Kevin Terraciano - Böcker

Mesoamerican Voices, first published in 2006, presents a collection of indigenous-language writings from the colonial period, translated into English. The texts were written from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries by Nahuas from central Mexico, Mixtecs from Oaxaca, Maya from Yucatan, and other groups from Mexico and Guatemala. The volume gives college teachers and students access to important new sources for the history of Latin America and Native Americans. It is the first collection to present the translated writings of so many native groups and to address such a variety of topics, including conquest, government, land, household, society, gender, religion, writing, law, crime, and morality.

Mesoamerican Voices, first published in 2006, presents a collection of indigenous-language writings from the colonial period, translated into English. The texts were written from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries by Nahuas from central Mexico, Mixtecs from Oaxaca, Maya from Yucatan, and other groups from Mexico and Guatemala. The volume gives college teachers and students access to important new sources for the history of Latin America and Native Americans. It is the first collection to present the translated writings of so many native groups and to address such a variety of topics, including conquest, government, land, household, society, gender, religion, writing, law, crime, and morality.

This book is a history of the Mixtec Indians of southern Mexico, who in their own language call themselves Tay Ñudzahui, "people of the rain place." These people were among the most populous cultural and language groups of Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest. This study focuses on several dozen Mixtec communities in the region of Oaxaca during the period from about 1540 to 1750.The work is largely based on an extraordinary collection of primary sources, translated and analyzed by the author, that were written by Mixtecs in the roman alphabet from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. To complement this native-language corpus, the author has examined preconquest and early colonial pictorial writings, Spanish-language civil and trial records, and Nahuatl (Aztec) texts.The book addresses many interrelated topics, including writing, language, sociopolitical organization, local government, social and gender relations, land tenure, trade, rebellion, religion, ethnicity, and historical memory. Throughout, the author emphasizes the internal, indigenous perspective instead of relying on Spanish sources and points of view. In its focus on indigenous concepts, the book introduces a new terminology and new categories of analysis in colonial Mexican history. The conclusion makes detailed comparisons with recent findings on the Nahuas of central Mexico and the Maya of Yucatán, and revisits the question of cultural change among indigenous peoples under colonial rule.

This book is a history of the Mixtec Indians of southern Mexico, who in their own language call themselves Tay Ñudzahui, "people of the rain place." These people were among the most populous cultural and language groups of Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest. This study focuses on several dozen Mixtec communities in the region of Oaxaca during the period from about 1540 to 1750.The work is largely based on an extraordinary collection of primary sources, translated and analyzed by the author, that were written by Mixtecs in the roman alphabet from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. To complement this native-language corpus, the author has examined preconquest and early colonial pictorial writings, Spanish-language civil and trial records, and Nahuatl (Aztec) texts.The book addresses many interrelated topics, including writing, language, sociopolitical organization, local government, social and gender relations, land tenure, trade, rebellion, religion, ethnicity, and historical memory. Throughout, the author emphasizes the internal, indigenous perspective instead of relying on Spanish sources and points of view. In its focus on indigenous concepts, the book introduces a new terminology and new categories of analysis in colonial Mexican history. The conclusion makes detailed comparisons with recent findings on the Nahuas of central Mexico and the Maya of Yucatán, and revisits the question of cultural change among indigenous peoples under colonial rule.

One of the earliest texts written in a Native American language, the Codex Sierra is a sixteenth-century book of accounts from Santa Catalina Texupan, a community in the Mixteca region of the modern state of Oaxaca. Kevin Terraciano's transcription and translation, the first in more than a half century, combine with his deeply informed analysis to make this the most accurate, complete, and comprehensive English-language edition of this rare manuscript.The sixty-two-page manuscript, organized in parallel columns of Nahuatl alphabetic writing and hand-painted images, documents the expenditures and income of Texupan from 1550 to 1564. With the alphabetic column as a Rosetta stone for deciphering the phonetic glyphs, a picture emerges of indigenous pueblos taking part in the burgeoning Mexican silk industry - only to be buffeted by the opening of trade with China and the devastations of the great epidemics of the late 1500s. Terraciano uses a wide range of archival sources from the period to demonstrate how the community innovated and adapted to the challenges of the time, and how they were ultimately undermined by the actions and policies of colonial officials.The first known record of an indigenous population's integration into the transatlantic economy, and of the impact of the transpacific trade on a lucrative industry in the region, the Codex Sierra provides a unique window on the world of the Mixteca less than a generation after the conquest - a view rendered all the more precise, clear, and coherent by this new translation and commentary.

Honorable Mention, 2021 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association, Mexico SectionIn the sixteenth century, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de SahagÚn and a team of indigenous grammarians, scribes, and painters completed decades of work on an extraordinary encyclopedic project titled General History of the Things of New Spain, known as the Florentine Codex (1575–1577). Now housed in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence and bound in three lavishly illustrated volumes, the codex is a remarkable product of cultural exchange in the early Americas.In this edited volume, experts from multiple disciplines analyze the manuscript’s bilingual texts and more than 2,000 painted images and offer fascinating, new insights on its twelve books. The contributors examine the “three texts” of the codex-the original Nahuatl, its translation into Spanish, and its painted images. Together, these constitute complementary, as well as conflicting, voices of an extended dialogue that occurred in and around Mexico City. The volume chapters address a range of subjects, from Nahua sacred beliefs, moral discourse, and natural history to the Florentine artists’ models and the manuscript’s reception in Europe. The Florentine Codex ultimately yields new perspectives on the Nahua world several decades after the fall of the Aztec empire.