The Latin American colonial period was a time of intense military, economic, social, political, and religious upheaval. Although European colonial expansion eradicated or seriously emaciated many indigenous societies and imposed itself on them politically and culturally, the conquest and colonization of the Americas was also a period of transculturation in which new symbolic forms–racial, religious, political, social, even gastronomic–emerged from the interaction between European and indigenous cultures. In some cases, the results of transculturation are relatively easy to identify, but the interaction between alphabetic writing and indigenous media such as Mesoamerican iconography and the Andean quipu is much more difficult to detect. This chapter proposes a theory of transcultural intertextuality as a model for understanding the nature of this interaction and a basis for the identification and analysis of particular instances.

As part of the ongoing project of decolonization and cultural critique, indigenous artists and writers take on the role of autobiographers, ethnographers, historians, activists, and visionaries, often in the form of visual autobiography. Their storytelling crosses fields of study (art practice, history, anthropology, and literature), media (text, photographs, drawings, paintings, and maps), as well as geographies and cultures. Collectively they bear witness to transgenerational trauma, challenge official settler-colonial myths, share tribal stories and epistemologies as well as personal narratives, and insist on indigenous presence, witness, and continuity. This essay traces indigenous visual self-narrative forms from pre-contact pictography to ledger book art to their adaptation into contemporary modes as well as the indigenization of Western forms such as comics and memoir. Two streams—one arising from and referring to earlier pictography and a second arising from Western literary or artistic traditions, but with indigenous inflections—are discussed.