prominent inclusion of the African alongside the fore- boding comet and earthquake signifies the incorporation of Africans and their circumstances into the system of signs and portents that characterized theNahua illustrated histories. Such evidence of alliances between Africans and indigenous peoples was rarely recorded, and, in fact, colonial docu- ments tended to focus on instances of African-native hostility rather than coexistence and alliance building.11
Consequently, whatever documentation of interaction between Afri- cans and native peoples there was tended to be negative, thereby reflecting Spanish self-interest. In the case of the 1537 slave revolt, Mendoza’s letter indicates the anxiety about the conspiring between the two groups, just the type of “flagrant violation,” to use Patrick Carroll’s term, that would be recorded (Carroll 2005: 252). And while the codex does not depict an alliance, speaking only of the negros revolting, it does point out the “smoking star” and the terrible earthquake of that year, thus associating typically Nahua concepts of unrest with the chaos of the squelched rebel- lion. Furthermore, the iconographic conventions that accompany the glyph reveal the ways in which the indigenous tlacuilo imbued the hanged figure with both Nahua and Spanish symbols.
First Images of Africans in the Americas 231
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
The platform at the base of the typically European scaffold resembles a Mexica stepped pyramid, manmade sacred “mountains” topped with temples to the gods. The Nahua written convention for recording a city’s conquest features a toppled temple platform, seen at the bottom of the frontispiece of the Codex Mendoza, an early colonial document that fea- tures typical indigenous glyphic representation (see fig. 2). Similar to pre- hispanic militaristic conquest, the Spaniards who conquered Central Mexico also destroyed the great pyramids, at times erecting their Christian churches directly atop them. This symbolic gesture of the vanquished god superseded by the victor’s godwas replicated inminiature inwhatChristian Nahuas called themomoxtli, an altar onwhich a cross is erected, seen in the Testerian catechism of 1614 that translates the Lord’s Prayer into a rebus for the instruction of indigenous Christian neophytes (see fig. 3). Before the arrival of the Spanish conquerors, momoxtli referred to a platform, stage, or altar for human sacrifice (Orduña 2011: 219).
Much as the stepped pyramid served as an altar-stage for the ritualistic act of human sacrifice, the early colonial momoxtli presented the symbol of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. The African on folio 45 recto is renderedwith this same convention, the scaffold from which he hangs shown mounted atop the momoxtli. Furthermore, the toppled temples in and around the Mexica capital may still have been visible. The enormous Templo Mayor complex was not entirely dismantled for quite some time after the entrada, despite the fact that the earliest Spanish maps depict an entirely Hispani- cized city center. The Codex Mendoza, for instance, records the Mexica leader Tlacotzin’s efforts to preserve Tenochtitlan’s indigenous infrastruc- ture (Mundy 2015: 81). Folio 64 recto of that manuscript credits him with maintaining streets and bridges that are depicted as leading to an adjoining temple pyramid. Clearly, these structures were still seen, at least in part, in many of the most prominent parts of the city. The massive Templo Mayor still cast its shadowover the PlazaMayorwhereCortes set up gallows in the months after the conquest. Here the indigenous residents who had been exiled by the Spaniards were publically punished if they attempted to move back into the center of the city (Mundy 2015: 76). We can imagine, then, that alongside the figure of the hanged African in the Telleriano-Remensis, themomoxtli, temple base, andmain plaza are conflated into a single space, harkening back to the sacrificial victims who died atop the great pyramids and representing the human deaths that occurred now within the same central urban space.
Even when hanged for disobeying Spanish authority, both indigenous and African victims were given the chance to accept Christianity and repent, following Spanish custom. The Telleriano-Remensis African is
232 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
Figure 2. CodexMendoza, frontispiece. Courtesy Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
First Images of Africans in the Americas 233
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
shownwith a cross in hand, indicating he died in a state of grace, having been granted confession and absolution prior to execution. In the Old World as in theNew, Africans were believed to have been corrupted by exposure to Islam, a religion that the friars were eager to eradicate following the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula (Martínez 2009: 96). Indigenous people, by contrast, were seen as pure and eager to bemolded into true Christians. For this reason, it was argued that the Indians should not be enslaved while Africans were natural slaves.12
As the colonial hierarchy evolved, Africans were placed into the Republica de Españoles rather than the Republica de Indios. Though this placement may be read as a sign of higher status for Africans, in fact it offered them few advantages and subjected them to greater control. They were associated with the Spaniards, often living in close proximity to them as slaves, which differentiated them from natives who were pushed to the outskirts of Mexico City and placed in reducciones in other parts of the Viceroyalty. As members of the Republic of Spaniards, they were expected to be true Christians and yet they were often not afforded the rights and privileges that were the lone domain of the peninsular Spanish and later
Figure 3. Egerton Codex, Lord’s Prayer in Testerian hieroglyphics with Nahuatl translation. Courtesy British Museum.
234 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
creole Spanish overlords. Indigenous people, while undoubtedly exploited, were in some instances paternalistically protected by Spanish authorities. Africans thus occupied a liminal “in-between” space of being associated with but not fully regarded as Spanish. The ambiguous way that groups viewed each other was particularly notable to the tlacuiloque, who were perhaps unsure how to categorize the negros who arrived alongside the powerful Spaniards, a sentiment that is crystalized in the second category of first African images: those of the black conquistador.13
Black Conquistadors in the Codex Azcatitlan and Durán’s Historia
The Codex Azcatitlán is a manuscript created in the mid-sixteenth century by tlacuiloque from the city of Tlatelolco. It chronicles the migration of the Mexica from their ancestral home in Aztlán to found the cities of Tlatelolco andTenochtitlan.Of interest to the present study is plate 23, “TheMarch of the Spaniards intoMexico,”which records the Spanish army led by Cortés andMalinche, a Nahua noblewoman who became Cortés’s interpreter (see fig. 4). The two leaders are followed by numerous armed henchmen and a trailing group of native porters bearing heavy loads. The soldiers wear armor and carry lances and shields, their faces obscured by their helmets. The single African in the group stands out markedly: he is placed near the front with only one soldier between him and Cortés.
The figure may be a reference to one Juan Garrido, an African auxil- iary in Cortés’s militia (Restall 2000: 175). Garrido famously petitioned Charles I of Spain for recognition of his involvement in the conquest of Mexico.14 He was born in Africa, traveled to Portugal, and eventually arrived in Seville before setting off to the NewWorld, becoming one of the first Africans to reach American shores, arriving in Santo Domingo as early as 1510.15 It is likely, in fact, that Garrido was one of a group of Africans involved in Cortés’smission.MatthewRestall explains: “The proportionof black armed auxiliaries in expeditions such as that of Cortés is . . . difficult to assess, as Spanish conquest accounts tend to ignore them or mention themonly in vague or passing terms” (Restall 2000: 179). Clearly, however, for the tlacuilo of the Codex Azcatitlan, the African soldier was distinctive and worth recording.
While the porters in back (the Tlaxcalan allies of the Spaniards) are shown floating in space, Malinche, Cortés, the African figure (Garrido?), and the henchmen are shown illusionistically along a path with a rolling horizon line following European pictorial conventions. Federico Navarette argues that such changes in the manuscript’s perspective were purposeful. Spanish figures and the portions most relevant for a Spanish audience were
First Images of Africans in the Americas 235
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
rendered with European conventions while the narrative sections con- cerned with indigenous matters use their own style and modes of repre- sentation (Navarette 2004: 145–46). This line of reasoning is interesting to consider in light of plate 23, where the African figure is shown entrenched within the Spanish army and given a prominent position near the front. He exists within the “Spanish” space of the image, as does Malinche, the indigenous interpreter. It is only two of the three Tlaxcalan porters who hover in space, divorced from the perspectival scheme of the rest of the composition. While a subtle difference, the African’s inclusion with the Spanish group rather than as a lowly servant like the Tlaxcalans indicates an intermediary, liminal position. Although part of the Spanish retinue, the figure is clearly singled out as different and given a prominence not accor- ded to the indigenous males within the entourage.
Painted a dark brown skin tone with curly black hair, the figure wears fine and colorful clothing: a yellow hat and doublet with red breeches and tights. He holds both a spear like that of the other soldiers and the reigns of the singular horse belonging to their dismounted leader, Cortés. His bright clothing and lack of armor distinguish the black figure from the Spaniards, yet his spear matches that of some of the trailing armored soldiers. The
Figure 4. Codex Azcatitlan, “The March of the Spaniards into Tenochtitlan,” folio 23. Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.
236 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
figure may perhaps be identified as Cortés’s servant, perhaps a groom or page, holding the leader’s reins and spear in either hand. The figure is clearly shown as an auxiliary, though possibly one who was himself unarmed.
The black conquistador as auxiliary is similarly rendered in Domini- can friar Diego Durán’s The History of the Indies of New Spain, written between 1574 and 1581 (Durán 1994: xxviii; see fig. 5). Durán and his indigenous assistants traveled the Basin of Mexico collecting accounts of Mexica history and of the events of the conquest. Durán’s African figure similarly holds the leader’s horse, wears fine clothing that distinguishes him from bothMexica and Spaniards, and holds an almost identical spear. The figure of Cortés, just as in the Codex Azcatitlan, has dismounted his horse and removed his hat as a signof respect. InDurán’s text, however, the image of Moctezuma is illustrated on the same folio rather than on the following (missing) page as in the Codex Azcatitlan. Two pages earlier, the Spanish leader is shown on horseback receiving the peaceful Tlaxcalans (see fig. 6). Here the Spanish soldiers are absent, showing the black conquistador’s distinctive role in this image as a servant of Cortés.
Even before the entrada, Nahua scouts sent by Moctezuma to survey the troops on the coast noted their varied skin color. According to Sahagún, Moctezuma was convinced that the Spaniards were gods, perhaps the return of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent.16 The Nahuatl account in Sahagún’s Florentine Codex reads: “They [the Spaniards] were called and given the name of gods who have come from heaven, and the blacks were called soiled gods.”17 While the Spanish translation makes no differentia- tion between the color of the black skin of the conquistadors themselves (los negros) and the concept of black gods (dioses negros), the Nahuatl trans- lation differentiates between these two concepts.18 The Nauhatl word tliltquemeans “black people” or “blackmen”; the termwas likely invented in this early contact period from the root word tlilli, meaning soot or black.19 Yet when referring to the gods, the Nahuatl text describes them as tliltique teucacatzacti, or “soiled gods.” This description of the black conquistadors as soiled gods likely derives from Mexica associations with blackened deities. Alfredo López Austin notes that there was a clear rela- tionship between darkness and holiness and that the Nahuatl word teotl, which translates as god or sacred essence, also refers in some cases to blackness (López Austin 1990: 145). Mexica priests often painted them- selves black to honor male deities and to embody the sacred prestige associated with blackness. This is seen in an image of a priest performing a ritual sacrifice in the Codex Tudela, a sixteenth-centuryMexicamanuscript (see fig. 7).20The priest is shownwith a dark brown skin tone that contrasts with the tan coloring of the sacrificial victim, indicating the use of body
First Images of Africans in the Americas 237
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
Figure 5. History of the Indies of New Spain and the Islands of Tierra Firme, “The Encounter of Cortés and Moctezuma.” Courtesy Biblioteca Nacional de España.
238 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
Figure 6. History of the Indies of New Spain and the Islands of Tierra Firme, “The People of Tlaxcala Receive Cortés in Peace.”Courtesy Biblioteca Nacional de España.
First Images of Africans in the Americas 239
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
Figure 7. CodexTudela, “Priest Performing Sacrifice.”CourtesyMuseo deAmérica.
240 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
paint likely derived from poisonous or hallucinogenic plants and animals. This paint not only associated the body with the potency of blackness but also could provide bodily protection during harmful activities such as entering caves, sacred places of emergence, and portals to the underworld.
At times of turmoil or change, these same salves were placed on the Mexica ruler himself, allowing passage through ritualistic liminal zones (Peterson 2012: 61). The most powerful figures were routinely depicted as black, following Nahua conventions as a sign of their male sacred power and leadership. In this context, it is not surprising that the tlacuiloque took note of the African physiognomy, which evidently was noticeably darker than that of the Spaniards and perhaps conjured up preconquest notions of blackness and its connection to the divine.
By contrast, Europeans associated blackness with ugliness and sin and regarded whiteness as beautiful and holy.21 As Erin Rowe points out, “When meditating on the black skin color of sub-Saharan Africans, Franciscanmissionary JuandeTorquemada (d.1624) decried blackness as a deformity— so ugly it was clearly a punishment from God.”22 These ear- liest images of Africans, then, indicate that the Spanish hatred of blackness was not understood by indigenous tlacuiloque, as such a binary distinction did not exist in Nahua cosmology.23 Africans in fact are given prominent places within the narrative of the entrada and its consequences. As the Mexica became entrenched in the colonial order, however, Africans were soon recognized as subordinates to their Spanish rulers.
Omission of the African Presence
While notable in indigenous accounts, the African presence was often ignored in Spanish chronicles of the entrada (Restall 2000: 184). Instead, the conquest was envisioned as an epic clash between Spaniards and Indi- ans, with the valiant Spaniards portrayed as heroes. Numerous Spanish conquest accounts completely ignore African contributions, and those that mention it often do so only in passing (179). These chronicles were often used for social advancement, and the inclusion of Africans in the narrative was therefore peripheral to that goal. As Africans were captured and brought to the Viceroyalty in increasing numbers, their involvement in the conquest faded further from memory.
By the late seventeenth century, Antonio de Solís’s Historia de la conquista de México (Solís 1684) became the most popular account of the conquest on both sides of the Atlantic. Solís’s text details the encounter of Cortés and Moctezuma and the fall of Tenochtitlan, compiled using
First Images of Africans in the Americas 241
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
Cortes’s letters (1519–25) and narrativeswritten byBernalDiaz del Castillo (1552–80) and Francisco Lopez de Gomara (1553). Despite other evidence to the contrary, both Cortés and Diaz del Castillo fail to mention the presence of Africans during the conquest. Lopez de Gomara, however, does mention an African member of Cortes’s retinue, whom he blames for introducing smallpox andmeasles to the fledgling colony. A classic example of Spanish scapegoating, the African is mentioned only as the cause of discord (Restall 2000: 176). Lopez de Gomara’s account, like that of Solís, was secondhand, compiled from the accounts of conquistadors. Despite having never set foot onMexican soil, he alone mentions the Africans who participated in the entrada, if only pejoratively. Africans were largely left out of the most popular narratives of the conquest.
This omission is evident as well in the visual record of the period. Perhaps one of the most famous images of the conquest of Mexico is in the seventeenth-century biombo, or painted screen, now housed at the Museo FranzMayer in Mexico City (see Sanabrais 2015). One side of the biombo offers an idealized view ofMexicoCity and its environs devoid of its human inhabitants. The opposite side shows a panoramic scene of the conquest that includes events from battles in multiple cities. The view offers a con- tinuous narrative pulsating with Spaniards and natives locked in combat. Gauvin Bailey points out that the two groups are rendered as equals in number, military might, and splendid regalia (Bailey 2006: 159). Biombos were commissioned for wealthy viceregal palaces as part of the process of cultivating a sophisticated criollo identity. Inspired by Asian models, incorporating European styles of painting, and rendering Mexican sub- jects, they crystalize the cosmopolitan tastes of viceregal Mexico. Despite this, the African presence is notably absent.
Not one African conquistador is depicted on the biombo, which is populated by hundreds of figures. The conquest scene is based on Solis’s Historia de la Conquista, which would have been well known among the learned elites of Mexico City at the time of the creation of the biombo (Mundy 2011: 166). This painted screen thus celebrates the popular nar- rative of the entrada, which by this point fails to acknowledge the presence of Africans within the Spanish retinue. By ignoring the presence of Africans in early conquest battles, Spanish narratives, as Herman Bennett com- ments, “den[ied] the complexity that characterized the initial ethnogra- phy of the Nahua” (Bennett 2009: 213). While the iconography of the black conquistador quickly faded, the extant images within contact period codices showcase both the keen observations of the tlacuiloque and the active role that Africans played in the formation of viceregal New Spain.
242 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
Conclusion
While much of the viceregal visual record ignores the black body, the images located within the pages of the three key manuscripts discussed in this article show that some indigenous artists in the early contact period found Africans notable and worthy of recording. These artists were now working under Spanish patronage, combining the inherited and newly introduced modes of representation. Following the tradition of the xiuh- tlapohualamoxtli, the tlacuiloque recorded the events of the conquest and colonization of their people. Yet within that encounter lay not two mono- lithic cultural groups, but numerous ethnic and racial identities. These images of Africans captured by indigenous artists obfuscate the hegemony of the Spaniards. An indigenous hand renders an African body, the imag- ining of a cross-cultural exchange reduced to a few inches within a much larger narrative.
By the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, the iconography of Mexican blackness had been reduced to mythologized or stereotyped fig- ures. Africans were pictured as historical Catholic saints, as allegories of the African continent, or (negatively) stereotyped as racial “types” in casta paintings. Despite their visual absence as agentival agents, Afro-Mexicans continued to live, work, and even prosper within a society that denied their very personhood. Whereas under civic law Africans were seen as chattel, within the Catholic Church they were deemed fully human (Bennett 2009: 1). Africans and their descendants were able to legally marry within the Church, and theywere also able to secure a degree of legitimacy through the development of their religious and familial lives.24
The archival records unearthed by scholars such as Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Matthew Restall, Herman Bennett, María Elisa Velázquez Gutiérrez, Ben Vinson, and Nicole von Germeten indicate the complex interactions and efforts exerted byAfricans to gain their freedomand live as full citizens.25 This struggle continued into the modern era, when the African presence remained overlooked in the Mexican collective memory. In the 1920s, José Vasconcelos, the reformist minister of education, declared that the Mexican people were the “cosmic race,” made up of the best characteristics of the Spanish and Indian forebears (Vasconselos [1925] 1948). Vasconcelos insisted that the African influence in Mexico was neg- ligible and that if there was any impact at all, it would have had to be negative (Moreno 2006: 15). Within the process of Mexican nation building, the stigma against blackness persisted, as it does inMexico to the present day. The subject of the first Africans in Mexico therefore is par- ticularly salient in the wake of the recent 2015 census, which for the first
First Images of Africans in the Americas 243
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
time acknowledged the category of Afro-Mexicans, despite the evident reckoning with alterity by the indigenous tlacuiloque more than four and a half centuries earlier.
Notes
Thanks are due to the following individuals who offered feedback on this article: Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, Elisa Mandel, Lisa Boutin Vitela, Kristen Chiem, Ananda Cohen-Aponte, LawrenceWaldron, Eloise Quiñones-Keber, DonWyatt, Emanuela Kucik, and the three anonymous Ethnohistory reviewers.
1 Theodore DeBry’s prints created for translations of NewWorld travel accounts from Spanish, English, Italian, andDutch sources included some images ofNew World Africans. These images were produced in Europe, rather than through direct observation in the Americas as in the codices analyzed in this article. Another notable early image of New World Africans is indigenous Peruvian artist Andrés Sánchez Galque’s Mulato de Esmeraldas (1599), a portrait of Afro-indigenous rulers of Esmeraldas, Ecuador. These examples are later than the dates of both the Telleriano-Remensis andDurán images. SeeGroesen 2008; and Cummins 2013.
2 Anthropologist Ivan Van Sertima claimed in 1976 that the Olmec heads were images of Nubian overlords who had sailed to the Americas around 700 BC. This claim, while popular among some Afrocentrists, has been dismissed by Mesoamerican archaeologists. The falsity of Van Sertima’s claims does nothing to undermine the impact of Africans in theAmericas, who first arrived not in the eighth century, but in the late fifteenth. See Haslip-Viera, Montellano, and Barbour 1997; and Van Sertima 1976.
3 So far as the author knows, the only other scholar to point out that the first images of Africans in the Americas were in Mexican codices was Ricardo E. Alegría, who mentions this point briefly in a larger text on the life of the black conquistador Juan Garrido. He mentions only the Durán and Azcatitlan images. See Alegría 1990.
4 For more on this, see Fisher and O’Hara 2009: 15–23. 5 For example, Edward Sullivan writes, “The earliest surviving depictions of
Africans in the Americas are in paintings by Europeans” (Sullivan 2006: 40). 6 For more on casta painting, see Katzew 2004. 7 Magaloni Kerpel (2014: 17) offers a useful discussion of Baxandall’s theories of
perception as related to Mesoamerican picture making in The Colors of the New World.
8 TheNahuatl text says,“ . . . cocototzique ocolochtic,”which translates as“[The Negroes’ hair] was kinky, it was curly.” The accompanying Spanish text reads: “… y de como venja algunos negros entre ellos, que tenja los cabellos crespos, y prietos.” See Sahagún 1950–82: bk. 12, chap. 7, 19.
9 Report of Antonio de Mendoza, Viceroy of New Spain, to King Charles I of Spain, nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/settlement/text6/SlavePlot Mexico.pdf (accessed 12 April 2016).
10 “Méxica/Aztec Chronicle, Codex Telleriano-Remensis, historyproject.ucdavis .edu/ic/image_details.php?id=1101026 (accessed 12 April 2016).
244 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
11 For more on conflict and cooperation of Africans and indigenous people during the sixteenth century, see Schwaller 2016; Palmer 1976: 119–44; and Carroll 2005: 252.
12 The Valladolid debate (1550–51) concerned the status of indigenous people. Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas argued that Amerindians were rational beings who should have equal rights, while theologian Juan Ginés de Spúlveda claimed that they were sinful natural slaves.
13 Matthew Restall (2009) describes a similar phenomenon, of blacks living connected to yet in between Spanish and indigenous worlds.
14 Juan Garrido’s probanza (petitionary proof of merit)—dated September 27, 1538 and housed in the Archivo General de Indias, Seville, México, 204, f. 1—was published in Alegría 1990:127–38.
15 There is disagreement over whether Garrido was ever enslaved. All sources, as well as Garrido’s probanza, indicate that he was free at the time of his arrival in the Americas. See Alegría 1990: 19–22.
16 Restall (2003: 100–130) debunks this “Desolation Myth” as a Eurocentric revision promoted by the Franciscans.
17 From chapter 8 of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s FlorentineCodex as translated in Lockhart 1993: 82. The original reads: “ic tocaiotiloque, teteu ilhuicac auh in tliltique teucacatzacti mitoque.”
18 From chapter 8 of the Florentine Codex translated in Lockhart 1993: 82. The Spanish text reads: “… y el lomando hazer porque tenia que aquellos erá dioses que venian del cielo: y los negros pensaron que eran dioses negros.”
19 whp.uoregon.edu/dictionaries/nahuatl/index.lasso?&dowhat=FindJustOne& theRecID=115651&theWord=tlilli (accessed 5 September 2016).
20 Codex Tudela: ceres.mcu.es/pages/ResultSearch?Museo=MAM&txtSimple Search=C%F3dice%20Tudela%20o%20del%20Museo%20de%20Am% E9rica&simpleSearch=0&hipertextSearch=1&search=simple&Museums Search=MAM%7C&MuseumsRolSearch=11&listaMuseos=%5BMuseo %20de%20Am%E9rica%5D (accessed 5 September 2016).
21 For more on early modern notions of blackness, see Andrew Curran 2011; Rowe 2016; Stoichita 2011.
22 Rowe 2016: 57, referring to Juan de Torquemada, Primera parte de los veinte i un libros rituales i monarchia Indiana (Madrid: Nicolas Rodríguez, 1724), 611.
23 For more on notions of racism in the early modern period, see Eliav-Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler 2009.
24 For more on Afro-Mexican Christian community formation, see vonGermeten 2006; and Bristol 2007.
25 Africans also used military service as a means of advancing in the viceregal society; see Vinson 2001.
References
Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo. 1946. La población negra de México, 1519–1810: Estudio etnohistórico. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Alegría, Ricardo. 1990. Juan Garrido, el Conquistador Negro en las Antillas, Florida, México y California. San Juan: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe.
First Images of Africans in the Americas 245
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
Bailey, Gauvin. 2006. Art of Colonial Latin America. London: Phaidon Press. Baxandall, Michael. 1988. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A
Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bennett, Herman. 2009. Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico. Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press.
Bindman, David, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Karen C. C. Dalton. 2010–14. The Image of the Black in Western Art. 5 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press.
Boone, Elizabeth Hill. 2000. Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Brewer-García, Larissa. 2016. “Imagined Transformations: Color, Beauty, and Black Christian Conversion in Seventeenth-Century Spanish America.” In Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, edited by Pamela A. Patton, 111–41. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill.
Bristol, Joan. 2007. Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century. Albuquerque: University of NewMexico Press.
Carroll, Patrick J. 2005. “Black-Native Relations and the Historical Record in Colonial Mexico.” In Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America, edited by Matthew Restall, 245–67. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Cummins, Tom. 2013. “Three Gentlemen from Esmeraldas: A Portrait Fit for a King.” In Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, edited by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal, 119–46. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Curran, Andrew. 2011. The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
DuBois, W. E. B. (1903) 1994. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover. Durán, Diego. 1994. History of the Indies of New Spain, edited by Doris Heyden.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler. 2009. The Origins of
Racism in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, Andrew, and Matthew O’Hara. 2009. Introduction to Race and Identity in
Colonial Latin America, edited by Fisher and O’Hara, 1–38. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Groesen, Michiel van. 2008. The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages. Leiden: Brill.
Haslip-Viera, Gabriel, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, and Warren Barbour. 1997. “Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima’s Afrocentricity and the Olmecs.” Current Anthropology 38, no. 3: 419–41.
Katzew, Ilona. 2004. Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mex- ico. New Haven: Yale University Press.
León Portilla, Miguel. 2001. La filosofía náhuatl estudiada en sus fuentes. 9th ed. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
León Portilla,Miguel. 2002. “Aztec Codices, Literature and Philosophy.” InAztecs, edited by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and Felipe Solíce Olguín, 64–71. New York: Abrams Books.
Lewis, Laura. 2003. Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
246 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
Lockhart, James. 1993. We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
López Austin, Alfredo. 1990. The Myths of the Opossum: Pathways of Mesoa- merican Mythology, translated by Bernard Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Magaloni Kerpel, Diana. 2014. The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2014.
Martínez,María Elena. 2009.Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Moreno, Cesário. 2006. The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Pre- sent. Chicago: Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum.
Mundy, Barbara. 2011. “Moteuczoma Reborn: Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico.” Winterthur Portfolio 45 (summer/autumn): 161–76.
Mundy, Barbara. 2015.TheDeath of Tenochtitlan, the Life ofMexicoCity. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Navarette, Federico. 2004. “The Hidden Codes of the Codex Azcatitlan.” Res 45 (spring): 144–60.
Orduña, Santiago de. 2011. “The Tree, the Cross, and the Umbrella: Architecture and the Poetics of Sacrifice.” In Chora 6: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, edited by Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell, 211–28. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Palmer, Colin. 1976. Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pasztory, Esther. 1989. “Identity and Difference: The Uses and Meaning of Ethnic Styles.” In Cultural Identity in the Visual Arts, edited by Susan Barnes and Walter Melion, 15–38. London: National Gallery of Art.
Patton, Pamela, ed. 2016.EnvisioningOthers: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America. Leiden: Brill.
Peterson, Jeanette Favrot. 2012. “Perceiving Blackness, Envisioning Power: Chalma and Black Christs in Colonial Mexico.” In Seeing Across Cultures in the Early ModernWorld, edited byDana Leibsohn and Jeanette Favrot Peterson, 49–71. Burlington, England: Ashgate Publishing.
Quiñones Keber, Eloise. 1995.Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Rabasa, José. 2011. Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Restall, Matthew. 2000. “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America.” Americas 57, no. 2: 171–205.
Restall, Matthew. 2003. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press.
Restall, Matthew. 2009. The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Restall,Matthew. 2012. “TheNewConquest History.”History Compass 10, no. 2: 151–60.
Rowe, Erin Kathleen. 2016. “Visualizing Black Sanctity in Early Modern Spanish Polychrome Sculpture.” In EnvisioningOthers: Race, Color, and the Visual in
First Images of Africans in the Americas 247
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
Iberia and Latin America, edited by Pamela A. Patton, 51–82. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill.
Sahagún, Bernardino de. 1950–82. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, edited by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Sanabrais, Sofía. 2015. “From Byobu to Biombo: The Transformation of the Jap- anese Folding Screen in Colonial Mexico.” Art History 38, no. 4: 778–91.
Schwaller, Robert. 2016. Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Solís, Antonio de. 1684.Historia de la conquista deMéxico: Poblacón y progreso de la América septentrional conocida por el nombre de Nueva España. Madrid: Bernardo de Villa-Diego.
Spicer, Jonathan. 2012. Introduction to Revealing the African Presence in Renais- sance Europe. Baltimore: Walters Art Museum.
Stoichita, Victor. 2011. “The Image of the Black in Spanish Art: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” InThe Image of the Black inWesternArt, Volume III: From the “Age of Discover” to the Age of Abolition, Part 1: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., 191–234. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sullivan, Edward. 2006. “The Black Hand: Notes on the African Presence in the Visual Arts of Brazil and the Caribbean.” In The Arts in Latin America 1492– 182, edited by Joseph J. Rishel and Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, 39–55. Phila- delphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Thompson, Krista. 2011. “ASidelongGlance: The Practice of AfricanDiaspora Art History in the United States.” Art Journal 70, no. 3: 6–31.
Van Sertima, Ivan. 1976. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America. New York: Random House.
Vasconselos, José. (1925) 1948. La raza cósmica. Mexico City: Espasa Calpe. Velázquez Gutiérrez, María Elisa. 2006. Mujeres de origen africano en la capital
novohispana, siglos XVII y XVIII. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Vinson, Ben, III. 2001. Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
von Germeten, Nicole. 2006. Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
248 Elena FitzPatrick Sifford
D ow
nloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/66/2/223/1634596/223sifford.pdf by U
C R
IVER SID
E LIBR AR
Y user on 20 January 2023
