Team

At the Santa Fe campus of the Bread Loaf School of English in 2019, in Professor Damián Baca's course Mexican-American Reinventions, graduate students "investigate how Mexican American writers challenge basic assumptions ingrained in the Western understanding of written communication and its ties to alphabetic literacy." As part of this upending of logosyllabic-inscription practices, students study the history of Aztec and Mayan codices, then go on to collaborate with drama students in the exchange of ideas and creation of their own class codex.

Inspired by this experience, three high school English teachers in the course created their own codices to express their learnings from the summer. They would go on to plan the creation of shared codices between their three high school classrooms, across two states and two countries.

From Professor Damián Baca's Bread Loaf course description: "Common assumptions about writing depend upon the alphabet as a precondition for literacy, thereby obscuring pictographic and non-logosyllabic inscription practices that still circulate among Mexican-origin communities. Our analysis of media-rich texts will account for a plurality of transmission practices that are unmistakably tied to the Valley of Mexico, greater Mexico, and México Ocupado. Finally, we will examine how Mexican American aesthetic expressions rooted in lived and livable experiences foster decolonizing relationships to body politics and to each other as well as to the natural world."

A GRADUATE CLASS CO-CREATED CODEX

THE CODEX OF ANJALI NIRMALAN

THE CODEX OF GRACE HUNTER

THE CODEX OF YULISSA NUNEZ