The tira was a pictographic book painted on a strip of bark paper and used in late pre-Hispanic Mexico especially to record dynastic information for important cities. Tepechpan, however, was a minor settlement in the Aztec realm, under the hegemony of a major capital, Tetzcoco. How and why Tepechpan elites used the tira format to assert their claims to political legitimacy in reference to both pre-Hispanic Aztec and colonial Spanish domains is the subject of Lori Boornazian Diel’s analysis. She demonstrates why interpretations of this document, which has more usually been studied for the preconquest history it records, must consider the colonial setting of its production, the changing agenda of its multiple authors during shifting political regimes, and their manipulation of visual patterns and metaphors.
The typical tira takes the annals format, in which the continuous span of time, rendered in the pre-Hispanic system of year symbols, runs across the...
