La "Pintura de Tecpatepec"

The colonial manuscript Pintura del Pueblo de Tecpatepec; Record of Expenses Kept by an Indianʺ (now part of the collection of the Nettie Lee Benson Collection at the University of Texas at Austin), represents the complaints against Manuel Olvera, former Corregidor in Mixqiahuala, during his residency at the end of his term as provincial governor of Mixquiahuala and the nearby Otomi villages. Most of the manuscript documents the products and services provided to Olvera by the Tecpatepec Indians, with their value in pesos. Abuses are mentioned and represented pictographically. The pictographic signs of the 16th century codex of the town of Tecpatepec (today Francisco I. Madero, State of Hidalgo, also called Tepatepec) are accompanied by alphabetic glosses, almost all in Spanish, some in Nahuatl. The author organizes her analytical study based on three steps. The first refers to the codicological analysis, the second to the content analysis and the third to the contextualization of the document.