Kevin Terraciano The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca sku-39966486

Kevin Terraciano's The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca is a hardcover Native American History Books title (sku-39966486). It studies Mixtec communities in Oaxaca from about 1540 to 1750. The Mixtecs, among Mesoamerica's most populous cultural and language groups at the Spanish conquest, call themselves Tay Ñudzahui, or "people of the rain place."

Terraciano translates and analyzes Mixtec texts written in the roman alphabet from the mid-sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, alongside pictorial writings, Spanish civil and trial records, and Nahuatl texts. The book examines writing, language, government, social and gender relations, land, trade, rebellion, religion, ethnicity and historical memory from an indigenous perspective.

It introduces terminology and categories for analyzing colonial Mexican history, then compares its findings with research on the Nahuas of central Mexico and the Maya of Yucatán to consider cultural change under colonial rule.