The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca (review)

In this splendidly produced volume, author Terraciano extends the "new philology" approach, developed by James Lockhart in his study of Nahua people of central Mexico, to the Mixtecs of Oaxaca. Central to this approach are (1) the identification and use of primary sources written by the indigenous people themselves and (2) repressing the temptation to privilege (because of their greater similarity to the historian's own culture) Spanish or other European accounts over native ones. Written for the advanced Mesoamerican specialist, the resulting volume is an excellent example of this approach, with all of its strengths and few weaknesses.

In one sense, the preconquest and colonial Mixtecs are well known, due to the efforts of several generations of scholars, including Alfonso Caso, Ronald Spores, Barbro Dahlgren, and Mary Elizabeth Smith, among many others. Terraciano is quick to acknowledge his debt to all his predecessors but does, in fact, achieve a new level of synthesis that will stand as the definitive work on the region for many years to come.

The Mixtecs have never been a single people in a sociopolitical sense. Instead, both the highland region (called the Mixteca Alta) and the lowland region (called the Mixteca Baja) were characterized in preconquest times by many small polities, tied together (if at all) by marriages between ruling families. This fragmentation continued into colonial times. A net effect is that many communities produced the documentation used by Terraciano, but no one of them produced enough of it in his estimation to serve as the basis of an historical ethnography or microhistory. Accordingly, the focus of the work is regional.

This regional focus allows Terraciano to make use of some 400 Mixtec-language documents, much of it from the western part of the region, particularly from the administrative district of Teposcolula and Yanhuitlan, which contained several dozen local communities. However, Terraciano feels that enough documentation exists from other parts of the Mixtec region either to confirm or contrast patterns established for the western area. These documents also cover an impressive time span, from the 1570s to the early nineteenth century.

Chapter 1 is an introduction to the historiography and methods to be employed, as well as an overview of the sources. Given the reliance placed on a wide and (to the nonspecialist) unusual Mixtec language sources of the preconquest and colonial periods, this overview is welcome and well done.

Chapter 2 is an excellent history of writing among the Mixtecs, authors of the majority of his documents, from preconquest times down through the late colonial period. It is commendably well illustrated, so that the reader can view the progressive changes from pictographic toward increasingly alphabetic writing. With a focus on documents written in Mixtec, chapter 3 summarizes what the documents indicate about the Mixtec language and changes within it over the course of the colonial period.

The following six chapters present Terraciano's findings on topics defined primarily by the documents themselves. These include types of communities and their organization, social stratification and statuses, continuities in change among the Mixtec royalty, land and economy, relations with the divine, and Mixtec concepts of their own ethnicity. These are all broad subject categories, and their actual content is both diverse and (occasionally) uneven, due largely to the nature of the documentary record and partly to the approach itself.

However, all of these chapters are gratifyingly data-rich. Terraciano takes the time not only to identify indigenous practices and changes to them but also to present much of his data in the form of direct quotes and synopses of the documents he has employed. He also provides an appendix with nearly thirty pages of transcriptions and translations of original source materials. Although this approach might prove tedious for the more casual reader, it is an essential and welcome practice, given that so many of the documents are relatively inaccessible and...