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And while I'm wrapping up Hum 110 posting for the (academic) year, here are a bunch of topically-adjacent children's books we wandered into while reading the assigned curriculum. (To be clear, none of these were assigned: they're all things we found that are based on stuff we read in bookgroup, or drew upon art styles we studied, etc.)


Vivian Mansour (illus. Emmanuel Valtierra, trans. Carlos Rodriguez Cortez), Pilgrim Codex (2025)

Heroic account of a Mexican family who, driven from their homes by violence, cross the US-Mexico border to try to find a safer home. Re-imagined through the lens of Mesoamerican codices, the family's peril, sacrifices, and bravery are told with sympathy and pride. Alas, not everyone in the family makes it alive to the US, and some of the scenes are genuinely harrowing. Nevertheless, I'd still call this age-appropriate: given that some children have themselves survived similar events (or have classmates or playmates who did), this could be a useful text for helping children discuss and make sense of their world.


Duncan Tonatiuh, A Land of Books: Dreams of Young Mexihcah Word Painters (2022)

Story of young tlahcuiloqueh (scribes) in training, learning to paint amoxtin (books, aka codices). Illustrations draw heavily on Mesoamerican glyphs, and shows several example of completed codex-pages in progress. The more one knows about how to read Mesoamerican codices, the richer this book becomes. Glossary of Nahuatl in the back (used liberally in the text), but unfortunately does not include a guide to Mesoamerican glyphs, dating systems, or other conventions of the Mixteca writing system. I highly recommend pairing this with Gordon Whittaker's Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs (not a children's picture book) or similar, to get insight into everything Tonatiuh is doing here.


Duncan Tonatiuh, The Princess and the Warrior (2016)

Tonatiuh's version of the Mixteca origin story of the volcanoes Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, which are visible from Tenochtitlan / Mexico City. As above, the illustrations are inspired by Mesoamerican codices, and the text is rich with Nahuatl vocabulary. As ever, I am caught by random side-characters: what became of the messenger who was bribed to betray Popoca? He lucked out that Popoca was too caught up in Itza's illness to hunt him down for revenge...


Duncan Tonatiuh, Feathered Serpent and the Five Suns (2020)

Another Mixteca origin story, this one for humanity itself. We read in bookgroup one of the sources Tonatiuh draws upon, but I didn't recognize the middle section of Tonatiuh's narrative--and the afterword suggests that the novel-to-me section was Tonatiuh's own creation, imaging that Quetzalcoatl faced the same challenges on the path to the underworld that the dead do.


Duncan Tonatiuh, Diego Rivera: His World and Ours (2011)

Introduction to the life and works of Diego Rivera, who was one of the principal artists of the Mexican government's muralism campaign of the 1920s and 30s. The art is a Mixtecan riff on Rivera's style, and alternates between Rivera's work, reimagined in Tonatiuh's style, and speculation about what archetypically Mexican subjects he might have immortalized had he been working today.



There may or may not be further posts of Hum-110-adjacent materials dribbling in as we go: there are a number of books I checked out from the library as potentially interesting, but which I didn't get to while we were reading related units. We'll see how it goes!