Mesoamerican manuscripts embody a wide range of qualities and formats, including pictorial manuscripts, screenfold and roll tira, and lienzos. Due to colonial violence, there are few surviving manuscripts from the pre-contact (pre-Columbian) period. However, a substantial number of manuscript objects made after this period share similarities with these early traditions; these include land maps, legal documents, catechisms, and accounts of the Spanish invasion, written and painted on paper, amatl (bark paper), animal skins, and other  sheet materials. Many post-contact manuscripts act as spaces for settler colonial and Indigenous encounters, shedding light on these histories that are both separate and shared.

Current project activities support work, led by David Fernández (University of Toronto Libraries), focus on a post-contact codex, Axoloapan Xoloctlan, a land grant manuscript from Tecámac, Mexico (1690-1720) in the collection of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Toronto. The codex is a Techialoyan manuscript in Nahuatl, on amatl, documenting land ownership by Indigenous caretakers and owners of land in Mexico. These Techialoyan documents were used to assert land claims in court against the Spanish, who were attempting to reestablish land boundaries and take Indigenous lands in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Updates on this subproject will be shared here as the research area develops.