Fourth-World Literatures and Ethnopoetics: Decolonial Focuses and Mexican Literatures

DARP and the digital edition of the Codex Mendoza have two theoretical focal points. The first is ethnopoetics, which can be defined as a theoretical and artistic movement to recognize the literary and cultural value of verbal expressions historically neglected by the aesthetic canons of what Western tradition recognizes as literature. Since 1968, through periodicals, books, and congresses, the creators of this movement, Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock, have drawn attention to alternative literatures that, as Rothenberg notes, had been regarded as pagan, gentile, tribal, or ethnic (Rothenberg and Rothenberg, Symposium of the Whole, xi).

According to Rothenberg, the principal features of ethnopoetics are the recognition of the primitive as a complex object and the presenting of an integral poetics of humanity where all literatures that historically have been dismissed are integrated and juxtaposed with hegemonic European and American canons. It also entails the search for more complex ways of translating and presenting these literatures—a goal closely linked to the DARP project and the digital edition of the Codex Mendoza (Miranda Trigueros, “DARP”).

The second focal point is the work of the British scholar Gordon Brotherston. He affirms the existence of a corpus of pre-Columbian written literatures covering the entire American continent, upheld by forms of writing far removed from those recognized in Western tradition. Brotherston calls this corpus Fourth World books, which includes the Nazca lines, Andean quipus, Mexican codices, Maya stelae, and North American Navajo Indian sand paintings, to name just a few. For Brotherston, these are all written literatures with unique grammars framed in a text (Brotherston, América Indígena en su literatura, 75).

Although both these approaches premise a decolonial position with respect to Amerindian literatures, the authors do not explicitly describe their work as postcolonial or decolonial studies. Both seek to reinstate the expressive and cultural power whereby these types of literature enrich the literary history of humanity. They highlight the singularity of these expressions and the need to find more comprehensive ways to represent them.

The Tradition of Studying Amerindian Literatures in Mexico

Since the arrival of the Spaniards in America, it was recognized that for Indigenous people in what is now designated Mexico, transmission of culture and knowledge was based on orality and writing in codices, sculptures, and architectural components. “Orality was a key element . . . closely linked to the content of their codices, inscriptions, and paintings” (León-Portilla, Destino de la palabra: section “La experiencia mesoamericana”). In their effort to assimilate and indoctrinate the Indigenous peoples, the Spaniards set about transferring this knowledge, transmitted to them by informants or through their own grasp of Amerindian languages, to written books. This transfer, as León-Portilla observes, implied a cultural reconfiguration, a “transliteration” that, as often noted, involved immense changes in the original epistemologies, brought on by the Spaniards’ zeal for conversion (León-Portilla, Destino de la palabra; León-Portilla, Códices; Mignolo, “Signs and Their Transmission”).

We must bear in mind that these representations of Amerindian literature took place from a Western cultural perspective to satisfy diverse interests:

with the exception of various cultures in Mesoamerica that had systems of writing and books, testimonies that exist in earlier American cultures in contact with Europeans were reconstructed and interpreted by means of the methods, styles of information, and written genres of the West, particularly of archaeologists. (Gossen, “Antropología del Nuevo Mundo,” 278)

It is only thanks to the ongoing work of scholars such as Gossen and León-Portilla that, looking beyond such alien intrusions, we can speak of a Mexican intellectual tradition concerned with understanding, interpreting, and spreading awareness and means of knowledge of these literatures.5 This work recognizes the intrinsic values of these literatures and the need to understand them from their own perspective. Unlike the studies addressing the oral tradition of the Indigenous people in other parts of North America, this work has had a centuries-long foundation, starting in the sixteenth century.

DARP: Orality and Its Forms of Representation

To start with, it is important to define broadly what we understand by orality, and then to explore the challenges it poses for its representation. The characteristics and scope of oral literature constitute a field of study in itself, so here I will only highlight some of the features most relevant to the DARP project (https://www.cultura.gob.mx/darp/).

Backed by the work of some Western academics, we could say that oral literature is based on three main characteristics: composition, transmission, and performance (Finnegan, Oral Poetry, 33). These literary forms are found in the voice, in the human body, and in individual or collective memory, which constitute its support. It is difficult to separate orality from the social context in which it is enunciated, because the way it is produced plays a key role, and in this sense, it is framed by specific conditions of codification (grammar, semantics, and performance) which differentiate it from everyday speech (Zumthor, Oral Poetry, 28).

For the purpose of this study, it is worth emphasizing the performative character of orality, which makes these intangible expressions unique and the context of their enunciation inseparable from the utterance. These traits present enormous difficulties for representation, as they require mechanisms and vehicles of representation infinitely more complex than the printed page. What is more, we must take into account that oral literature cannot be severed from a series of communicational elements that accompany it:

an immense orchestration of genres in all available sensory codes: speech, music, singing; the presentation of elaborately worked objects, such as masks; wall paintings, body paintings; sculptured forms, complex many-tiered shrines; costumes; dance forms with complex grammars and vocabularies of bodily movements, gestures, and facial expressions. (Turner, “Review of ‘Ethnopoetics,’” 12)

This diversity of sensory codes has demanded that researchers integrate innovative technologies for the representation of these literatures. Synthetically, a history of the representation of oral literature is traced back in Ridington et al. (“Ethnopoetic Translation”). There, the pioneer work of Franz Boas, and of Alice Cunningham Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, is recognized in their creation of editions with transcriptions in native languages, which in some cases included musical notations, literal and free translations (Ridington et al., “Ethnopoetic Translation,” 211).

The appearance of the tape recorder in the mid-twentieth century transformed the way of compiling and transcribing these literary forms. For the first time, audio recordings documented numerous key factors, such as intonation, gestures, silences, and repetition—intrinsic features of oral poetry. In addition, the tape recorder permitted researchers such as Dennis Tedlock and Dell Hymes to contribute new forms of representation for oral literature by including in their editions the transcription and translation along with the audio recording.

The next step in the incorporation of technologies for the representation of orality was the use of subtitles for ethnographic films, which according to the authors arose in 1961 with the filmmakers Tim Asch and John Marshal. This technique permitted a multimedia integration of the different channels constituting orality. For Ridington et al. (“Ethnopoetic Translation”), the use of subtitles in ethnographic films has been perfected through documentaries such as those of the Canadian Indigenous collective ISUMA TV. The film they mention as paradigmatic is The Journals of Knud Rasmussen.

Ridington and her colleagues must be included in this tradition of innovative use of technologies for representing oral forms, because of the virtual museum known as the Dane Wajich Project, opened in 2007. In this project, hypermedia resources are utilized to produce a better representation. According to the authors, the project “demonstrates the potential for ethnopoetic translation in hypermedia and cyber-techniques. The Dane wajich project provides a degree of reflexivity and transparency not easily achieved in textual and videographic representations of oral narratives alone” (Ridington et al., “Ethnopoetic Translation,” 223).

Dane Wajich is a clear example of the power that digital media has to represent orality. As mentioned further in this paper, there are other tools such as text marking, synchronization of text with audio, and codification of the audio file, that can considerably enrich these representations. By incorporating these technologies, DARP also sought to insert itself into this brief history of the use of technologies in the digital representation of oral forms.

As previously mentioned, DARP is a prototype constructed to represent what was defined as ritual poetry for the purposes of this project. It utilizes a case study of the ritual curative chants of the Mazatec shaman María Sabina, which were recorded in a comprehensive edition, that could be considered ethnopoetic, by the ethnomycologist Gordon Wasson in 1974. The main objectives established for DARP were

• to highlight and demonstrate the poetic value of these expressions with the help of digital tools;
• to offer mechanisms for a more comprehensive representation and analysis of these expressions;
• to demonstrate the potential of digital technologies in representing complex cultural expressions.

One of the main premises underlying the project was that the translation or transfer of these literatures to digital media implied a loss of fewer elements than if they were represented on paper (McCarty, “What’s Going on?” 254). On the one hand, the possibility of adding more channels, and in some cases synchronizing them, proved to be effective in avoiding losses during transfer. On the other hand, and following the work of Jerome McGann, the project sought to demonstrate how a codification and digital modeling of these forms of expression helped to reveal other aspects of the text, which are not evident when creating analog editions (McGann, “Rationale of Hypertext,” 3). In other words, through the creation of DARP, aspects of the chants were brought out that might have gone unnoticed had we represented them on paper: for instance, the guttural sounds or the interjections, which DARP included in the section “Audio Markup.”

Technically, DARP was conceived as a hyperedition, including a diverse array of elements for a more comprehensive representation. The notion was based on McGann’s support of hypermedia editions: “hypermedia editions that incorporate audial and/or visual elements are preferable, since literary works are themselves always more or less elaborate multimedia forms” (McGann, “Rationale of Hypertext,” 7).

The modules composing DARP are:

• A representation module (Render), which offers a sample of the text in the Mazatec language and English translation, synchronized with the audio. When DARP was created, a Javascript plug-in called Popcorn.js, dependent on JQuery (which was discontinued in 2016), was used to develop this module. It has lately been replaced with Rabbit-Lyrics, which does not depend on JQuery. The implementation of these technologies does not require specialized computer knowledge. Thanks to this feature, it became possible to present both of the components that form these expressions, the aural and the textual.
• An analytical module (Analysis) offering hyperlinked references embedded in the text, which help to provide context and definitions of some elements of the text. Javascript was used again for this section, with a very simple plug-in to generate popups. Indexes of certain relevant topics were created as part of this same module, generated automatically by using XSLT Stylesheets to highlight specific elements of the XML. Text marking and the creation of dynamic indexes opened new levels of analysis, focusing attention on the text.
• An audio-marking module (Audio Markup): a final module that made it possible to mark the audio for specific elements of the audio document, highlighting verbal expressions that lack semantic weight at the textual level (interjections and cries, in this case), but are undoubtedly significant on the aural level and in the overall conception of the chant.

The project made it possible to conclude that basic web technologies could contribute significantly to representing orality, and especially by synchronizing the audio recording with the dynamic unfolding of the text. This is particularly noteworthy if we take into account the extremely complex characteristics of orality. It offered the possibility of adding elements that unfolded as separate layers over the text to add greater context for understanding these expressions. But at the same time, the digital encoding of the text opened up a series of discoveries and challenges within the text itself, which would not have been possible without this exercise in representation (Miranda Trigueros, “DARP”).

These conclusions are inspiring from the perspective of a very hands-on model of digital humanities, especially taking into account the binary dimension—that is to say, “More hack less yack.” But we should stress that DARP was conceived as a prototype, which still needs to tackle many of the theoretical challenges described below:

• Mazatec is a tonal language, hence the system should allow the representation or annotation of different words.
• Poets, linguists, and Mazatec speakers should be consulted or involved in the creation of such a project.
• All the tools utilized to develop this prototype have documentation in English, and a few in Spanish. This could pose a challenge, for example to a Mazatec scholar interested in extending the work.

If DARP is to stop being a prototype, we need to ask new questions such as these:

• Are Indigenous communities in contemporary Mexico asking for new and more comprehensive forms of representation, or are we just replicating atavistic forms of the academic?
• Following Tuhiwai (A descolonizar las metodologías, 31), “What are the interests behind DARP? Who will benefit from this? Who owns it?”

Codices and Their Forms of Representation

Just as with oral literature, it is important to offer a brief description highlighting the main characteristics of Mexican codices. Codices were one of the distinctive material supports for writing employed by Mesoamerican peoples.6 We can distinguish different types of codices by their content: calendrical, tally, geographic, and ritual (Brotherston, Painted Books from Mexico, 10–20). Or we may distinguish them by their different materials: deerskin, amate bark paper, cotton paper, and European paper. For Brotherston, codices are one of the most complex forms of writing and the most difficult to define, by integrating “into a single holistic affirmation what for us are separate concepts of letters, painting, arithmetic” (“América Indígena en su literatura,” 82 [my translation]).

The discussion surrounding writing in pre-Hispanic Mexico encompasses a considerable body of literature, of which the volume Writing without Words, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo, offers an excellent overview. I will refer to the definitions proposed by Boone, especially when trying to resignify pre-Columbian writing outside the evolutionary line toward writing systems.7

Broadly, Boone divides Mesoamerican writing into two categories: on the one hand, those that represent phonemes in combination with ideas, named glottographic, which we find in the Maya and Gulf Coast cultures; and on the other, forms of writing developed by the Mexica and Mixtecs, in which meaning is based on the relationship between images and their position, named semasiographic8 (Boone, “Introduction,” 17–19).

One of the characteristics that should be highlighted here is that codices were complex systems, widely utilized to accumulate and transmit knowledge. They functioned as comprehensive systems in combination with other elements such as orality and ritual context. “Orality, especially among these cultures, was a key element that was closely tied to content in their codices, inscriptions, and paintings” (León-Portilla, Destino de la palabra, section “La experiencia mesoamericana” [my translation]).

Just as with oral knowledge, the contents of codices were transferred to written documents, mainly as a result of the Spaniards’ missionary zeal. From the sixteenth century to the present, most of the work carried out has sought to transmit the content of codices into alphabetic writing. Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, Eduard Seler, Alfonso Caso, Ernst Förstemann, and many others including Miguel León-Portilla and Frances Berdan, have devoted their lives to interpreting codices. Each of them has prepared editions to share their invaluable discoveries. However, few have reflected on the material format in which they might be able to represent (as opposed to interpret) codices better. In the words of León-Portilla: “In the indigenous ‘texts’ that were put in writing with the alphabet, orality remained silenced and glyphic signs disappeared, and almost always, all or most of the images painted in vibrant colors [were also lost]” (Destino de la palabra: section 13–14, “La fractura de un sistema con raíces milenarias” [my translation]).

Exploring new forms of representation seems almost imperative for cultural forms of such complexity. Several years ago, Miguel León-Portilla developed an analogy to demonstrate the multimedia character of Mesoamerican communication systems. Although he never suggested that CD-ROMs might be the ideal medium to represent codices, he had already anticipated the possibilities of digital technologies for these purposes:

we consider the support of linear alphabetic writing always fixed, and finally, the characteristics of storage, transmission, and intercommunication of CD-ROMs. What a CD-ROM offers encompasses many possible readings of texts, accompanied by images as well as sounds. With all the differences that one could wish for, something somehow similar took place in the universe of the books of paintings and in pre-Hispanic celebrations, where hymns and tales were chanted or recited. In that universe, texts could constantly be enriched, decoding meanings in the dialogue with codices, by following how the word amoxohtoca, the path, the structure, and the conventions of the book was uttered. (León-Portilla, Códices, 134 [my translation])

Despite the formidable tradition of scholarly study and analysis of codices and their content, and facsimile editions that have sought faithfully to evoke the originals, new forms of representation for codices have not been thoroughly explored. It is perhaps the digital edition of the Codex Mendoza, one of the first of its kind, that has opened up a series of possibilities to better represent codices.

There are many initiatives working toward the digital encoding of nonalphabetic writing systems. We could mention interesting discussions and projects developed for Arabic (Monella, “Scritture dimenticate, scritture colonizzate”) and the recent development of a Unicode encoding for Egyptian hieroglyphs (Suignard, “Revised Draft,” 2018). Regarding pre-Columbian codexes we could mention Tlachia (https://tlachia.iib.unam.mx/) of the Instituto de Investigación Bibliográficas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, which has created a digital corpus for all the glyphs in Mexica codices; and the work of Carlos Pallán Gayol and Deborah Anderson in representing Mayan glyphs with Unicode. Gabrielle Vail’s extensive compilation on Mayan glyphs (http://mayacodices.org/) is also worth mentioning.

These innovative ventures are working toward a better representation of codices in the digital realm. However, conversion to Unicode, or compiling dictionaries as in the case of Tlachia, implies interesting epistemological positions that take us back to the seminal discussion: Are our new codes and signs appropriate for these complex literatures? Furthermore, let us not forget that Codex Mendoza is encoded in a semasiographic writing system, which does not rely solely on signs but on the spatial relationship of the parts, so that none of the aforementioned projects tackles the challenges posed by the Codex Mendoza.

Digital Edition of the Codex Mendoza

The digital edition of the Codex Mendoza was published in 2015 by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National Institute of Anthropology and History) under the direction of this author, who designed the project back in 2013.9 High-resolution images were provided by the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, and the studies and interpretation of the codex integrated into the resource were provided by Frances F. Berdan, author of the most exhaustive interpretation of the Codex Mendoza published to date.

The project’s objectives were:

• to make a fundamental document in the history of Mexico more accessible to a larger number of people;
• to connect the knowledge generated from it to wider sectors of the public, as well as to specialists;
• to permit its study and research through a digital platform;
• to explore new ways of displaying the materiality of the codex, its transcriptions and glosses, and the geographical information utilizing digital tools.

The project produced two digital outlets, one based on the web (https://www.codicemendoza.inah.gob.mx/inicio.php), and another on the iOS operative system (earlier, but no longer, available from the Apple Store). The former offered greater functionality in the sense that it was conceived for a more specialized public. In contrast, the iOS version was aimed more at the dissemination of knowledge to a nonspecialized public. Both versions were free of charge and were made available in both English and Spanish.

The resource allows the dynamic display of transcription, glosses, and descriptions contained in the Codex in Spanish and Nahuatl, in normalized or diplomatic text. This feature facilitates access for both the general and the specialized public interested in the Codex Mendoza. The web app was developed using PhP, HTML5, CSS, and a database in MYSQL where the information consolidated by Frances Berdan was included, as well as a geographic information system (GIS) to visually represent the information in the section on the territorial extension of the Mexica Empire and the tribute payments. The GIS permits clear and dynamic visualization of the economic importance and power of the Mexica Empire. These technologies made it possible to create a navigation system to negotiate the four fundamental aspects of the codex: its materiality, its transcriptions, its context, and its geographic representation. In this case we will highlight only two features, the transcription and the geographic representation.

In these two respects, the model of the original object permitted the recognizing and highlighting of fundamental aspects of the codex that could be studied in greater depth through its digital presentation. If, taking the opposite view, we grant the inevitable loss in translating materials from one medium to another, as observed by McCarty, we could say that the loss of translating codices to digital media is less than in analog media such as printed editions.

As observed earlier, codices, like orality, are elusive when it comes to representing them on paper. Their open, interactive multimedia format (following León-Portilla’s analogy), where the enunciation takes place interactively and in real time, clearly reaffirms the limitations of paper as a suitable medium to represent them. But by converting codices to digital media, they were not transferred from a dynamic medium to a static one, as transfer to paper might have been construed. Instead, they were transferred from one dynamic medium to another, with enormous scope for adaptability and flexibility. Again, they were not transferred from a static medium to a multimedia format, which would happen by transferring a text to the digital ecosystem, but rather from one multimedia format to another in order to minimize the loss of information in the process.

We can therefore conclude that digitization works optimally in the case of Mexican codices by making it possible to produce more holistic, precise, faithful editions, with enormous scope to extend them by adding to their context and their relations with other objects and issues.

It is exciting to demonstrate, with DARP and the digital edition of the Codex Mendoza, that some of the most ancient communicative technologies on the American continent can be better represented through digital media. Utilizing dynamic media to represent inherently dynamic multimedia forms is more transparent than transfers from one culture or one writing system to another. However, we must not forget that by using these technologies, we might be adding another layer of coloniality to the way we approach non-Western literatures. Armed with the best intentions, like the Spanish friars convinced of their faith or modern ethnographers convinced of evolution and progress, we might fall into a trap if we insist that these literatures must necessarily be transferred to digital media.

We must avoid assuming that all knowledge and intangible heritage (such as orality) should be freely and openly accessible. “Universal notions of ‘the commons’ and the ‘public domain’ have been questioned, particularly with regard to the mechanisms by which the access and use of tangible and intangible cultural heritage of Indigenous communities are determined” (Ogden et al., “This Is for Everyone?,” 2). Now it will be up to the heirs of these literatures to decide if their expressions should be translated, transferred, analyzed, and digitized. And if they grant this, they must find the proper forms to do so, arising from their own perspectives and resources.10

It is worth pondering that the technological infiltration that we live with today across the world can have important connotations of digital coloniality. It will be the responsibility of those of us who promote digital humanities, principally in multicultural countries like Mexico, to maintain equilibrium between the potential of representation via digital media and being participants in what Mignolo considers the Colonial Matrix of Power, implying the control of Indigenous knowledge (Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica, 12).

When these DH projects were conceived in 2012 in an academic institution in the United Kingdom, none of the faculty members, nor my fellow students, pointed toward potential decolonial approaches. Even if this is thought to be my own responsibility, at least in part, it indicates the work that needs to be done by institutions in the Global North. Following Roopika Risam:

the move to decolonize digital humanities requires redress of the traces of colonialism that appear in digital scholarship, which has political and epistemological implications. While Digital Humanities offers tremendous potential for democratizing scholarly knowledge, such possibilities are undercut by projects that recreate colonial dynamics or reinforce the Global North as the site of knowledge production. (Risam, “Decolonizing the Digital Humanities,” 8)

Perhaps, before pursuing new projects, we should have a better understanding of the context with respect, for example, to Indigenous representation in the digital realm. As Ricaurte says, “The perspectives of Indigenous nations and communities are rarely considered in debates surrounding digital agendas” (“Data Epistemologies,” 8). We assume that they will be and want to be redeemed by the digital messianism that comes from the West. Ultimately, we will need to envisage how these technologies could better help Indigenous communities or Indigenous researchers to emancipate themselves from colonial epistemologies, and become platforms for inclusion.

The following words by Brian Swann might serve as an ethical manifesto for non-Indigenous researchers and as an optimal conclusion for this chapter:

The skill in translating the Native world consists of making something inaccessible into accessible enough, without making it totally accessible; to make something available without making it assimilable; to make it similar and different at the same time, while taking it seriously all the time; to keep it simultaneously intriguing and challenging; to create beauty, respect, and admiration with the desire to share and participate without the need to appropriate. (Swann, “Introduction,” 6)

Notes

1. DARP was developed by the author as a master’s degree project in Digital Humanities in 2012 at King’s College, London.

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2. The conceptualization of this project was also developed as the task for the above-mentioned master’s degree, within a course on the material culture of the book.

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3. Rothenberg addresses this issue in the introduction to his seminal book Technicians of the Sacred. There he proposes temporal categories based on artistic expressions from the West, just as a means to lay out boundaries for rendering non-Western literary productions.

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4. As Paola Ricaurte states in a recent article: “Data extraction, storage, processing, and analysis are part of a much broader process that is ripe for analysis through a decolonial lens” (Ricaurte, “Data Epistemologies,” 351). Simply by processing or storing Indigenous literary records through digital technologies, we might be falling in with unconscious colonial practices, despite our good intentions.

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5. Gossen traces a lineage that begins with Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and continues with the work of numerous erudite writers such as Chimalpahín and Álvarez Tezozómoc. This tradition of study and recovery of pre-Columbian thought and literatures, according to Gossen, experienced a hiatus in the nineteenth century as a result of the creation of nation-states and the need for these states to define national literatures and cultures (Gossen, “Antropología del Nuevo Mundo,” 288). At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the work of Franz Boas and the influence of his time in Mexico gave new life to the study of oral literatures, permitting the rise of a new generation of scholars down to the present, including Ángel María Garibay, Alfonso Caso, Manuel Gamio, Miguel León-Portilla, and Alfredo López Austin.

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6. Only a small number of pre-Columbian codices have survived, as most of them were destroyed. Nevertheless, they continued to be made during the viceregal period. Today many of these codices still serve ritual and legal purposes among some of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico.

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7. Historically, scholars have considered oral cultures and those with nonalphabetical writing systems to be less evolved. That has been one of the most injurious aspects of colonization (Boone, “Introduction”; Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica; Tuhiwai, A descolonizar las metodologías).

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8. This chapter focuses only on semasiographic writing, which is what we find in the Codex Mendoza, combined with glosses in Spanish and Nahuatl. An evolutionary view of the history of writing has pejoratively referred to semasiographic writing as complex iconography but has not understood it as a system of communication (Boone and Mignolo, Writing without Words).

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9. The Codex Mendoza or Mendocino was commissioned by Viceroy Mendoza in the mid-sixteenth century to gain a better understanding of different aspects of the Mexica Empire. The codex may be regarded as a synthesis of pre-Hispanic and European forms of representing knowledge. This is evident not only in the form but also in the basis of the work. The first two sections reflect pre-Hispanic narrative and representational styles in recounting the military expansion of the empire and tribute payments made by the towns subjugated by Tenochtilan. The third part narrates aspects of Mexica daily life; it does not correspond to any Mexica form of representation (Berdan and Anawalt, Essential Codex Mendoza). It is also an interesting source to study what Mignolo refers to as “coevolutionary histories of writing” (Mignolo, “Afterword,” 293), where two epistemologies and mentalities meet and perhaps clash.

   Unlike in DARP, the technology was developed by a private contractor, although the project was conceived and coordinated by the author. The author also developed the wireframes, site map, resource management map, and navigation flows.

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10. There are innovative projects that seek to focus the application of technology on their own communities, such as Local Contexts (https://localcontexts.org/) and Mukurtu (https://mukurtu.org/). In these, the communities model and create their own repositories according to their own needs and not from yet another colonial perspective (Christen, “Does Information Really Want to be Free?”).

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