Journal Article

Distorsion y silencio en el Lienzo de Tlaxcala

Amaral-Rodriguez, Jannette

2020

Overview

Descripcion de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala (1581-1585), a Tlaxcalan manuscript that contains homologous images to the ones in Lienzo de Tlaxcala (of which there are only modern copies in existence), was found in 1976 and published in three modern editions since 1981. Even though this sixteenth-century manuscript offers authentic images on the history of colonial Tlaxcala, literary critics and historians continue to use the Lienzo de Tlaxcala copied by the painter Genaro Lopez and edited by Alfredo Chavero in 1892. To develop a critique of these methodological practices through the consideration of the historical and ideological context of production of the Lienzo de Tlaxcala under the Porfirian state, this work identifies and examines a critical difference between both codices that has not been discussed by experts before: the reformulation, by Porfirian intellectuals and artists, of a sixteenth-century Tlaxcalan discourse of conquest that silences or erases fundamental aspects of that local historical narration. This article argues that our Lienzo de Tlaxcala is Descripcion de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala and that the 1892 edition of the Lienzo by Chavero responds, rather, to the interests of nationalistic and propagandistic projects by the Mexican modern state under the Porfiriato.

• Publisher: Latin American Studies Association
• Subject: Propaganda