The Spreading of Color: Sacred Scripts and the Genesis of the Rio Grande

Abstract

In 1518, only a few years before military general Hernán Cortéz and his combatants invaded Tenochtitlán, Conquistador Juan de Grijalva lead a colonial expedition to the coastal Maya city of Tulum. Juan Díaz, chaplain and conquistador under de Grijalva, recorded one of the only existing firsthand Spanish accounts of the well-populated metropolis with complex painted designs on its buildings. A soaring tower, constructed on the edge of a cliff above the turquoise waters of the Yucatán peninsula, caught his attention. In the European mind of Díaz, Tulum’s tower was the equivalent of the Torreóns from Seville, fortified towers for protection against enemy invasion. Years later Spaniards would realize that, on the contrary, the tower sheltered a ceremonial altar for burning incense and prayer. Geometric scripts and traces of painted knowledge up and down the walls of the tower presumably align with the prayer rituals. Although these “fortified towers” vary across time and region, as is evidenced by contemporary buon fresco muralist Frederico Vigil’s Torreón near the Rio Grande river, the historical link to Mesoamerican, Spanish, and Mexican syncretism are crucial to understanding these painted rituals. By “syncretism,” I mean the cautious, perpetual adaptation of multiple and conflicting cultures in a shared expressive context.

We followed the coast day and night; on the following day…we sighted a city or town so large that Seville would not have appeared bigger or better…a very tall tower was to be seen there..

—Juan Díaz, Tulum, Yucatán Peninsula, 1518