This is the first work to begin to fill a gap: an understanding of discourse aimed to persuade within the Pre-Columbian Americas. The contributors in this collection offer glimpses of what those indigenous rhetorics might have looked like and how their influences remain. The reader is invited to recognize "the invention of the Americas," providing other ways to contemplate material life prior to contemporary capitalism, telling us about the global from long ago to current global capitalism. This book is the drop that will ripple, creating new lines of inquiry into language use within the Americas and the legacies of genocide, conquest, and cultural survival.

Conventional scholarship on written communication positions the Western alphabet as a precondition for literacy. Thus, pictographic, non-verbal writing practices of Mesoamerica remain obscured by representations of lettered speech. This book examines how contemporary Mestiz@ scripts challenge alphabetic dominance, thereby undermining the colonized territories of "writing." Strategic weavings of Aztec and European inscription systems not only promote historically-grounded accounts of how recorded information is expressed across cultures, but also speak to emerging studies on "visual/multimodal" education. Baca-Espinosa argues that Mestiz@ literacies advance "new" ways of reading and writing, applicable to diverse classrooms of the twenty-first century.

This is the first work to begin to fill a gap: an understanding of discourse aimed to persuade within the Pre-Columbian Americas. The contributors in this collection offer glimpses of what those indigenous rhetorics might have looked like and how their influences remain. The reader is invivted to recognize "the invention of the Americas," providing other ways to contemplate material life prior to contemporary capitalism, telling us about the global from long ago to current global capitalism. This book is the drop that will ripple, creating new lines of inquiry into language use within the Americas and the legacies of genocide, conquest, and cultural survival.

Conventional scholarship on written communication positions the Western alphabet as a precondition for literacy. Thus, pictographic, non-verbal writing practices of Mesoamerica remain obscured by representations of lettered speech. This book examines how contemporary Mestiz@ scripts challenge alphabetic dominance, thereby undermining the colonized territories of "writing." Strategic weavings of Aztec and European inscription systems not only promote historically-grounded accounts of how recorded information is expressed across cultures, but also speak to emerging studies on "visual/multimodal" education. Baca-Espinosa argues that Mestiz@ literacies advance "new" ways of reading and writing, applicable to diverse classrooms of the twenty-first century.