MEL Talks - Tom Johnson

WEDNESDAY DEC 4, 2024 7:00 PM

The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan: A Curious, Compelling, Captivating Geohistory of 16th Century Mexico and Guatemala - When Cortez and his small army scrambled over the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains and finally took the city of Tenochtitlan in 1521, he recognized the need for much more intel about the people and the terrain he was conquering. Two years later, he dispatched trusted lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado to go to today's Puebla Valley, seek allies with the native Nahua people and explore the lands to the south. Two years later, the expedition returned and Nahuatl artists created a stunning pictorial map of the journey as far south as today’s Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. That map is Quauhquechollan: El Lienzo de la Conquista. This presentation covers the history of the map and how it, and other indigenous pictorial maps (lienzos), influenced all of Mexican history, especially the Mexican legal system and land law.

Tom Johnson is a retired journalist and professor emeritus with a long career zig-zagging from the classroom to the newsroom and back. As a journalist, researcher, lecturer and traveler, he has been in and out of Mexico and Latin America since the 1960s. He was a reporter for TIME Magazine in El Salvador in the mid-1980s, the start-up editor of MacWEEK magazine and, in the late ‘90s, a deputy editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He has taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, Boston University's College of Communication and lectured and conducted workshops in England, Poland, South Africa and Latin America. In 2011, the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars selected him for inclusion on the Fulbright Specialists Roster as a specialist in analytic journalism.

He is Professor of Journalism (Emeritus) at San Francisco State University and the co-founder/director of the Institute for Analytic Journalism in Santa Fe, New Mexico and a member of the national board of directors of the Society of Professional Journalists, representing the four states in Region 9. He has severed as a director of the non-profit New Mexico Foundation for Open Government. Currently, he is a director of Global Santa Fe and the Rio Grande Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

See the entire season lineup of MEL Talks here.