Hayley Woodward

“Tracing Histories” explores the conditions of making, revising, reading, translating, and collecting a crucial object of Indigenous historical memory in early colonial New Spain: the Codex Xolotl. This Nahua painted manuscript collapses a monumental scale of historical information into an exemplary example of Indigenous cartography. A critical examination of the manuscript’s visual apparatus and its individual elements reveals that the Codex Xolotl is the result of a complex production process that incorporated the purviews of many different makers. Study of the Xolotl’s materiality, composition, iconography, glyphic writing, and style, in tandem with other alphabetic and pictorial texts in its orbit, demonstrates that the Xolotl does not exhibit a unified, definitive version of pre-Hispanic history. Rather, its current state is the result of a piling up of multiple interventions by different actors that reflect multiple agendas across time and space, which produced a multiplicity of versions of the pre-Hispanic past that suited the needs of different audiences. By merging study of the creation of artistic products with the production of the past, this project demonstrates how Indigenous actors in the colonial world conceptualized making as a diachronic, collaborative process that withstood the rupture of coloniality.