(Current Digital Project, in development)

As colonial empires expanded, administrators required precise maps and annals to successfully govern their holdings (Mundy 1996). Cartography was a critical element of statecraft, an “art of the state” (Mundy 1996:12) that allowed colonial regimes to rationalize territories.[1] Together with annals—narrative descriptions of events that happened in a given locale—colonial maps formed the foundation of the Western chronotopic tradition: its particular way of dealing with the problem of space and time (see Bakhtin 1981 on the chronotope). However, colonial cartographic systems did not completely supplant Indigenous cartographies. In the sixteenth century in central Mexico, Indigenous scholars created documents that were simultaneously maps, annals, and histories (Navarrete 2000:42).

I am beginning to work with the pictorial codices that represent the Aztec migration from Aztlan to Tenochtitlan. Rather than parsing elements of the migration story into truth and myth, or real and imaginary places, my digital project is designed to investigate what we can learn about Aztec historiographical practice if we choose to keep the stories whole. New digital tools such as Esri’s StoryMaps and other platforms enable ever more creative representations of space and time by allowing users to incorporate images, texts, and storytelling elements. For the first time, then, the complexity of Mesoamerican maps and codices can be approximated in the digital world–a process that will, I hope, open new avenues of understanding the particular chronotopic imaginary of the Postclassic world.

Bakhtin, Michael (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, translators. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Foucault, Michel (1994) Power. James D. Faubion, ed., Michael Hurley et al, trans. New York: The New Press

Mundy, Barbara (1996) The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Navarrete, Federico (2000) “The Path from Aztlan to Mexico: On Visual Narration in Mesoamerican Codices.” In RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 37, pp. 31-48

[1] Foucault (1994:201-222) provides a succinct summary of the changing meaning of territory and its relationship to governance between the medieval period to modern times.