Embodied Space and Time in the Huamantla Map

Abstract

The Huamantla Map is a cartographic and historical manuscript, painted by
speakers of the Otomi language in the eastern Tlaxcala province on a large rectangle of figbark paper during the final third of the 16th century. Originally measuring approximately 7.0 by 1.9 meters, it represents a strip of land extending from the mountains northwest of the Valley of Mexico to the southeastern slope of La Malinche volcano. Within this geographic setting, designed in the native central Mexican tradition, the collective past of the Otomi of Huamantla is depicted, superimposing a narrative structure on the landscape. The story begins with the emergence of sacred ancestors from a primordial cave in cosmological time and ends with the adaptation of the native lords of Huamantla to Spanish colonial rule. The exceptionally large format of this environmentally embedded and socially situated cognitive tool suggests certain types of bodily interaction with its surface, at the time of its execution and during public performances of the story it contains. On a smaller scale, the meaningful placement of pictorial representations of human bodies within this pictorial space provides a path to reflection on the way the Otomi perceived their relationship with the geographic, cultural, and political landscape surrounding them.