Mexican Manuscripts and the First Images of Africans in the Americas

Africans in the Americas were first visually recorded by tlacuiloque, or indigenous artist-scribes, in mid-sixteenth-century Central Mexican manuscripts such as Diego Durán’s History, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and the Codex Azcatitlan. These figures, while often peripheral to the central narrative and never mentioned specifically by name, are nevertheless rendered as active agents in the shaping of a new colonial society. The article examines these images of Africans to reveal their ethnographic complexity and the development of concepts of alterity in the early contact period.