ABOUT THIS BOOK

Through close readings of the painted images in a major sixteenth-century illustrated manuscript, this book demonstrates the critical role that images played in ethnic identity formation and politics in colonial Mexico.

The Relación de Michoacán (1539–1541) is one of the earliest surviving illustrated manuscripts from colonial Mexico. Commissioned by the Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, the Relación was produced by a Franciscan friar together with indigenous noble informants and anonymous native artists who created its forty-four illustrations. To this day, the Relación remains the primary source for studying the pre-Columbian practices and history of the people known as Tarascans or P’urhépecha. However, much remains to be said about how the Relación’s colonial setting shaped its final form.

By looking at the Relación in its colonial context, this study reveals how it presented the indigenous collaborators a unique opportunity to shape European perceptions of them while settling conflicting agendas, outshining competing ethnic groups, and carving a place for themselves in the new colonial society. Through archival research and careful visual analysis, Angélica Afanador-Pujol provides a new and fascinating account that situates the manuscript’s images within the colonial conflicts that engulfed the indigenous collaborators. These conflicts ranged from disputes over political posts among indigenous factions to labor and land disputes against Spanish newcomers. Afanador-Pujol explores how these tensions are physically expressed in the manuscript’s production and in its many contradictions between text and images, as well as in numerous emendations to the images. By studying representations of justice, landscape, conquest narratives, and genealogy within the Relación, Afanador-Pujol clearly demonstrates the visual construction of identity, its malleability, and its political possibilities.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Angélica Jimena Afanador-Pujol is Assistant Professor of Art History at Arizona State University, where she teaches courses on the art and architecture of the peoples of the Americas.

REVIEWS

"Afanador-Pujol’s book is an elegantly written and closely and judiciously argued interpretation of a key sixteenth-century ethnohistorical document. The author’s astute and meticulous analysis of the document’s pictorial content and its relationship to the text is persuasive, and it convincingly demonstrates the critical role of images in the articulation and negotiation of social identities in early colonial Mexico."

— Eduardo de J. Douglas, Associate Professor of Art History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl: Painting Manuscripts, Writing the Pre-Hispanic Past in Early Colonial Period Tetzcoco, Mexico

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Making and the Makers of the Relación de Michoacán

2. Unfaithful Lovers and Malicious Sorcerers: Justice, Punishment, and the Body

3. Making and Emending Landscape in the Petamuti’s Speech

4. Creating Chichimec-Uanacaze Ethnic Identity

5. Mimicry and Identity and the Tree of Jesse

6. Memories of an Ethnographic Funeral

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index