Were ancient Mesoamericans among the first emoji users? Duncan Tonatiuh thinks so; the elaborate books they created featured pictogramlike art that conveyed just as much meaning to readers as smiley faces and hearts do to us. Tonatiuh took a deep dive into the world of Mesoamerican bookmaking for his latest work, A Land of Books: Dreams of Young Mexihcah Word Painters (Abrams, Nov. 15), which he both wrote and illustrated. “When we talk about books in [world history], we talk about Europe, China, Egypt. But Mesoamerica was one of the places where books flourished independently, without outside influence,” he tells Kirkus via a Zoom call from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he lives.

Though many Mesoamerican cultures created books, Tonatiuh’s picture book focuses on the Mexihcah, also known as the Aztecs, who lived in what is now Mexico from the 14th to the 16th centuries. The tlahcuilohqueh (a Nahuatl word that translates to “painters of words”) who worked on these books were highly respected. “They attended this special school called the calmecac…with noblemen and with warriors,” says Tonatiuh. “They were very well regarded because they were in charge of preserving the knowledge, the different legends, the different myths, the history.”

Tonatiuh’s book is narrated by a child telling her brother about their parents’ work. “Children were often involved in the family’s work from an early age,” he says. “I wanted to show the brother and sister learning and being involved in the making of books.”

Unlike bound books, these codices (or amoxtin as they were known in Nahuatl) folded out, like accordions. Bookmaking was communal work, says Tonatiuh. Similar to how teams of writers, artists, colorists, and letterers work on comic books, many people lent their talents to bookmaking in Mesoamerican cultures, though the codices were unsigned. “There were different people that were involved in things like making the paper. The Mixtecs would paint on the hides of deer, but the Mexihcah would paint on paper made out of tree bark.”

Making the paint for the books was an involved process. Cochineal insects that lived on nohpalli, a kind of cactus, were used to create red paint, while black paint was made from ash mixed with gum and water. “When a tlahcuiloh was painting and he wanted to change color, he could just lick off the paint from his brush, because it was all made from flowers, from different vegetables,” and from other natural ingredients, explains Tonatiuh.

The communal aspect extended to the reading of books, too. “Nowadays, when we read a book, it’s usually a very individual experience,” Tonatiuh says. But in Mesoamerican culture, not everyone had access to books. Festivals, he says, were opportunities for public readings. “There would be a reader that would sing the words that were painted on the books. And there would be musicians, and there would be dancers. It would be a performance, almost like theater.”

Mesoamerican bookmaking traditions have long resonated with Tonatiuh, who was born in Mexico. He draws inspiration from pre-Columbian art for his illustrations, something that began when he was in college, at Parsons School for Design in New York. He volunteered at the organization National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, where he met a Mixtec man, Sergio, from Mexico. “He had successfully organized at this restaurant where he was paid very poorly because he was undocumented.” Tonatiuh knew the story would make a compelling subject for his senior project.

Intrigued that Sergio and his family preserved many Mixtec traditions, including speaking the language, Tonatiuh researched Mixtec art at his university library. He’d seen this kind of art growing up in Mexico but now fell in love with it, adopting it for his project “Journey of a Mixteco,” which years later was published as the adult title Undocumented: A Worker’s Fight (2018). Both works fold out, accordion-style, like a codex. In many ways, Mesoamerican bookmaking helped launch Tonatiuh’s own career; a professor noticed his project and put him in touch with a children’s book editor. “Eventually, it led to my first picture book, Dear Primo: A Letter to My Cousin [2010].”

For A Land of Books, Tonatiuh did even more research. Because most Mesoamerican codices were destroyed with the Spanish conquest (some were created after the conquest), and the few that do exist are extremely fragile, he looked at digital versions for his research, though he has seen two from the early colonial period in person at the Library of Congress and at Tulane University. Digitization, he notes, has made researching these books much easier; before that, scholars had to travel to see codices and obtain special permission to view them.

Readers of A Land of Books will emerge enlightened about bookmaking; Tonatiuh hopes they will also come away aware of the complexity of Mesoamerican cultures, which many U.S. history classes tend to overlook. “Sometimes people forget that there were civilizations that existed for thousands of years before the Europeans came,” he says. “But there's this rich tradition of food, of music, of language.”

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.