Lori Boornazian Diel’s study of the colonial Mexican manuscript known as the Tira de Tepechpan is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarly literature examining colonial historical documents, both pictorial and textual. The Tira de Tepechpan is an annals-style manuscript documenting the history and ruling lineage of the central Mexican town of Tepechpan. It was probably begun around 1553 and its imagery completed ca. 1590/96, with written annotations in Nahuatl added at an unknown time. Its various contributors organized the historical information along a continuous line of year dates taken from the fifty-two-year Mexican calendar. The manuscript, which is reproduced in its entirety in full-color plates, is now housed among the numerous Mexican documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

The Tira de Tepechpan is one of many extant ethnohistorical documents from early colonial Mexico, pictorial and alphabetic texts that were created by indigenous, mestizo, and Spanish authors in the aftermath of conquest. These describe key origin and migration stories, community foundations, ruling dynasties, and major marital and military alliances. Among the most vexing issues scholars of late Postclassic and early colonial Mesoamerica have had to confront in using Mexican colonial histories, however, are their myriad inconsistencies and contradictions. Historians culling the colonial sources with the goal of creating definitive histories have time and again found their attempts frustrated by the nature of these extant sources, and the search for a single, “authentic” version of historical events has persistently eluded scholars. Given this, Mesoamericanists have had to develop alternative strategies for understanding the information inscribed in Mexican colonial histories, pictorial and textual alike. Such strategies do not gloss over or discard information that does not neatly fit a singular historical narrative. Rather, these kinds of studies of Mesoamerican history embrace the slippages, contradictions, and omissions inherent in the colonial documents, and examine what the disjunctions might mean. Diel’s analysis of the Tira de Tepechpan is one of these.

What makes the Tira especially noteworthy is that its creators recorded not just the history of Tepechpan but also the simultaneous events in the history of Tenochtitlan, the Mexica—and later Spanish—capital. Building on and expanding important nineteenth- and twentieth-century discussions of the manuscript’s contents, Diel now considers the reasons why the various contributors who painted and annotated this document chose to include the historical events and personages that they did (1). As Diel puts it, “it is often the historical manipulations themselves that carry more intriguing meanings, for these reveal the issues of key concern to Nahua communities and their historians” (5). The primary purpose of the Tira de Tepechpan, Diel concludes, was to demonstrate the “antiquity, autonomy, and prestige—political, religious, even intellectual” of this central Mexican community as it continually negotiated its subject position under imperial control. In this way, the creators of the Tira de Tepechpan constructed a history of the community’s past that effectively met the changing needs of its present under the Spanish colonial administration. This study draws on and complements other important recent works addressing painted and textual Mexican histories. It is a book that will be useful for historians, art historians, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists interested in the historical and visual records of pre-Columbian and early colonial Mexico.

At the heart of Diel’s analysis are the ways in which its colonial creators wielded pre-conquest historical traditions, forms, and pictorial systems alongside imported vocabularies and concepts of time, history, and power. An art historian, Diel chooses to treat the pictorial imagery first and apart from the alphabetic Nahuatl annotations. Throughout, she emphasizes the painters’ judicious use of iconography and style. She examines in detail the significant ways in which the Tepechpan painters draw on indigenous Mexican pictorial systems and symbols in setting forth the pre-conquest history of the communities, and then meaningfully integrate a foreign iconography of power into the colonial section. It has become increasingly clear in recent studies of the colonial visual record that Mexican artists could effectively integrate European pictorial systems and signs alongside aboriginal conventions without a concomitant loss of meaning, and Diel’s analysis contributes importantly to this discussion. Thus the entry of the Spanish into the history of the Tepechpaneca is accompanied by the introduction of a new visual vocabulary into the pictorial imagery of the Tira de Tepechpan. For example, Diel considers the strategic use of Spanish icons like the European folding chair instead of the indigenous woven reed mat for rulers of Tepechpan (but not for Mexica kings), and, similarly, the adoption of the European crown in place of the turquoise diadem. Such symbols variously functioned to signify authority and legitimacy for indigenous rulers and to communicate or deny allegiance to the Spanish. The use of color also emerges as a remarkable component of the manuscript. Skin color, for example, is used to suggest political allegiance rather than ethnicity, such that lighter skin color is associated with accepting Spanish authority. It is also interesting, as Diel notes, that the year disks change color with each change of rule in Tepechpan; given the ancient significance of color in Mesoamerica and its cosmic associations with time, space, and power, this could be a compelling topic for additional research.

Chapter 1 establishes the theoretical framework for examining the Tira. Diel frames its contents in terms of conceptions of history in Mesoamerica, where it could function as “political argument, a tool of persuasion that could be manipulated to argue for power and status in the pre-conquest and colonial worlds, hence the micropatriotic focus of many of these histories” (1). She examines closely the manuscript’s pictorial and alphabetic texts, and considers them in relation to the vast interconnected web of extant Mexican histories, tracing the use of key historical tropes and patterns that are also used in other major documents. She discusses the manuscript’s form, history, and contributors in chapter 2.

The heart of the book, in chapters 3–7, is her detailed explication of the manuscript’s contents. The history begins in 1298 and continues through 1596. Information is organized chronologically, starting with the pictorial imagery, in chapters based on the specific contributions of the four painters whose hands she has identified. She then considers the issues raised by the Nahuatl textual contributions added by five scribes, whose work she also isolates. Chapters 3 and 4 document pre-conquest history for Tepechpan and Tenochtitlan. Chapter 3 treats the pre-imperial period of ethnic migrations, communal foundations, and dynastic foundations, and chapter 4 addresses the emergence of the Aztec empire. Diel points out any number of ways that the Tira manipulates history, asserting a role for Tepechpan as a chief, early ally of the Mexica—and, significantly, largely ignoring the political reality of Tepechpan’s actual place as a subject of the major city-state of Texcoco. Tepechpan thereby “used its history to argue for a more advantageous position within the empire, effectively usurping Texcoco’s rule as principal ally of the Mexica” (4). The point is an important one, since an indigenous community’s pre-conquest political status was crucial for determining colonial status and territorial holdings. Foundation dates set forth for the two settlements are also significant. The Tira asserts that Tepechpan was founded in 1334, earlier than the date given for Tenochtitlan, whose foundation is vaguely dated to ca. 1366–1369. This creates a major inconsistency with the more usual foundation date of 1325 for the Mexica capital, and, as Diel shows, also establishes for Tepechpan’s ruling dynasty a measure of legitimacy and antiquity. This was of particular importance in colonial Mexico when “ancient and independent ties to land were a necessity for continued corporate integrity” (40).

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 consider the fortunes and rulers of Tepechpan under Spanish authority. The early colonial history emphasizes Tepechpan’s shift in allegiance from one imperial administration to another, as Tepechpan accepts the imposition of Spanish and Christian authority. Diel observes subtle changes in the narrative, as the contributors now distance themselves from the Mexica in favor of the Spanish. While the pre-conquest history emphasizes the glorious exploits of the ruling dynasty, a certain disequilibrium creeps into the narrative as well as the imagery in this colonial section, as its later painters and its annotators document the increasing hardships experienced by the city-state under Spanish rule. Waves of epidemics and crop losses devastated the community, a situation exacerbated by heavy tribute demands.

The final chapter brings together the thematic units interspersed throughout the book, as Diel considers how the Tira de Tepechpan functioned to record the community’s shifting political, military, cultural, and religious allegiances as it struggled to ensure its corporate integrity and survival under the imperial powers that successively dominated central Mexico. Even though the community of Tepechpan was a relatively minor city-state—whose fortunes declined considerably under Spanish control—the Tira de Tepechpan is an important document for considering the ways in which Nahua pictorial histories wielded and revised history to meet contemporary political, religious, and social circumstances.