History

Over the course of the summer of 2019, we had the opportunity to study with Professor Damián Baca through the Bread Loaf School of English in New Mexico. We shared an interest in the precolonial texts known as "codices." Originating on the land mass presently referred to as South America, the Mayan and Aztec codices, which contained both illustrations and instructions in Nahuatl, pre-date the modern concept of a book.

We were namely concerned with the Aztec codices. These pre-Columbian texts not only offer a primary glimpse into ancient Aztec life, but also present an ancestral alternative to the emblem of Westernized knowledge: the book. The few extant codices in and of themselves resist the colonization of education. Even in the very construction of a book, it supposes a linear timeline, whereas a codex, bound in a multitude of ways, structurally encourages a more cyclical reading of the information.

Additionally, the codex literally resists colonization, in that the remains defy the Spanish conquistadors' efforts to eradicate Aztec knowledge by burning all scholarly and religious artifacts. While the tremendous loss of centuries of wisdom was an indelible suffering in the lives of Mesoamerican people, the few codices that remain are symbolic of a resilience that refuses the restrictive clutches of modernization.

Gloria Anzaldùa famously noted that she did not cross the border, "the border crossed me." Aztecs moved across the land masses we commonly refer to as North and South America. Some of our students, attending schools in both Monterrey, MX and Alameda, CA, have experienced a border crossing of their own. Often separated not only geographically, but also personally, from their own ancestral and personal histories, we hope this project, of creating and sharing codices across the borders demarcated by a colonial ethic, connects our students to a collective, cosmic wisdom that predates so much of the worlds we inhabit. In the hopes of helping students explore their self-identities in relation to text and image, they create a shared codex and exchange their stories with others to create a confluence of understanding.