Lienzo de Tlaxcala, Cortés greets Xicotencatl

1545-1555

Name(s) currently unknown

Austin, TX, USA, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas (current location)

This scene depicts two famous alliances in the history of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. The first is between Xicotencatl, the head of the indigenous state of Tlaxcala, and Hernán Cortés, the leader of the Spanish conquistadors. The second alliance is that between Córtes and his translator, doña Marina, who appears in the center of the image.

The meeting between Hernán Cortés and Xicotencatl, who was the leader of indigenous state of Tlaxcala, dominates the center of this sheet. As a result, the Tlaxcalans allied with the Spaniards. While the meeting took place in 1519, this work was made later. Below the two men, doña Marina appears. She was one of 20 women given to Cortés by a Maya lord on the Gulf Coast. During the Spaniards’ march across Mexico, she quickly distinguished herself as an able linguist (she spoke Maya and Nahuatl and learned Spanish). In this image, her position between the two leaders emphasizes her central role in their negotiations. Mounted Spaniards on horseback dominate the upper left side of the page. On the right are Tlaxcalan elites, whose decorated cloaks were their privilege to wear. Their stylized hand gestures convey their greetings. The crisp outline used for the figures is typical of indigenous manuscript painting in central Mexico—both before the Spanish conquest and across the 16th century.

The name of the painter is not known, it was clearly an indigenous person well trained in the art of pre-Hispanic manuscript painting yet familiar with European visual traditions. For instance, the proportion of the figures and the even outlining are all familiar from indigenous colonial manuscripts. On the other hand, the overlapping composition of the figural groups at upper left and their animated interaction are European conventions.

The manuscript was painted on native paper and the painter used a light guideline followed by a dense black ink to outline the figures. Color was then applied. The pigments were probably earth- and vegetable-pigments and they have faded through time. While there has been some over-painting of the original, the painting is largely pristine.

The first Lienzo of Tlaxcala seems to have been a multi-scene painting that hung in that town’s ayuntamiento (town government) building. Its purpose was to document the conquest of the Culhua-Mexica (or Aztecs), and to underscore the crucial role the Tlaxcalans played alongside Spaniards in this effort. Control of this historical narrative was important—for Tlaxcalans, it meant immediate leverage in their post-Conquest struggle to retain rights and powers, to be seen as “first among Indians.” A number of copies were made and this is the earliest known copy to survive. A lithographic copy of a more complete version, showing 88 scenes, was published in 1892, and today, this lithograph is our best record of the whole.

The page offers central insights into the theme of mestizaje. First is the fact of biological mixing that quickly followed the Spanish entry into the New World: doña Marina herself bore Cortés a son, one of the first mestizos born of conquest. Second is that mestizaje never happened in a vacuum: its participants were always enmeshed in different power relationships and these changed through time. When Cortés and Xicotencatl first met, a meeting recorded in this painting, Cortés was an anxious supplicant, eager to enter into an alliance with the Tlaxcalans, who he needed to help fight the Aztecs. When this painting was created, towards the middle of the 16th century, the tables had turned. Now it was the Tlaxcalans who were eager to reassert their early alliance with the Spaniards.

Reproduced courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Alarcón, Norma. 2003. “Traductora, Tradiora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism.” In Perspectives on Las Américas: A Reader in Culture, History and Representation. Matthew Gutmann, et al., eds. Pp. 33-49. London: Blackwell Publishing.

Brotherston, Gordon and Ana Gallegos. 1990. “El Lienzo de Tlaxcala y el Manuscrito de Glasgow (Hunter 242).” Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl 20.

González, Cristina. 2003. Doña Marina, la Malinche y la formación de la identidad mexicana. Madrid: Encuentro Ediciones.

Karttunen, Frances. 1997. “Rethinking Malinche” in Indian Women of Early Mexico. S. Schroeder, S. Wood and R. Haskett, eds. Pp. 290-312. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.