Marcelo, a graphic designer in his late thirties when I first met him in 2005, is one of the founders of the Calpulli Macoyolotzin, a group of residents from San Miguel Coatlinchan who are interested in their town’s pre-Hispanic heritage. A few years earlier he had come across a facsimile of Coatlinchan’s oldest cartographic representation displayed in a bookstore window: a sixteenth-century painted manuscript known as the Mapa de Coatlinchan (also spelled Coatlichan) (fig. 1). He later described his find to me as oro molido (powdered gold), a metaphor that anticipated the ways in which the document has been activated by the Calpulli as a kind of treasure map.1 Using its own research methodologies, the group has repurposed the colonial document to explore the town’s territory, uncovering and reinstating hidden forms of knowledge and value...
Skip Nav Destination
Close
Article navigation
Discussion|
December 18 2020
The Pre-Hispanic in Landscape: Ethnography with the Mapa de Coatlinchan
Sandra Rozental
Sandra Rozental
Sandra Rozental is associate professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Cuajimalpa. She researches national patrimony, cultural property, and claims generated by the extraction of archaeological objects from local contexts and other state-making enterprises. She has collaborated with several artists, such as Eduardo Abaroa, and codirected The Absent Stone (2013).
Search for other works by this author on:
Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2020) 2 (4): 91–96.
Citation
Sandra Rozental; The Pre-Hispanic in Landscape: Ethnography with the Mapa de Coatlinchan. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 18 December 2020; 2 (4): 91–96. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2020.2.4.91
Download citation file:
Close
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.