Matrícula de Huexotzingo Facsimile Edition

The Matrícula de Huexotzingo is a monumental pictorial census created around 1560 in the province of Huexotzinco, present-day Huejotzingo in Puebla, Mexico. Produced on European paper under Spanish colonial authority, the manuscript records the population of numerous Indigenous communities through a remarkable fusion of Nahua pictography, alphabetic Nahuatl, and Spanish administrative writing.

A Community Rendered in Signs

Across hundreds of pictorial pages, human heads, personal-name glyphs, footprints, flags, buildings, and occupational symbols transform demographic information into a structured visual language. Married men appear alongside signs for their wives, while distinctive conventions identify nobles, elders, widows, widowers, the sick, fugitives, and the deceased. Names are often linked to individuals by fine lines extending from the mouth, preserving elements of Indigenous onomastic expression.

Order, Status, and Tribute

The census is organized geographically by town and socially between commoners and nobles. Repeated groups of twenty taxpayers reveal an administrative system concerned with population, landholding, labor, and tribute. Yet the manuscript is more than a colonial register. Its varied page layouts and locally adapted signs testify to the participation of Indigenous painters and record keepers who translated community knowledge into forms legible within a new political order.

A Hybrid Archive of Early Colonial Mexico

The Matrícula preserves thousands of individual presences otherwise lost to history. Its pages illuminate the social organization, language, economy, and visual culture of sixteenth-century central Mexico, revealing a society documented not only through imposed bureaucracy, but through the enduring intelligence of Indigenous pictorial tradition.