Center for the Humanities

A collaborative public health-informed comic on the COVID-19 pandemic  

This visual text represents some of the content from the article, Women, Childbirth, and the Sticky Tamales: Nahua Rhetoric and Worldview in the Glyphic Codex Borgia, by Felicia Lopez. Through the use of comic book conventions, readers are guided through the decipherment of logographic writing from Central Mexico and, in the process, are shown how colonization has limited our contemporary understanding of ancient Indigenous people. By offering reinterpretations of glyphs that reveal the cultural knowledge of women, this guided reading of a codex image paints a picture of Aztecs and other Indigenous people as intelligent, complex, and inventors of their own unique writing systems.

This comic is based on Prof. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe's TEDtalk "A climate change solution that's right under our feet" (https://www.ted.com/talks/asmeret_asefaw_berhe_a_climate_change_solution_that_s_right_under_our_feet?language=en) 

Abstract from TED.com: There's two times more carbon in the earth's soil than in all of its vegetation and the atmosphere -- combined. Biogeochemist Asmeret Asefaw Berhe dives into the science of soil and shares how we could use its awesome carbon-trapping power to offset climate change. "[Soil] represents the difference between life and lifelessness in the earth system, and it can also help us combat climate change -- if we can only stop treating it like dirt," she says.

Based in a fictional town in rural California, “Thirsty for Change'” explores themes in environmental justice and the right to clean water. This bilingual comic book introduces concepts in water governance and illustrates the possibility of systemic change to water management through community empowerment. Resources from the nonprofit organization, Community Water Center, are included within. This project was funded through the Henry Luce Foundation and the Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Merced.

Mayahuel’s Mysterious Maguey: The Divine Mesoamerican Mother’s Sacred Story of Transformation explores the narrative of Mayahuel as told in the Histoyre du Mechique, the extant French translation (via a lost Spanish translation) of the lost or destroyed original Nahua sacred narrative. This visual text adapts glyphs and iconography from the Indigenous-authored Codex Yohualli Ehecatl (Borgia), Codex Mictlan (Laud), Codex Tonalpohualli (Vaticanus B), and Codex Mendoza (as well as including Jordan Collver’s original artwork) to bring the story of Mayahuel’s transformation into maguey to contemporary readers. Embedded within this visual narrative are Indigenous, specifically Nahua, Aztec, and Mexica, ideologies related to motherhood, death, interconnectedness, nature, and teotl, a Nahuatl term not easily defined. Inspired by Felicia Rhapsody Lopez’s article, "Case Study for the Development of a Visual Grammar: Mayahuel and Maguey as Teotl in the Directional Tree Pages of the Codex Borgia," published in rEvista: A Multi-media, Multi-genre e-Journal for Social Justice, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017

 A comic based on Susan Amussen's article, "The Contradictions of Patriarchy in Early Modern England," published in Gender and History, vol. 30, no. 2, 2018, pp. 343-353.

A comic synopsis of the book Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California, edited by Kathleen L. Hull and John G. Douglass (University of Arizona Press, 2018).