Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone: "The Anthropocene and Mesoamerican Cosmologies" with Professor Regina Pieck

We are excited to invite you to Race and Gender in the Global Hispanophone’s first event of the academic year with our own Professor Regina Pieck! Her talk, “The Anthropocene and Mesoamerican Cosmologies,” will be on Friday, October 23rd, from 10:30am to noon in Pigott Hall, Room 216. Please let us know if you will be able to attend!

RSVP HERE For Lecture with Prof. Regina Pieck

Abstract: 

This presentation analyzes representations of the underground in early colonial Mesoamerican texts in order to consider how they can contribute to current discussions of the Anthropocene. Drawing primarily on the Nahua Leyenda de los soles and Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, as well as the K’iche’ Maya Popol Vuh, I examine three forms of the subterranean: the animate earth and subsoil; the lands of the dead; and primordial caves of origin.

I focus on Tlalteuctli/Cipactli, the ambiguously gendered Nahua earth deity; Mictlan and Xib’alb’a, the Nahua and K’iche’ Maya underworlds; and Chicomoztoc, the Seven Caves from which several Central Mexican peoples emerged. Read alongside precontact pictorial manuscripts, archaeological findings, and colonial chronicles, these sources show that the earth was not understood as an inanimate setting or a passive resource to be transformed by human activity. It was an animate and powerful being that sustained life through agriculture while also receiving blood, bodies, and bones.

I argue that these narratives complicate the separation between humans and the environment often assumed in Anthropocene discourse. Humans are made from ancestral bones or maize, depend on cultivation for survival, and return to the earth after death. At the same time, these traditions should not be treated as timeless ecological models. Written down amid conquest, displacement, and transformations in landholding and political authority, they preserve and reshape Indigenous understandings of the earth at a moment of profound colonial change.