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Teenth Centuries. by Kevin Terraciano (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002) 514 Pp

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Teenth Centuries. by Kevin Terraciano (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002) 514 Pp REVIEWS | 119 The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eigh- teenth Centuries. By Kevin Terraciano (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002) 514 pp. $65.00 The peoples of the Mixteca region possess a larger extant corpus of writ- ten and pictorial records created before and during the Spanish colonial era than any other native cultural group in the Americas. Terraciano bases a study of these peoples in the colonial period on archival sources, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/34/1/119/1706971/002219503322645835.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 including many Mixtec-language documents. The native-language sources open the door to a world of meanings, and allow Terraciano to probe local social divisions, religious understandings, political forms, gender relationships, and ethnic identities from an internal point of view. Because of similar work on colonial Mexico by others, notably Karttunen and Lockhart, in what Terraciano refers to as the “New Phi- lology,” he is able to compare local processes of change in the Mixteca with central Mexico and Yucatán.1 Writing and language are the subjects of the lead chapters. The book begins with an analysis of the hybrid pictorial/alphabetic sources produced in the years following the Spanish arrival, followed by a de- scription of the alphabetic sources produced by the people of the Mixteca themselves. The book does not look back to the prehispanic period, but examines processes of change that unfolded because of con- tact between the people of the Mixteca and the Spaniards—especially the Dominicans, who taught them to write and who profoundly trans- formed their religious beliefs. What the people of the Mixteca wrote testiªes to the increasing penetration of an alien language and culture, though penetration was slower and more uneven than in central Mex- ico. The degree to which this process fell into Mixtec hands is also evi- dent. Some Mixtec documentary forms evolved from prehispanic antecedents; some were local inventions; but all were fundamentally Mixtec. Instead of the words Mixtec and Mixteca, Terraciano uses Ñudzahui. Throughout the book, he deªnes “the Nudzahui” on the basis of lan- guage, as Lockhart before him deªned “the Nahuas.” This choice has important consequences, the most important being that language classiªcation may have always been imposed by European outsiders, from the ªrst explorers to the evangelizers and even to modern-day an- thropologists. Since the late nineteenth century and the rise of anthro- pological science, the people known as Indians to the Spaniards, who adopted Spanish in large numbers in the eighteenth century (as Terraciano and other New Philologists have demonstrated) have been redeªned as people who did not speak a European language, given the assumptions that language is coterminous with culture. One of the vir- tues of Terraciano’s book is his apparent discovery that many Mixtec 1 Frances Karttunen and James Lockhart, Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language Contact Phe- nomena in Texts of the Colonial Period (Los Angeles, 1976). 120 | CATHERINE JULIEN terms have equivalences in Nahuatl. There may have been as much dif- ference between different regions of the Mixteca as between any of them and the region just to the east, inhabited by Nahuatl speakers. If we remove assumptions about the primacy of language from the issue of how people classiªed themselves, other possibilities come into view. For example, the origin story clearly deªnes a territory, known as ñuu ñudzahui, consisting of regions named after the most signiªcant groups within them. Terraciano notes that in Teposcolula, the heart of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/34/1/119/1706971/002219503322645835.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 the Mixteca Alta, three distinct variants of the ñudzahui language were spoken in addition to ªve non-ñudzahui languages. Even though people who called themselves tay ñudzahui, “person of ñudzahui,” may have spoken one of the dialects of a common language, ñuu ñudzahui in- cludes many people who were not tay ñudzahui. The origin story reºects a local historical consciousness as well as a local classiªcation of what it means to be ñudzahui ñuu, and it is fundamentally about land. Terraciano tells the origin story in his last chapter, “Ethnicity.” Since ethnicity is deªned historically, through contact between social groups, Terraciano might have said something about local political history, in- cluding the period when these people lost their autonomy to a political alliance centered in the valley of Mexico, during the century before the Spaniards arrived. Since he does not dip backward in time—except in the leading sentences of some chapters to provide background about “traditional” cultural practice—we do not get a sense of how the ethnic conªguration that he documents emerged or what it meant to those who lived their lives within it. By deªning units of study on the basis of language, the project of developing images of a ñuu ñudzahui identity is effectively subverted. We still need to do history. Concerns about the “New Philology” notwithstanding, Terra- ciano’s book is still a ªne ethnography, built from native-language sources that have a great deal to say about the culture of people living in the territory of Ñuu ñudzahui. Catherine Julien Western Michigan University Columbus’s Outpost among the Tainos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493–1498. By Kathleen Deagan and José Maria Cruxent (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002) 294 pp. $35.00 The Spanish settlement at La Isabela, established by Christopher Colum- bus in December 1493 on the island of Hispañola, was, by all accounts, a failure. Within ªve years, it had been abandoned, attracting only spo- radic attention for the next 500 years. Thankfully, Deagan and Cruxent have rescued La Isabela for posterity. Their excavations, the ªrst fully documented investigations of the site, have produced two books—a technical work aimed at archaeologists and this accessible, interdisciplin-.
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