tequiti (Osu16r)

The gloss is in Spanish, referring to two Indigenous persons “for service,” and no Nahuatl text provides the term tequiti that we use here. But the contextualizing image makes it even clearer that the labor of these men was part of what Doctor Bravo expected each week on Mondays. This manuscript gives a number of Spanish colonial officials hieroglyphic renditions of their names. Dr. Bravo, who was an <em>oidorem> of the Audiencia (high court), is shown on the larger manuscript page as a person in a full set of dark clothing and a hat, seated in profile, in a curule chair, facing toward the viewer’s right. He wears a sword on his hip, carries a staff of office, gestures with his finger, and has a speech scroll coming out of his mouth, all part of the iconography of his authority and power. On this same folio one can see indications of the labor that was provided to him in the way of twelve loads of fodder for his horses. The value of such products and services is also spelled out on the page in pesos and <em>tominesem> (colonial coins).