Collections: Arts of the Americas

Lienzo of Ihuitlan. Oaxaca, Mexico. Mixtec artist, mid-16th century. Nine four-selvaged cotton plain-weave panels, dye pigments, and inks, 97 3/4 x 62 in. (248.2 x 157.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Carll H. de Silver Fund, 42.160

This detailed and delicately drawn lienzo is from the Mixtec community of Ihuítlan, located in the Coixtlahuaca Valley in the modern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. A lienzo (a Spanish word meaning linen or canvas) is a large sheet of woven cotton with pictographs combining genealogical, cartographic, and historical information. Lienzos were the dominant form of colonial manuscript in southern Mexico, and they recorded the histories of native communities and their relationship to each other.

This lienzo is primarily pre-Conquest in style except for the place names, which are written in Nahuatl, and the inclusion of a new symbol for the community of Ihuítlan (a church, in the lower right). The arrangement of place glyphs (bell-shaped mounds around the circumference) parallels the location of communities in the valley; the lienzo is a map with the north at the top. The genealogies of community rulers are represented in the center, their high status indicated by jaguar-skin mats; footprints document historical relationships between genealogies. The lienzo was kept in the community of Ihuítlan until 1900, serving as a tangible record of community identity throughout the colonial period.