Recent research has explored Indigenous and mestizo communities that partake in social practices of transculturated, Amerindian and translingual literacies, often to oppose attempts by powerful groups to suppress them. By drawing on data from studies conducted in Peru and the United States, this paper traces the tracks of Amerindian and translingual literacies from the early modern/colonial period to the postmodern/postcolonial present. It traces the domination of alphabetic-text literacy driven by the ideology of its superiority and the coexistence of Amerindian and translingual literacies driven by the ideology of border gnoseology. It unites metaculture with colonial semiosis and literacy as translingual practice to explain continuities and discontinuities among semiotic systems in Amerindian literacies. Metaculture, colonial semiosis, and the existing data allow to identify formerly overlooked texts and the social and literacy practices that produced them as products of border gnoseology and translingualism, and to grasp Indigenous and mestizo material in autoethnographic texts studied mainly from the viewpoint of the subaltern appropriation of dominant paradigms.