This volume brings together eleven essays by the students who received the Ph.D. under Elizabeth Hill Boone's direction. Boone, a renowned art historian of the prehispanic Mexica and colonial Mexico published on a wide range of topics. These include monolithic sculpture from the Mexica (Aztec) capital of Tenochtitlan; sixteenth-century manuscripts from the Valley of Mexico and the reception history of Indigenous art. Her most lauded book is Stories in Red and Black: The Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. This volume, which grew out of papers presented at a 2024 conference held in Boone's honor, includes contributions by Allison Caplan, James Córdova, Lori Boornazian Diel, Jennifer Saracino, and Hayley Woodward, all of whom treat pictographic manuscripts created in the Basin of Mexico in the sixteenth century.

Others venture into fields outside of those explored by Boone, such as Maya hieroglyphic writing, Nahuatl linguistics, Andean archeology, and colonial Andean history. Taken as a whole, the chapters offer a snapshot of new directions of Latin American art history, as they engage with environmental history, interspecies relationality, identity construction, and Indigenous epistemologies.