The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Nudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (review)

The peoples of the Mixteca region possess a larger extant corpus of written 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, 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 Philology," 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 description 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 contact between the people of the Mixteca and the Spaniards—especially the Dominicans, who taught them to write and who profoundly transformed their religious beliefs. What the people of the Mixteca wrote testifies to the increasing penetration of an alien language and culture, though penetration was slower and more uneven than in central Mexico. The degree to which this process fell into Mixtec hands is also evident. 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 defines "the Nudzahui" on the basis of language, as Lockhart before him defined "the Nahuas." This choice has important consequences, the most important being that language classification may have always been imposed by European outsiders, from the first explorers to the evangelizers and even to modern-day anthropologists. Since the late nineteenth century and the rise of anthropological 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 redefined as people who did not speak a European language, given the assumptions that language is coterminous with culture. One of the virtues of Terraciano's book is his apparent discovery that many Mixtec terms have equivalences in Nahuatl. There may have been as much difference 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 classified themselves, other possibilities come into view. For example, the origin story clearly defines a territory, known as ñuu ñudzahui, consisting of regions named after the most significant groups within them. Terraciano notes that in Teposcolula, the heart of the Mixteca Alta, three distinct variants of the ñudzahui language were spoken in addition to five 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 includes many people who were not tay ñudzahui. The origin story reflects a local historical consciousness as well as a local classification 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 defined historically, through contact between social groups, Terraciano might have said something about local political history, including 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...