From the Mexica Empire to New Spain: Transculturation and Identity

The symposium, “From the Mexica Empire to New Spain: Transculturation and Identity- A Symposium in Homage of Diana Magaloni,” will present the great cultural, historical and artistic developments of the PreColumbian peoples of Mesoamerica, before and during the Contact Period with the Spaniards in the 16th Century. It was a complex process of transculturation that through the mestizaje eventually created the Mexican and Latin American peoples and their identity. Presentations will detail how the indigenous artists and authors interpreted the Spanish conquest and their role in the new colonial era. The lectures will also include an analysis of early colonial Mexican literary and pictorial sources like the ones Sahagún and his indigenous scholars and artists used in central Mexico to produce the monumental Florentine Codex. Speakers will take on broader temporal, regional, and cultural perspectives on the effects of the Spanish conquest and explore transcultural situations in and outside of central Mexico. There will be presented some cases that show the transformation of the Indigenous art into an Indian-Christian art. This symposium will contribute to growing scholarship analyzing the complex and varied processes of artistic and cultural negotiation, collaboration, appropriation, and contestation in which indigenous, Spanish, and mestizo peoples engaged over the past 500 years. It will be emphasized that the formation of the identity of Mexican and Latin American People started since the very first century of the colonial rule, continued evolving through the 17th and 18th centuries, and got consolidated in the 19th century with the Independence of Mexico and the Latin American countries.