Caterina Pizzigoni

Late Nahuatl Testaments from the Toluca Valley: Indigenous-Language Ethnohistory in the Mexican Independence Period

Newly collected testaments from two settlements in the jurisdiction of Metepec in the Toluca Valley reveal that, although scholars believed the great tradition of mundane records in Nahuatl to have lapsed by 1800, it continued on a large scale during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the independence period so far hardly touched by examinations of indigenous social history. The larger corpus is from San Bartolome Tlatelolco, which also happens to be represented by documents from about a century earlier in Pizzigonis Testaments of Toluca, giving a perspective on the new materials. Surprisingly, a large majority of the testators were women. Nevertheless, we find continuity in gender roles and in structures and practices generally, as well as in specific traditions of San Bartolome. At the same time, new aspects of naming patterns, testament and funeral conventions, land measurement, ritual kinship, and the role of lay sodalities emerge from the testaments.

Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (review)

The story that Brian Owensby tells us is one of active engagement and constructive reaction instead of surrender in front of a colonial power. The protagonists are the indigenous people of seventeenth-century Mexico. So, we may ask, what is new? In truth, the creative response of die native people of Mexico to the Spanish presence has already been the topic of many books. However, this book aims to see this relation through the lens of the law—the legal procedure itself and what die indigenous subjects understood or made of it. Focusing on such matters rather than using lawsuits as sources to get to details about colonial life is quite rare, although it has been attempted before (die author acknowledges his debt to Woodrow Borah, for one), so the perspective is interesting and refreshing.