Inspired by the pre-Hispanic codices that escaped immolation during colonial invasions, this artists' book opens from right to left, expanding out from accordion folds to a length of over twenty-one feet. Gomez-Pena's texts -- a heady mix of languages, accents, poetry, and prose -- are woven through and around Chagoya's collages filled with pre-Hispanic drawings, European colonial representations of New World natives, and contemporary comic book superheroes. Rice's masterful typographic compositions orchestrate the text's many voices and views in a series of beautiful and jarring montages.

Codex Espangliensis offers a history of the Americas which must be read forward and backward, in fragments and in recurring episodes -- in short, as history itself tends to unfold.