the will to desire living according to Christian principles. But the realization of this “will to desire” would be further complicated by the fact that faith entails a participation in grace. In this regard it foments a habitus of the will that prepares the subject for recognizing and receiving the gift of faith. A glance at the Apéndice de la postilla will find the repetition of the terms “desire” (nequilia), “your obligation” (monauatil), and “it is necessary” (monequi). Needless to say, one finds descriptions of Heaven and Hell that should motivate the new life of the neophyte. Among these fully converted Christians, whose desires are in perfect harmony with the teachings of the church, one would find the Tenochca elite, to which the Nahua historian Fernando de Alvarado Tezozómoc belonged and celebrates in his Crónica mexicáyotl: “With this, here ends the account of the ancient ones who were the first Christians, the noblemen who were the first neophytes” (Anderson and Schroeder, 1997: 1, 62). Tezozómoc’s internal voice is consistent with what Sahagún seeks to implant. He defines himself as a Christian and constitutes himself as the inheritor of the ancient histories of the Mexican: “But these accounts of the ancient ones, this book of their accounts in Mexico, we have inherited. These accounts certainly are in our keeping. Therefore we too, but especially our sons, our grandchildren, our offspring, those who will issue from us, they too will also guard them. We leave them for them when we die (Anderson and Schroeder, 1997: 1, 60 – 2).
Let us now examine the language of learning and knowledge in the Exercicio quo- tidiano. The refrain now consists of “it is necessary that you should know [as in the Spanish saber]” (ticmiximachiliz), and “it is necessary that you should know [as in the Spanish conocer]” (ticmatiz). If the language of care opens the discussion of the nature of love, “it is necessary that you care for the love with which God is loved and the love by which your neighbors are loved,” the meditation for Saturday ends by placing the emphasis on knowledge: “Clearly this is the knowledge (iximachoca) by which the only Deity, God, is known, and the love with which he is loved, and the knowledge (iximachoca) by which your neighbors are known, and the love by which they are loved, and the nature of good love. Take [all these admonitions] very much to heart” (ibid.: 169). The Exercicio quotidiano emphasizes the creation of a habitus that will lead to the understanding of the Deity. It certainly also entails a transformation of affect, but it no longer resides in desire and the will, rather on the intellectual preparation of the soul for the reception of grace and the knowledge it imparts. Once the Exercicio quotidiano establishes the need to live by the Ten Commandments and the obligation to confess all sins, it goes on to compare the soul to a milpa, a cornfield: “This is esteemed to be like seeding and planting. For your soul is a spiritual field, and you are to take care of the spiritual green corn stalk that is aforementioned keeping of the divine commandments and living in accordance with the virtues” (131-3). This recommendation is systematized when it insists on the development of an intellectual habitus:
To this work is necessary that you apply yourself if you wish to be saved. And it is necessary that you importune God each day and each night, so that he will strengthen you and you will perform your obligations well. For later, when you become a follower of what is good and righteous, you will be much comforted. You will live as if in a fresh, green field. (133).
The Exercicio quotidiano juxtaposes explanations of the nature of God to discourses that constitute a first person that the reader will assume to direct himself or herself to God. This is a text to be read silently and internalized by the reader. It records voices directed to the reader, and also reproduces voices that the reader will use to address God. This is the terrain in which the Nahua historians Tezozómoc and Chimalpahin were intellectually formed. To what extent were their internal voices, which critically reflect on the task of collecting the accounts of the elders and establishing the criteria for the identification of more credible versions, formed by this kind of training in self-examination? But also, to what extent did this critical habitus also lead to the interrogation of the colonial institutions that surrounded them? Indeed, these questions should not make us exclude what, for lack of a better term, we may define as an autochthonous critical thought. The accounts that Chimalpahin and Tezozómoc collect document the genres of speech acts that supplemented the pictographic histories. Beyond the alphabetical texts, pictography provides leads for an inquiry into native critical thought.
Writing Pictograms
In its most elemental form alphabetical writing exerts violence on the pictographic by denying the status of writing to the latter. This is what Walter Mignolo has defined as the “tyranny of the alphabet.” This “tyranny’ does not merely refer to those places in colonial writing by Spaniards, mestizos, and Indians that reduce pictography to limited form of documenting information and specify that only alphabetical writing can be historical. As Mignolo has argued, the reproduction of phonetic sound has defined the criteria for tracing the evolution of forms of inscriptions from pictography to alphabetical writing; only alphabetical writing constitutes true writing (Mignolo, 1989, 1995). On a second level, alphabetical writing exerts violence by means of glosses that are written on the margin of precolonial and colonial pictographic texts. Beyond the dismissals of pictographic writing by historians, one finds that colonial authorities most often recognize the knowledge inscribed using pictographs. We find the use of pictographic documents in Indian and Spanish courts throughout the colonial order. If on an ideological level alphabetical writing represents a more evolved stage for some indigenous and Spanish members of the colonial elite, in the courts pictography often carried more weight. As Barbara Mundy has shown, we can observe the force of pictography in land-grant or mercedes maps drawn by native painters who were commissioned to establish the boundaries of wastelands that could be claimed and appropriated by people not associated with the indigenous communities (Mundy, 1996: 181—211; also see Gruzinski, 1993). There is a rhetorical weight to pictography that, in this instance, authenticates the legality of land claims. Disputes between indigenous communities would also be settled by means of pictographic documents. I have also argued that the production of the Codex Mendoza (Berdan and Anawalt, 1992) in the years corresponding to the implementation of the New Laws of 1542 makes the documentation of precolonial tributary patterns all too appropriate for legitimizing the encomienda as a system that continues precolonial patterns of tributaries (Rabasa, 1996).
In the Codex Mendoza and the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (Quiñones Keber, 1995), the Spanish religious and secular authorities ordered the production of these pictographic texts with the intent of not just creating a record of information regarding indigenous social patterns, religious beliefs, and history, but also to document systems of writing. There are ample alphabetical documents in Spanish and in indigenous languages that record detailed information about Indian life – we have spoken of Sahagún’s projects — a fact that should make suspect the production of pictographic texts if it were only for the purpose of recording information. The Spaniards charged with supervising these projects knew well that pictography contained information that alphabetical writing could not record. This makes the relationship between pictography and alphabetical writing more complex. We may mention, in passing, that khipus in the Andean region were used throughout the colonial period, and continue to be used even today in indigenous communities. This leads to another modality of writing violence that is implemented not by the denial of the pictography as a form of writing, but by the glosses that were written in codices like the Mendoza and Telleriano-Remensis in spaces the tlacuilos left blank for this purpose. The glosses were often written by different hands that included Spaniards and indigenous as well as mestizo scribes. In the case of the Telleriano-Remensis one can actually draw a difference between those glosses written by native scribes with a handwriting that approximated the typography of print and those written by missionaries in which scribbles and scratches destroy the aesthetic if not the epistemological integrity of the pictorial text.
Let me briefly call attention to fol. 46r of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (Plate 2.1) that offers a complex and troubling view of the colonial order. My contention is that supervising missionaries faced a disconcerting representation of their institutions and evangelical practices that led the missionaries
