The Lienzo of Analco: Conquest Pictorial, Cartographic History, and Frontier Narrative

This paper examines changes in indigenous conceptions of space in the Lienzo of Analco, one of three extant Mesoamerican “conquest pictorials.” This genre includes two other existing lienzos (the Lienzo of Tlaxcala and the Lienzo of Quauhquechollan), and a missing Lienzo, which belonged to a colony of Central Mexican conquistadors who settled in Totonicapan, Guatemala. The similarities among the extant “conquest pictorials” suggest that they were part of a broader tradition of indigenous pictographic narratives of the conquest, dating from the 1530's and 1540's, and an extension of a pre-conquest tradition of “conquest pictorials,” which served to legitimize the status of a conquering group (Asselbergs, 2004). As products of colonial encounter, the conquest pictorials evince culturally hybrid conceptions of space. The Lienzo of Analco commemorates and documents the historical role of the indigenous conquerors of Oaxaca's rugged and remote Sierra Norte. As both a story and a map (a “cognitive map”), the lienzo communicates a dual sense of space: the space of the story (abstract and selective), and geographical space. Of the conquest pictorials, the Lienzo of Analco is the most Europeanized in its representation of space, though it borrows heavily from Mesoamerican iconographic and stylistic conventions. In this paper, I will explore two aspects of this Europeanized conception of space: the representation of the Spanish settlement of Villa Alta and the naboría settlement of the barrio of Analco (home to the Indian conquistadors); and the representation of the geographical space of the Sierra Norte region. I argue that the prolonged nature of the military conquest of the region, an early colonial period punctuated by indigenous rebellions, and a strongly interdependent relationship between the region's Spanish and Indian conquistadors shaped the representation of space in the lienzo, which I characterize as a “frontier narrative.”