The Tlaxcalan Conquest Pictorials: The Role of Images in Influencing Colonial Policy in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

At various points in the sixteenth century, Nahua artists of Tlaxcala produced a number of pictorials representing the Tlaxcalteca's alliance with the Spaniards during the conquest of Mexico. This dissertation shows that each of these cognates operated as a distinct visual stratagem, serving Tlaxcala's partisan interests in a distinctive way, and seeks to identify how and why changes in form and content served this end. Through an examination of the Tlaxcalan conquest images in relation to each other and sixteenth-century Tlaxcalan municipal records, other Spanish and indigenous conquest histories, and the texts of contemporary indigenous petitions to the crown government, this study demonstrates that the Tlaxcalan images participated in a competition of claims. Tlaxcalan accounts contradicted not only those of the Spanish conquerors and friars but those of other Nahuas as well. Different ethnic divisions and social classes within Tlaxcala itself took competing positions in their response to the conquest. This study contributes to the current investigation into this varied and contentious character of colonial narratives. In these images and documents, the Tlaxcalteca sought to remind the Spaniards of their cooperation in the conquest of Mexico and subsequent expeditions for which the Spaniards had not fully compensated them. Yet the pictorials were made at a time when the Tlaxcalteca were also being uncooperative in Spanish military and colonizing campaigns in hostile regions. The Tlaxcalteca, then, were adroitly resisting Spain even as they referred to alliance and accommodation in their conquest pictorials. This provides a more nuanced understanding of Tlaxcalan-Spanish colonial power relations. Because the Tlaxcalan conquest images vary over time, they have implications for the question of indigenous artistic agency. This study shows that artists drew upon Nahua traditions of the past, but at the same time appropriated new European forms as they re-shaped their community's history to respond effectively to points of contention in the present. The dissertation concludes by showing how the Tlaxcalan version of the conquest narrative remains active into the nineteenth century, indicating the art historian's need to recognize the changing nature of art of the colonial period.