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A 2006 collection of indigenous-language writings from central Mexico and Guatemala, written during the colonial period.
"Contesting Archives makes vivid and concrete the way historians must proceed when faced with partial or contradictory sources. Historians and anyone interested in how historians work will appreciate the authors' strategies for, and cautions about, unearthing information about women from documents inside and outside the archive." Margaret Strobel, coeditor of Expanding the Borders of Women's History --
A critical rethinking of the way canons are defined, constructed, dismantled, and revised. A century ago, all art was evaluated through the lens of European classicism and its tradition. This volume explores and questions the foundations of the European canon, offers a critical rethinking of ancient and classical art, and interrogates the canons of cultures and regions that have often been left at the margins of art history. It underscores the historical and geographical diversity of canons and the local values underlying them. Twelve international scholars consider how canons are constructed and contested, focusing on the relationship between canonical objects and the value systems that sha...
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 deciphe...
A history of the Mixtec Indians of southern Mexico, this book focuses on several dozen Mixtec communities in the region of Oaxaca during the period from about 1540 to 1750.
"The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but, as Mackenzie Cooley uncovers in this timely book, there is a dark parallel to this fãeted era. Those same men and women who were offering profound advancements in our understanding of the human condition-and laying the foundations of the Scientific Revolution-were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural world. Cooley traces how the Renaissance world, from the Mediterranean to Mexico City to the high mountains of the Andes, was marked by a lingering fascination with breeding. While one strand of the Renaissance celebrated a liberal view of human potential, an...
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...
The Spaniards typically portrayed the conquest and fall of Mexico Tenochtitlan as Armageddon, while native people in colonial Mesoamerica continued to write and paint their histories and lives often without any mention of the foreigners in their midst. This title addresses key aspects of indigenous perspectives of the conquest.
The first major visual and cultural exploration of the legacy of La Malinche, simultaneously reviled as a traitor to her people and hailed as the mother of Mexico An enslaved Indigenous girl who became Hernán Cortés's interpreter and cultural translator, Malinche stood at center stage in one of the most significant events of modern history. Linguistically gifted, she played a key role in the transactions, negotiations, and conflicts between the Spanish and the Indigenous populations of Mexico that shaped the course of global politics for centuries to come. As mother to Cortés's firstborn son, she became the symbolic progenitor of a modern Mexican nation and a heroine to Chicana and Mexica...
The term cacica was a Spanish linguistic invention, the female counterpart to caciques, the Arawak word for male indigenous leaders in Spanish America. But the term’s meaning was adapted and manipulated by natives, creating a new social stratum where it previously may not have existed. This book explores that transformation, a conscious construction and reshaping of identity from within. Cacicas feature far and wide in the history of Spanish America, as female governors and tribute collectors and as relatives of ruling caciques—or their destitute widows. They played a crucial role in the establishment and success of Spanish rule, but were also instrumental in colonial natives’ resistan...