The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico’s Toluca Valley, 1650–1800 by Caterina Pizzigoni (review)

A substantial expansion of her earlier work on indigenous-language testaments of Toluca, Caterina Pizzigoni’s new book makes an important contribution to the historiography of colonial Mexico. While her first book offered translations and commentary on 98 wills, she provides here an in-depth analysis of 220 testaments and additional related documents that shed refreshing new light on the daily lives of indigenous people in the Toluca Valley. Pizzigoni’s focus is on the colonial-era household—its physical layout; the resources, economic pursuits, and ritual practices that sustained it; relationships among its members; and the household’s connections with the wider community.

Given the nature of her sources, such topics as inheritance patterns, funeral practices, and kinship networks receive careful attention. The testaments also enable her to clarify the nature of indigenous landownership as “corporate in terms of original allocation” (p. 63), but rarely subject to redistribution by community officials. When writing their wills the indigenous people of the Toluca Valley treated their lands as private property. Specialists in the continued evolution of colonial Nahuatl will welcome her detailed discussions of terminology used for different types of landholdings, units of measurement, kinship categories, community subdivisions, and local officials. They will also appreciate her comments on the evolution of notarial styles.

Some of Pizzigoni’s specific findings on material culture, market activities, and personal behavior will come as no surprise to those familiar with rural society in the colonial period. Like their counterparts elsewhere in central Mexico, indigenous people in Toluca cultivated maize and maguey, wove elaborate networks of petty credit, and often cohabited outside of marriage. However, the book presents many new insights, chief among them the author’s refinements of the timing and process of cultural change identified by previous scholars who have used indigenous language materials. While most such studies have concentrated on the years before 1650, the bulk of Pizzigoni’s sources come from the period that James Lockhart labeled “Stage 3,” from the mid-seventeenth century forward, when Spanish words other than nouns appeared in Nahuatl documents with mounting frequency and corresponding structural changes in native society became increasingly evident.

Pizzigoni complicates this chronological progression in a number of ways. She shows, for example, that by the eighteenth century testators had discarded gender-neutral words for spouses and small children in favor of gender-specific Nahuatl terms that more closely resembled Spanish usage. Pizzigoni observes that this phenomenon “could be a special development intermediate between retention of traditional vocabulary and the adoption of Spanish loanwords” (p. 235) and invites other researchers to examine this hypothesis. The wills also indicate that devotion to household saints became firmly entrenched in Toluca only at the very end of the seventeenth century and not during “Stage 2” (before 1650), as other studies have concluded. The many subregional variations within the Toluca Valley further bolster Pizzigoni’s assertion that assumed chronologies require further testing and deeper contextualization.

Other notable contributions emerge from the author’s detailed examination of gender relations. We learn that women dominated such economic activities as maguey cultivation, pulque manufacture, and moneylending. Pizzigoni also notes that while sons generally received larger inheritances, daughters fared better than historians have previously assumed, and women often acted as custodians for lands that their young children or grandchildren had inherited. In other ways, however, women’s status deteriorated. By the eighteenth century, few females were called upon as witnesses or executors of wills, as male community officials increasingly took on these functions. Gender relations changed in response to Spanish influences in myriad ways, but “on their own path and at their own speed, determined by indigenous choices” (p. 232). This wonderfully nuanced book suggests that the same can be said about many other aspects of indigenous life in colonial Mexico.