Alex Hidalgo

Trail of Footprints offers an intimate glimpse into the commission, circulation, and use of indigenous maps from colonial Mexico. A collection of sixty largely unpublished maps from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and made in the southern region of Oaxaca anchors an analysis of the way ethnically diverse societies produced knowledge in colonial settings. Mapmaking, proposes Hidalgo, formed part of an epistemological shift tied to the negotiation of land and natural resources between the region’s Spanish, Indian, and mixed-race communities. The craft of making maps drew from social memory, indigenous and European conceptions of space and ritual, and Spanish legal practices designed to adjust spatial boundaries in the New World. Indigenous mapmaking brought together a distinct coalition of social actors—Indian leaders, native towns, notaries, surveyors, judges, artisans, merchants, muleteers, collectors, and painters—who participated in the critical observation of the region’s geographic features. Demand for maps reconfigured technologies associated with the making of colorants, adhesives, and paper that drew from Indian botany and experimentation, trans-Atlantic commerce, and Iberian notarial culture. The maps in this study reflect a regional perspective associated with Oaxaca’s decentralized organization, its strategic position amidst a network of important trade routes that linked central Mexico to Central America, and the ruggedness and diversity of its physical landscape.

The lesson discussed in this article—making iron-gall ink using recipes that circulated in the Hispanic world during the early modern period—represents a modest effort to enhance history teaching in three key areas.  First, that the history of the book in the Iberian world is more than the history of print.  Likewise, writing with iron-gall ink represented the most important function of the imperial state which sought to thoroughly document every aspect of life in the New World and other parts of Spain’s overseas territories.  Second, learning about the process of writing helps us gain a fuller appreciation of the way observation, experimentation, and repetition played important roles in disseminating knowledge.  Lastly, the assignment enhances the teaching curriculum in the humanities by asking students to take an active role in the learning process.

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.

The recent quincentennial of the Mexica forces' defeat at the hands of a Spanish-led coalition invites us to reflect on the changes in the region's acoustic ecology, the layers of sound that reverberated across geographic spaces. Expressions of sound allow us to consider the actions of past actors in relation to their physical surroundings, the stimulation of the senses, and patterns of religious conversion that guided social behavior. Vocal sounds produced by people of various ethnic and racial backgrounds formed part of this aural environment, and they carried meaning that has often escaped the attention of scholars. An analysis of routines of indoctrination centered on vocal modulations reveals that authorities hierarchized different forms of sounds, from singing and praying-which they encouraged-to screams and muffled noises such as murmur and chatter-which they attempted to silence. These routines took shape during daily masses, theater presentations, civic and religious rituals, confession, and, in some cases, formal training.

The article centers on a handwritten account of the stillbirth of conjoined twins in eighteenth-century Mexico stitched into a book about natural history. Finding things in books as part of an accidental process of discovery in the present does not equal random acts by users in the past. Inserting documents and prints of various kinds into books represented for historical actors a distinct kind of archival practice that combined careful observation, deliberation, and a certain measure of dexterity to manipulate the physicality of a book. Examples of records and objects found in other titles from the same time period and region help to contextualize the way people used books and how they stored memories, as well as what we as researchers can learn when critically analyzing the materiality of print.

Students from my Fall 2014 History Major Seminar curated a digital exhibit of the George T. Abell Collection of Historic Maps housed in the Mary Couts Burnett Library's Special Collections at Texas Christian University. The Abell Collection includes over one hundred maps that highlight early modern and nineteenth-century achievements in cartography, geometry, and science.

http://abellcollection.omeka.net

The Coordinating Committee of the Southwest Seminar on Colonial Latin America invites proposals for its annual meeting, to be held at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas from October 13-15, 2016. The seminar will bring together a selected number of participants to present new scholarship and advanced works-in-progress on any period or region related to colonial Latin America.