Constructing the Chichimec Trope in New Spain 1526-1653

Recent scholarship regarding the Viceroyalty of New Spain has emphasized the fluid and provisional – rather than fixed and innate – political cultural and ethnic identities negotiated by the Spanish colony’s heterogeneous population. However the dynamic social position of the indigenous peoples collectively glossed as “Chichimecs” has largely escaped such analysis. The present work attends to this lacuna by explicating the formation and re-articulation of a visual and textual trope associated with this cultural malapropism between 1526 and 1653. In so doing it analyzes Nahua iconic-script histories textual records of the Chichimec War the Battle Frescoes of Ixmiquilpan and a seventeenth century painting entitled Transfer of the Image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the First Miracle.