This presentation advances Gloria Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza consciousness” as a dynamic strategy for understanding and teaching contemporary codex rhetorics. The powerful aesthetic of placing oneself at the cross-roads between Iberian, Náhuatl, and Anglo-American traditions makes possible an invention of different ways of knowing and writing, where the pre-Columbian past meets the global American present.

Most scholarship on written information positions the Western alphabet as a precondition for literacy. Thus, non-alphabetic and non-verbal writing systems that thrived in pre-Columbian civilizations typically remain subservient to the representation of alphabetized, visible speech. Codices of the ancient Aztec relied entirely on an equally suitable, highly complex pictographic inscription system.

Today, Post-Columbian codices strategically weave Aztec and Western stylistic devices in order to critique dominant power structures and ensure cultural survival. Accounting for material, historically-grounded inscription practices promotes a more inclusive and historically sound theory of how written information is designed across regions, cultures and situations unique to the Americas. The codex is a culturally relevant way of “writing” today and that the use of codex technologies makes history relevant by enabling people—particularly Chicana and Chicano writers—to construct media rich texts of significance.

Damián Baca (Ph.D. CCR, Syracuse University, 2005) is an Assistant Professor in the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures Department at Michigan State University. Baca is also an affiliate faculty with the Chicano/Latino Studies Program. He works at the intersections of rhetoric, "subaltern" studies, and globalization. Baca's publications have appeared in Dialogue: A Journal for Writing Specialists; An Introduction to Authorship: A Guide for Teachers and Scholars of Composition and Rhetoric (2004), and the Encyclopedia of Latinas and Latinos in the United States (2004). His forthcoming book from Palgrave MacMillan Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing addresses present-day IndoHispano codices, post-Columbian manuscripts in which pictorial and alphabetic inscription systems converge. These contemporary textual variations are reinterpretations of the earlier forms produced between 1000 and 1521 by Mixtec and Zapotec dynasties in Oaxaca. Mexican-Amerindian intertextuality, a central theme in Baca's work, provokes the recognition of competing yet interwoven literacies. Thus, cumulative and comparative technologies of writing in Mesoamerica/later America guide his research and teaching.