doña (Osu21r)

This painted example of iconography refers to an elite Nahua woman with the title doña, a loanword that entered Nahuatl from Spanish. The full name given is doña Ana. She is painted with long dark hair and a pink flesh tone on her face and neck. The long hair suggests youth, as she is not wearing the neaxtlahualli hair style of adult women. The view of her is almost a frontal view, but she looks and turns slightly to the viewer’s right. She is apparently being assigned to the viceroy don Luis de Velasco as a servant, even though the text mentions all the other workers assigned to him but leaves her out. The contextualizing image shows her next to a tied bundle of fodder and red dots representing four loads’ worth. Perhaps it would be her job to gather the grasses to feed the viceroy’s horses.