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"En todo se hallaron los tlaxcaltecas": The Measure of Conquest in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

This dissertation exposes the pivotal nature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century geographic discourses and practices --both European, indigenous and mestizo--in the articulation of strategies of power, resistance, and negotiation in the kingdoms of the New World. Focusing on the Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala (1580-1585) by Diego Muñoz Camargo - a manuscript that is part of the relaciones geográficas de Indias corpus and contains a voluminous alphabetic text written in Spanish and a pictographic text of 156 images - this dissertation proposes to expand our understanding of the rhetorical resources and repertoire of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers in New Spain by studying the cultural innovations produced in the exchange, appropriation, and re-articulation of diverse written and pictographic traditions coming from both sides of the Atlantic. Focusing on geographic discourses -which take the form of prose geography, cartography, map making, land and itinerary measurements, symbols, simulacra, and Mesoamerican ideo-pictographic writing of geographic meaning or value - this dissertation discusses how these innovations are an integral part in the articulation of a Tlaxcalteca discourse of conquest and privilege that seeks to conceptualize and regulate notions of territoriality, movement, and network in the recently globalized world at the end of the sixteenth century.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/D8NV9GD4
Date January 2014
CreatorsAmaral, Jannette
Source SetsColumbia University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeTheses

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