Join us for the keynote event of the 18th annual Tulane Maya Symposium, Mapping Inequality: Lessons from Central Mexico with Barbara E. Mundy, Robertson Chair in Latin American Art, Tulane University. A reception for all attendees will follow the lecture.

This program is free and open to the public. Advance registration for the keynote address is encouraged but not required.

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This page is for keynote event registration only. For more information about the 18th Annual Tulane Maya Symposium: Inequality Among the Maya and to access the full symposium registration, please visit their website.

Keynote Abstract

Painted manuscripts of Central Mexico often present images of historic migrations, led by elites, and genealogies of ruling families, set against a backdrop of territory. Cartography, then, offers a visual record of the inequality implicit in social hierarchies. At the same time, as physical objects that had to be created and cared for, maps depended upon the involvement of a range of social actors and were shaped over time by evolving practices. In this talk, I turn to a selection of maps from Central Mexico to show levels of social complexity implicated in objects that seem, on their surfaces, to offer direct records of inequality.

About Barbara E. Mundy

Barbara E. Mundy’s scholarship dwells in zones of contact between Native peoples and settler colonists as they forged new visual cultures in the Americas. She is particularly interested in the social construction of space and its imaginary, which was the subject of her first book, The Mapping of New Spain. Her most recent book, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City, draws on Indigenous texts and representations to counter a colonialist historiography, and to argue for the city’s nature as an Indigenous city through the sixteenth century. With Dana Leibsohn, Mundy is the co-creator of Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820, an NEH funded project.

She serves the editorial board of Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, and The Americas, as well as on the advisory board of the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. Mundy is the past president of the American Society for Ethnohistory (2021-22) and was the 2021-22 Kislak Chair at the Library of Congress. She has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Art (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, and the John Carter Brown Library in support of her work.