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A warm, witty, passionate cry for living, vital, indigenous languages and the people who speak them. Despite the more than 200 Indigenous languages spoken in Mexico, including 63 that are officially recognized and celebrated by the Mexican government, linguistic diversity is and has been under attack in a larger culture that says bilingual is good when it means Spanish and English, but bad when it means Nahuatl and Spanish. Yásnaya Aguilar, a linguist and native Mixe speaker, asks what is lost, for everyone, when the contradictions inherent in Mexico’s relationship with its many Indigenous languages mean official protection and actual contempt at worst, and ignorance at best. What does it...
A dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world. When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In The Tame and the Wild, Marcy Norton tells a new history of the colonization of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the center of the story. She reveals that the encounters between Europ...
Fifth Sun offers a comprehensive history of the Aztecs, spanning the period before conquest to a century after the conquest, based on rarely-used Nahuatl-language sources written by the indigenous people.
Racism has historically been a taboo topic in Mexico. This is largely due to the nationalist project of mestizaje which contends that because all Mexicans are racially mixed, race is not a salient political issue. In recent years, however, race and racism have become important topics of debate in the country’s public sphere and academia. This book introduces readers to a sample of these diverse and sometimes conflicting views that also intersect with discussions of class. The activists and scholars included in the volume come from fields such as anthropology, linguistics, history, sociology, and political science. Through these diverse epistemological frameworks, the authors show how people in contemporary Mexico interpret the world in racial terms and denounce racism.
A highly readable narrative of the causes, course, and consequences of the Spanish Conquest, incorporating the perspectives of many Native groups, Black slaves, and the conquistadors, timed with the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.Five hundred years ago, a flotilla landed on the coast of Yucatan under the command of the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes. While the official goal of the expedition was to explore and to expand the Christian faith, everyone involved knew that it was primarily about gold and the hunt for slaves.That a few hundred Spaniards destroyed the Aztec empire - a highly developed culture - is an old chestnut, because the conquistadors, w...
In popular imagination, saints exhibit the best characteristics of humanity, universally recognizable but condensed and embodied in an individual. Recent scholarship has asked an array of questions concerning the historical and social contexts of sainthood, and opened new approaches to its study. What happens when the category of sainthood is interrogated and inflected by the problematic category of race? Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh explores this complicated relationship by examining two distinct characteristics of the saint’s body: the historicized, marked flesh and the universal, holy flesh. The essays in this volume comment on this tension between particularity and univ...
The culmination of recent restoration and analysis, these richly illustrated essays examine the history and meaning of one of Mesoamerica's surviving documents dating from the 1540s.
Being the Heart of the World offers a timely reflection on the relationship between mobility and identity-making in the Spanish colonial world. It will be of value to historians of colonial Mexico and the Spanish empire.
The book analyzes the phenomenon of how indigenous migrants, who escaped social discrimination and economic exclusion in Mexico, are building a well institutionalized, transnational migrant community in the United States. During this process of self-empowerment, indigenous migrant leaders use transnational networks on different levels to negotiate indigenous membership, identity, and opportunities of political participation. Over the last few decades, they were able to improve living conditions of members in the migrant community as well as indigenous home communities in Mexico. Dissertation. (Series: Studies in Migration and Minorities / Studien zu Migration und Minderheiten, Vol. 32) [Subject: Migrant Studies, Politics, Sociology]
Following their first contact in 1519, accounts of Aztecs identifying Spaniards as gods proliferated. But what exactly did the Aztecs mean by a "god" (teotl), and how could human beings become gods or take on godlike properties? This sophisticated, interdisciplinary study analyzes three concepts that are foundational to Aztec religion—teotl (god), teixiptla (localized embodiment of a god), and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles containing precious objects)—to shed new light on the Aztec understanding of how spiritual beings take on form and agency in the material world. In The Fate of Earthly Things, Molly Bassett draws on ethnographic fieldwork, linguistic analyses, visual culture, and ritua...