Emblems of Indigenous Origin
While there can be no doubt that the emblem of Santiago Matamoros was of Spanish origin and was adopted and modified by indigenous actors, the emblems we will now discuss were mostly constructed by Mesoamerican and Andean rulers, writers and artists during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in collaboration with Spanish priests and authors.
Two are depictions of the brutal massacres carried out by the conquistadors in the central square of Cholula in 1519 and at Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1520. In the Mexica codices narrating those events, these emblems operated as a synecdoche of the defeat of this people and the destruction of their city, as well as of the cosmic order that revolved around it. In Tlaxcalan visual histories, the slaughter and dismemberment of enemy indigenous populations were presented as a necessary building block for the victory of the Spanish conquistadors and their Tlaxcalan allies and also for the establishment of the new cosmic order of colonial rule. Another emblem consists of the multiple representations and re-enactments of the execution of the Inca by the Spanish conquistadors produced during the colonial period. This royal execution (actually the posthumous conflation of two distinct acts of violence) also worked as a synecdoche for the destruction of Inca power and its cosmic order and also, in some instances, as an implicit promise of the restoration of this power.
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