ÌÇÐÄTV

My project Molhuia Mababa (Náhuatl for ‘they are called maps’) took place in the Newberry Library, city of Chicago, between August 27^th and September 12^th, 2024. Designed as a maps redux scheme, it is part of an effort to position the University of ÌÇÐÄTV at the forefront of current research on the potentialities of non-Anglophone, non-European languages an representations of territory.

At the reading rooms of the Newberry library, I analysed six resources unique to this collection that were quintessential to the construction of the Americas, and Latin America in particular, from a European perspective. I started with Cortés’ 1524 ‘Map of Tenochtitlan’, in Praeclara Fredinadi Cortesii de Nova maris Oceani Hyspania (1524), Livro que dá razão do Estado do Brasil (1612), ‘Carte du Detroit de Magellan et des nouvells decouverttes dans la Mer du Sud’ (ca. 1708), ‘A New and accurate map of Chili’ in Terra Magellanica (co. 1747), Bernardino de Sahagún’s Nahuatl-Spanish-Latin dictionary, and James Pilling’s collection of Indigenous linguistics (1903).

As well as digitising this collection to collaborate with colleagues in ÌÇÐÄTV such as Elizabeth Chant following copyright law, and creating a back-up of items that have not been digitized yet, I analyse these resources under the extraordinarily detailed guidance of University of Chicago’s Associate Professor Dr Edgar García. A leading scholar in how non-Anglophone, non-European cultures represent turbulent times within the longue durée, Professor García and I dialogued and exchanged observations on two main topics. First, how traditions such as the Náhuatl and the K’ché depicted transitional historic times as opportunities and beginnings of new possible worlds instead of what ecopsychologist Joanna Macy defines as the dilemma of denial or ‘business as usual’ and resignation or ‘the great derangement’ (The Work that Reconnects, 2014) in the Anglophone canon. As a second main topic, my attention, as a well as Professor García’s, was to dissect the occasional but consistent commentary in these texts that showed the extraordinary exchange and reflections that happened when Europeans encounter these cultures, beyond cosmologic clashes, preconceptions and projections. The purpose of this exploration was to bring this perspectives to think our current time —when modern nations' disputes over territory are once again taking centre stage in the midst of our climate and economic crisis— to look for productive answers to questions about extinction anxiety.

Finally, following professor García’s advice, I focused on the original The Popol Vuh (1515) itself which, despite not being in a literal sense a map, acts as a mappa mundi in its own way, reckoning with its place in a new colonial world while also trying to situate that world in a larger and encompassing Maya cosmos. Given the short time of my stay in Chicago, this work could not have been done without the daily help of Alexis Flaherty, library assistant, in the American Indian and Indigenous Studies collection. I want to thank especially the generous guidance of Dr Christopher Fletcher, assistant director of the Center for Renaissance Studies (CRS). As Dr Fletcher’s research focuses on premodern public engagement and its lessons for contemporary society, I have agreed with him to future collaborations to help to expand this project as an interdisciplinary dialogue born out of a shared love of maps.

Beyond my future collaborations with both Dr García and Dr Fletcher, during my stay in Chicago I had productive meetings with Dr Paulina León, Visiting Assistant Professor at New York University (whose research explores the cultural dimensions of disease in colonial Latin America), and Dr Luis Madrigal, Teaching Fellow at University of Chicago (with a focus on spatial criticism in Latin America). Besides an invitation to give a conference in February to talk about the Molhuia Mababa project at the University of Chicago, León and Madrigal offered a collaboration with ÌÇÐÄTV scholars from now on expanding this particular line of research with their respective departments.

As I said in my proposal, the results of this research, which emphasizes the interrelationship between storytelling, philosophy and coexistence of language and cultures in our time of crisis, will be used in two projects, with both academic and public engagement focuses. Firstly, an academic article will be published simultaneously in Spanish in Chile (following an invitation to showcase my work to the Universidad Diego Portales of Santiago de Chile next March), and in English in the University of ÌÇÐÄTV’s Institute of Advance Studies (IAS) journal Exchanges. Secondly, the documented historical graphic materials will be presented together in a website under this project’s title. This collection of early maps and their commentary showing the frictions and intersections between cultures will be the starting point of a website which will work as an archive of maps and commentary about them from non-European sources to point out to the veiled potentialities of points of view often missed in global debates – and their possible implications in thinking shared futures.

This effort will be aided by other IAS fellows including Aravinthen Rajkumar (Sri Lanka), Noorin Rodenhurst (India, Gujarati speaker), Erika Herrera (Mexico) and Emmanuel Effiong (Nigeria), and it has been conceived as an ongoing project to be enriched in coming years by the next IAS cohorts, enhancing the institute’s position as a central hub in the UK for international researchers’ exchanges. In particular, this part of the project aims to strengthen something that in my opinion ÌÇÐÄTV lacks such as a sophisticated, visually attractive web design that highlights the unique work that is done by its researchers from perspectives from non-performative, truly diverse points of view that are, as a result, uniquely rich. I am currently applying for funding to get make this project a reality through schemes such as the BA Small Research Grant and others.

The Popol Vuh