Native paper was transformative. In Mesoamerica, it was frequently used for ritual costumes that transformed human beings into manifestations of deities, creating a second skin for the wearer. A secondary use was as the substrate for codices, Mesoamerican books. Made from either the fibers of the maguey plant or the inner bark of the amatl tree, native paper's facture also contributed to the meanings attributed to it. By the 1540s, after the Spanish Invasion, native paper seems to have shed many of its ritual uses, and it was primarily valued as a surface for inscription, including the new technology of alphabetic writing. In this talk, I look at two rare instances when native paper was used in European books, one of them created under the auspices of the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagun, being produced alongside the famed Florentine Codex. And I explore the potential valences of native paper, and potentials for survivance, as it entered into the new ambit of the European-style book.
Barbara E. Mundy is an art historian, best known for her work on the history of cartography, urban history and the history of the book. Her work focuses primarily on Mexico and New Spain, and the interactions between Indigenous peoples, settler colonists and their environments across the colonial period, roughly 1520-1800. Mundy's intellectual interests are wide-ranging: she has written about urban smellscapes and their relation to ecological changes brought by colonialism, Nahua epistemologies of art production, and the impact of Aztec (Mexica) festival culture on Renaissance European urban design. She has engaged with questions of race in Latin American painting and practices of decolonization.
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