The codex comes home to the city its pages were painted in

In a hall of the National Museum of Anthropology, visitors leaned over twenty-five leaves of bark paper that had not been seen in Mexico for more than 150 years. The Códice Azcatitlan, painted by an unnamed Mexica artist in the sixteenth century, arrived on loan from Paris. It tells the story of Tenochtitlan — in the city that Tenochtitlan became.

The manuscript was painted on amate bark paper and on European paper, by someone trained in two worlds at once. Its early pages follow the Mexica from their origins to the founding of Tenochtitlan. Its later ones show Spaniards on horseback, and a church with a friar standing in it. Several leaves are missing. Some drawings were left as outlines, the colour never filled in — the work of a hand that stopped, for reasons no one recorded.

Even the codex's name is borrowed. It had none until Robert H. Barlow, an American historian teaching at Mexico City College, published the first full study of it in 1949 and took a place name from the opening migration scenes. Azcatl is the Nahuatl word for ant. The name means, roughly, place of the anthill.

The route was long and entirely legal on paper. The French teacher and collector Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin gathered manuscripts in Mexico in the 1830s and 1840s and carried them to Paris. Late in life he sold them to Eugène Goupil, a collector born in Mexico to a French father. After Goupil died, his widow gave the collection to the Bibliothèque nationale. The Azcatitlan has stayed there since, digitised and freely viewable online — which is not the same thing as being here.

Our interest is that our patrimony be in Mexico, because it acquires greater significance here.

Brito Guadarrama's sentence is the whole argument in miniature, and Mexican officials now have a legal opening to press it. France's Law 2026-351 permits restitution of culturally looted items acquired between 1815 and 1972 where colonial-era plunder can be scientifically demonstrated. The Foreign Ministry, the Culture Ministry, INAH and Customs are assembling a case covering more than 100 Mexican historical documents held in French institutions. The loan is the opening move, not the conclusion.

The preparation produced something no one had planned for. While readying the exhibit, researchers identified two previously unpublished sixteenth-century manuscripts on amate paper, possibly from the hand behind the Códice Mendoza — which sits in Oxford's Bodleian Library, and which Mexico has so far recovered only as a joint digital edition, released in 2015.

The exhibition opened on the museum's own anniversary. Pedro Ramírez Vázquez's building was inaugurated on the seventeenth of September, 1964. Sixty-two years later, the pages came through its doors.