From Visual Storytelling to Historical Imagination in Central Mexico: A Praxis Podcast featuring Marisol Andrade Muñoz

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: I was born in Davis, California, and I lived there until I was five, and then moved around a lot. Was living in Coahuila, a northern Mexican state, for a couple years when I was really young, before living in Washington State, and then finally, Arizona, which is where I spent the longest, for 14 years, before moving to Boston in young adulthood after my undergraduate degree.

Maddison Tenney: What is your degree, and what's your focus?

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: Yeah. My degree is a master in theological studies, and my area of focus is religions of the Americas, though it has a lot of overlap also with religion, literature, and art and religion, ethics, and politics.

Maddison Tenney: I'm so curious, when people say religions of the Americas, what does that mean for you, and what you're studying? Because that's a pretty broad topic, and there's, like, North America, Canada, South America. So what does it look like for you and your focus?

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: Thank you so much for asking that because I think we really vary in our definition of the Americas depending on our relationship to, primarily, time, also space. But I think a lot of American studies orient themselves to the study of this continent and primarily to North America, but including all of the Americas, after contact, after the fifteenth century. I'm interested in religious tradition, both during the colonial and post-colonial, if you want to call it that, but the period since contact, and also the period before contact. I'm interested in continuities between those times and also in ruptures, how things have changed, and how things have remained the same. And my work specifically focuses on Central Mexico in the time directly following contact.

Maddison Tenney: So for our listeners, I am friends with Marisol and have been for a while. And you have such a beautiful story of what brought you to HDS. So how did you become interested in the first place in religious studies, after having a full career?

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: Yeah. So for those of you that don't know me, I started my career in visual communication design. That's what I got my degree in, in undergraduate. I also minored in Spanish. But essentially, I was working in a lot of exhibition design. I was working to craft these visual narratives that would connect with an audience to tell a very particular story, and to make it not just legible and not just well-researched on the part of the other people collaborating on the project, but also compelling and interesting and eye-catching.

And it was after being in that field that I recognized that I wanted more agency in the kinds of stories that I told, and wanted, in particular, the kinds of stories that a younger version of myself and also people like me would connect to it and find necessary to our development of identity and being and community.

I wanted to tell these well-researched, rigorous, historically true stories about Mexicanidad, in particular, but in general, Latinidad. And there are a lot of different avenues to get there. You can go through Chicano studies route, you can do an American studies route. Literature, anthropology, ethnography are all different disciplines where you can engage those questions.

But I was drawn to religious studies because I think that's a place where a lot of different disciplines converge, and you get a lot of collaboration across fields. And I think it's partly just my personality and disposition, and partly my vocational background that makes me really juxtaposed to collaborative work, and I thought that I would find that in a religious studies program. Especially one like the master's of theological studies, where you really can get a range of methods.

And it's a relatively short program, and so I saw it as a good opportunity to survey my intellectual interests and also the container—the containers through which I might explore those, what kind of methodology I wanted to employ.

Maddison Tenney: I love this perspective of coming into HDS wanting to collaborate and work with other people and other fields. And I would agree. I think my experience with the MTS has been similar, of it giving you lots of opportunities to try different fields, different methodologies, meeting different kinds of people.

Marisol, how did you decide your focus?

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: Yeah. I mean, I think the focus kind of falls into place around the kind of classes that I wanted to take. That's the most basic answer.

I kind of toyed with the idea of exploring religion, literature, and art, or even religion, ethics, and politics, but I think because I became so interested in history and historical thinking so quickly, and that's like very—it's very oriented by a time and place. That organizing my degree around religions of the Americas just made a lot of sense because those were the classes that I was taking.

Maddison Tenney: I'm so interested. You've brought up a couple times, time and place and history. When did that click into place for you, or was there an experience or a set of experiences that clued you in to that's what you wanted to study?

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: Yeah. Oh, that's such a good question.

So the very first class of Ahmad Greene-Hayes's class—the very first meeting of Ahmad Greene-Hayes's class, "Religion, Theory, and the Archive," we were assigned Saidiya Hartman's "Venus in Two Acts." And I had been curious before at this point about the capacity of memory and the capacity of imagination to fill in the places where we can't possibly know or where information, stories, traditions, languages have been lost.

And I was really curious about both the opportunities of imagination and the limitations of it to reconstruct something to which we don't have access, or we don't have access in a way that feels meaningful or substantial enough.

And you know, Saidiya Hartman, who does a wonderful job and is so unique in her methods, but also a number of historians who are engaging history very critically and asking the question that I think is on the other side of the coin of the one that I was asking, which is what are the possibilities and limitations of the archive and of the historian as an interpreter of that archive?

And I think I just started to see these two things, like imagination and historical research, as really necessarily married to one another to I think, one, to ground—history to ground imagination in maybe it's devotion, like a devotional relationship to people who have existed in the historical past. And I think of imagination to ground history in maybe its humility, maybe its intellectual humility, that we can't possibly ever things, but we can imagine them. Maybe it's a connection to historical actors that we see our own lives in their—in the traces that they've left of their own agency.

I started seeing history as this really generative place for being in relationship to people who are located differently in time and usually, space to us. And I mean, ultimately to collaborate, and ask some really interesting and sometimes destabilizing questions about what it means for somebody to have a say in how their stories are told, about who gets a say in how their own stories are told, or how they're represented.

And then to just try. To just simply try to represent people as they are, and in a way that is both responsive and accountable to those historical actors that you're representing, but that's also accountable to people in the present.

I was having a drink with a friend, who was also a historian, the other day. And she mentioned that history is written for the present, and that's something that I think a lot of historians lose sight of.

A lot of historians are working with things like court records, police records, Inquisition records, disputes. And so, I don't know. I think a lot about the ways that it is easy to reproduce the same logics of the archive that you're accessing, instead of looking through the archive and understanding maybe even the archive as an actor in and of themselves.

Maddison Tenney: Have you been able to have any outside of classroom experiences with the archive during your time at HDS?

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: Yeah. So something that exists at HDS is the—it's through the Office of Student Life, the OSL. And basically, you can leverage it to travel, to have an experience that would be academically and intellectually formative.

So I applied, and I went to the General Archive of the Nation, in Mexico City. It's where a lot of Inquisition documents are housed and a lot of just generally time directly following contact documents are stored. I really wanted to specifically know how people in the 1500s in this particular town of Ocuituco, in Central Mexico, were negotiating their encounters with not just one but two empires, the Mexica Empire and the Spanish Crown.

But I also was just really trying to get myself oriented to how to even navigate an archive of this scale, how to register, how to just speak and have rapport with the people who are administrators of the archive, how to handle the materials, how to store and create your own archive om your own devices and your own hardware, because that happens, too. You visit the archive, and they have a way of organizing information and attaching data that interprets what that information is, what those documents are. But then you go home, and you attach your own interpretation, your own tags, your own system of organization to them.

So that was exciting. I got to become acquainted with that process. And now now that I am home, and I have all these very, very old documents, I have to learn to interpret them, because as we know handwriting and conventions for writing were very, very different in 1500 Central Mexico. A lot of these conventions actually came from the medieval era, and then that's how things were written down in Spanish and Nahuatl.

So the nerdy word for this is paleography. I'm learning to read very old documents. That was my visit to the archive.

And now I'm working with a different archive, which is at the University of Houston. They have a program called the Recovery Program, which is part of Arte Publico Press at the University of Houston. And what it is, is it's an archive where they not just process and archive and keep and care for just like an enormous collection of archival documents related to Latina cultural productions in Latina history between the 16th and 20th centuries, so between contact and the Civil Rights era.

But importantly, they also publish it in a number of ways. So they publish collections of these archival materials, but they're also doing a lot of digital humanities work, and in particular, working with this archive, where my own role is helping process this collection, called the Bakal Collection that's a number of Colonial-era Mexican documents.

My current question is around how we're using and leveraging data and metadata to make these searchable and selfishly, a little bit to make me a better historian, because I wanted to know how the back end worked so that I became better at navigating it.

But yeah, I think having these experiences of advocating for access to these archives for myself, clarifying what kinds of archives are important and to what end, and what kind of skill sets I need to be able to interpret them with and if we're using the language from earlier to have devotion to these documents in a way that is meaningful and affords them, like, legibility or maybe affords me the ability to read, those experiences of visiting the Archivo General de la Nación, the General Archive of the Nation, Mexico City, and of helping process this collection at the University of Houston and the Recovery Program, I think both experiences have helped me to really clarify what the essential skills around history and around the particular period in which I'm interested are.

And those include things like language. Now, there are a number of Nahuatl documents that tell us a lot about how people were navigating their world. And it's a language skill that I don't have yet, and I'm trying to develop. Paleography and reading very, very, very old documents is one of them.

Just knowing how to navigate the archive, how to have good rapport with the people working there is really indispensable. And I think historians do well to be very emotionally intelligent in how they're navigating an archive.

Maddison Tenney: I wish every incoming HDS student could just listen to what you just talked about.

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: That part was actually good and helpful.

Maddison Tenney: So helpful. Especially like the breadth of resources available, and then how to leverage them for what you need. How did you even know to look at the archive down in Mexico and the University of Houston? How did you even to ask those questions and to look for those spaces?

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: Yeah, that's a great question because I was just thinking about the thing that I wanted to add to my last point, which is talk to people. And in particular, I would talk to these people. PhD students have been some of the most generous, kind, like, curious, and interesting collaborators of my time here.

So don't be shy. Like, reach out to PhD students. I'm going to find the language for this because there's a particular word—there are study groups around particular subjects, where you get to bounce ideas off of one another, so look for those.

Also, having good relationships with faculty can be a huge boon. I knew of the Recovery Program at the University of Houston through a conversation that I had with Professor Mayra Rivera, who is wonderful, and here at HDS. And I was open with her about what drove my work and the kinds of projects that I was interested in. And she was the one that told me to—even opened up the idea of reaching out to them.

I've also worked with Dr. Scott Sessions, who was visiting here at Harvard, although he's in the anthropology department, who has really actually helped me navigate the archive in Mexico. So I would say follow-up on your resources, or I think sometimes there's a temptation to want to be very—to handle everything on your own and just be buried in your studies, and be very independent, but I think to do work that's meaningful, I found it really necessary to collaborate, and to be willing to believe that people do want to be generous.

And a number of people, if you reach out, will love to talk to you about their field of study. And after all, I think a lot of academics are studying things that are very particular to them. And so when somebody reaches out who is one of maybe four people who are deeply interested in Central Mexico in the 1500s, they're actually really thrilled to talk to you.

Yeah, I've been really grateful for the generosity of people, even independent scholars outside of HDS, who have been working in the Nahuatl and the paleography spaces for years now, and for their mentorship and curiosity in my work and conversation has been hugely formative to me intellectually.

Maddison Tenney: So, Marisol, you're in the archive. You're studying, you're researching, you're building this network of connections. Where do you hope to go after your time at HDS?

You've got a year left. What sort of future plans are you thinking about, and where do you hope to go next?

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: Yeah, I'm in this space where I'm exploring the different containers that can exist for this very well-articulated central goal, which is to tell stories that are both historically rigorous true, but also compelling and legible.

And I am very interested in the digital humanities. Through my work in recovery, I'm learning about how data is leveraged in that process. And also through this project called the Digital Florentine Codex, which is published by the Getty Research Institute. That has opened up my imagination to documents that are historically weighty. They're are important things that tell us a lot about how people moved through the world in a different space and time than ours.

And I think maybe I should explain what the Digital Florentine Codex is. So the Digital Florentine Codex, which is this series of books that is an early ethnographic work of Central Mexico post-contact, was published by the Getty Research Institute, and it was the first time that I really witnessed this archival document scanned in high definition next to several different transcriptions of the work and translations in different languages.

And you can even reference different historian's interpretations of certain aspects in the footnotes. So it's this really, really beautiful, rich resource that is starting to pick up more momentum. I would call it, a virtual exhibit of archival material, that allows people to access-- grants people access to these archival works that otherwise wouldn't have been searchable or as easily findable. 

And I've been described as having the sensibility of a public historian, and I'm in the process of discerning whether history in the sense of being a researcher that visits the archives and interprets the archives, that publishes work interpreting the archives is the way that I want to orient myself to this field, or whether I want to do it more through a data science capacity, which would be a shift in how I'm thinking and orienting myself.

But I think, again, this work is like inherently and necessarily extremely collaborative. And so I think some of my previous work as a graphic designer, again working on exhibitions, has been building a container for stories to be told, but maybe it is as an academic and somebody who interprets the archives themselves.

Maddison Tenney: All right. Marisol, these are our last three questions, and I call this Speed Round, so in a sentence or less. I'll ask these next three questions.

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: Yeah.

Maddison Tenney: What musician or artist are you currently listening to?

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: In a sentence or less?

Maddison Tenney: A sentence or less.

Marisol Andrade Muñoz: Charli XCX's remix with Lorde, "The Girl, So Confusing."

Maddison Tenney: It's everything. It's literally everything.

Marisol Andrade Muñ​​​​​​​oz: I wept. I wept. Those are three sentences.

Maddison Tenney: I'm obsessed.

If you could create any class at Harvard Divinity School, what class would you create?

Marisol Andrade Muñ​​​​​​​oz: Language learning for Nahuatl.

Maddison Tenney: And finally, any words of wisdom that you would give your younger self who is just starting at HDS?

Marisol Andrade Muñ​​​​​​​oz: Find your resources early on, and apply to them. And just—if you're not sure, just try. And I think there's a—there's a process of rapid iteration that starts to happen once you start applying to things that you think might be useful, and so getting through the first phase of learning what doesn't work and what works better as soon as possible I think is just wise, and I've picked up along the way.

And also, I think I did a fairly good job about this, but really do reach out to people. People are, I think, more generous than—and more generous in their assumptions of us and their curiosity for us than I think most people realize, or at least, I tend to realize. So I would affirm that, reach out to people, and take them up on if they offer help. You might start a really great relationship of reciprocity, where you learn things, and you're able to contribute back to them and build a really meaningful collaboration.

Maddison Tenney: This has been a Harvard Divinity School podcast. Thank you so much to Caroline Cataldo and Jonathan Beasley for editing this podcast. For more information on the show, you can view the show notes or go to the Harvard Divinity School website.