How A Centuries-Old History Of Indigenous Mexico Inspired These College Students To Change Career Paths

The Getty unveiled this past week the final product of an eight-year effort to digitize a massive, centuries-old encyclopedia of central Mexican indigenous culture. That process has already started changing lives.

Written about 50 years after the Spanish invaded and defeated the Aztec army, the document’s title when finished was: "Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España" or "General History of the Things of New Spain."

It ended up in a royal library in Italy, which led to the name it’s now known by: the Florentine Codex.

“It really blew my mind,” said Maria Velasco, remembering the 2018 undergraduate class at California State University, Northridge in which she learned about the Codex.

“I [had] never seen any [indigenous] manuscripts and the Florentine Codex was the first manuscript or codex that I had seen,” she said.

She grew up in Los Angeles, but her family is Zapotec, an indigenous community in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

A career inspiration

As graduation day neared, Velasco set out to start a career working in a museum in some capacity. She started reading the Nahuatl (the language of the Mexica, as the Aztecs are now more commonly called) in the Codex. As she studied the indigenous scribes and painters who created the Codex, she found herself on a different path.

Maria Velasco, a California State University Los Angeles student.

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Ashley Balderrama

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LAist

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Maria Velasco shows a picture of herself as a child in traditional indigenous attire.

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Ashley Balderrama

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LAist

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“It helped me to navigate then to the Zapotec language because then I was able to translate and transcribe some [Zapotec] words that were written… centuries [ago],” she said.

Velasco became a researcher in that class and began working on TICHA, a project that finds and digitizes colonial-era documents from the Zapotec region of Oaxaca. The idea is to make these documents available for translation and interpretation in order to learn about the lives of Zapotec people centuries ago and find commonalities with modern-day people.

Those efforts led to what she’s doing now: working on her master's degree in anthropology at California State University, Los Angeles and teaching a class this semester on Zapotec language and culture.

“I think [the digital Codex is] going to be really great for... Latinx and Zapotec people and people at large to see it… they’re going to relate to it,” she said.

Until last week, there was no one place online that made available the entire Florentine Codex, transcriptions of the hard to read handwriting, and annotation of the illustrations.

A digital history

Last week, the Getty, the Los Angeles-based art institution with a multi-billion-dollar endowment, unveiled the results of a years-long effort to create a digital portal to make every page of the Codex’s writing and images accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

“The conservation and dissemination of documentary heritage is functional to greater understanding and dialogue between peoples, to promote peace, human rights, and dignity,” said Francesca Gallori, director of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, the Renaissance-era institution that owns the Codex and is now run by the Italian government.

A Franciscan priest, Bernardino de Sahagún, led the Codex’s creation, ultimately to convert indigenous people to Christianity, but also as a way to document a culture he saw being transformed in the decades after the Spanish claimed the land for their country.

Scholars believe 22 people of indigenous descent wrote and painted the Codex. These people were known as tlacuilos, or scribes.

During the five hour-plus unveiling of the Digital Florentine Codex, researchers, the digitizing team, as well as scholars, and indigenous language and culture experts from Mexico described previous digitized versions of the Codex, translations of the texts, and reproductions of the images.

“The Digital Florentine Codex stands on the shoulders of these great scholars. To complement these already published versions, we invited scholars to provide new translations,” said Kim Richter, senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute.

A chapter on feather work

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Courtesy the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT

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Disguised Mexica merchants in Tzinacantlan acquiring quetzal feathers in Book 9 of the Florentine Codex, 1577

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Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT

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Heroic Tlatelolcan warrior, Tzilcatzin, throwing stones at the invading Spaniards in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, 1577

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Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT

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Hummingbirds (huitzitzilin) in Book 11 of the Florentine Codex, 1577

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Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT

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Water creatures in Book 11 of the Florentine Codex (“On Earthly Things”), 1577

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Courtesy of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT

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The new translations, along with recordings of the text and searchable tagging of content, are meant to bring the 16th century Mexica culture within reach of the modern person.

Modern day tlacuilos

The Codex is inspiring a new generation of Latino people.

“As a first generation student, [the Codex] exposed me to entirely new ways of learning, research and even careers,” said recent UCLA masters graduate Roxanne Valle. She took part in the unveiling to talk about her research into how handwriting in the Codex revealed how many tlacuilos worked on it.

Roxanne Valle, a UCLA student in a masters program for Latin American Studies.

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Ashley Balderrama

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LAist

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Like Maria Velasco, Valle learned about the Codex as an undergrad several years ago. Until learning about the Codex, Valle was planning an academic career studying some aspect of Latinas in sports.

She grew up in Azusa and her parents were born and raised in Mexico.

Valle’s experience researching the Codex led her to see it as a foundational document in Mexican history that’s not well known to people of Mexican heritage. She wants to change that in order to “extend these experiences to people I know, many who are also people of color and children of parents who came to the U.S. years ago, like my parents, and whether or not they had the privilege to attend college or not."

A promise of connection

The Codex has been generating buzz since the Getty showed two of its three volumes at its museums in 2010 and 2018, and began digitizing efforts in 2015.

The unveiling doesn’t mean the work is done.

“You still need a bridge, you still need to encourage people because this information is clearly being rotated in this kind of academic circle, but now we need to bring it to the communities themselves,” said Xóchitl Flores-Marcial, a professor of Chicana/o Studies at CSU Northridge.

That bridge is taking the information online and turning it into lesson plans for various grades and learning levels, and for the indigenous people for whom the Codex is a deep cultural document. Creating that learning material is time intensive and expensive, she said, and points to the Getty as the institution that needs to follow up to ensure the connections between the 16th century content and our modern day lives happens.

The Getty says it’s on it.

“With UCLA’s Latin American Institute, we co-organized a workshop in 2020 for local teachers that helped them develop curricula based on these historical sources,” Getty spokesperson Alexandria Sivak said in an email.

It’s also developing recommendations for how to use the Codex in classrooms, and offering workshops for teachers and professors.

Coming up in that effort: two of the main people involved in the digitizing effort, Kim Richter and Senior Project Manager Alicia Maria Houtrouw, are set to talk about the digital Codex at the College Art Association’s conference next February in Chicago.

Learn more about the digitization project