This volume offers a historiographical survey and a specific contribution to an ambitious inquiry: how were the variegated notions of rightful property, family, and the social order in Central Mesoamerica shoehorned into operational categories for a bureaucratized colonial empire? There is a long-standing precedent of historiographical skepticism regarding documents wielded by Indigenous claimants as accurate representations of pre-Columbian “laws,” whether origin narratives masquerading as testaments, or self-serving defenses of privilege; however, as the author observes (179), “since time immemorial” was a feint used in the absence of documentary proof. This work widens an analytical lens (11) to track potential Indigenous sources for colonial law, yielding three vistas. Part I (chapters 1–2) addresses a transatlantic historiography of custom, and Part III (chapters 5–7) presents innovative data on how colonial Indigenous authorities shored up claims based on customary rights. Together, they read as a stand-alone monograph.
Part II (chapters 3–4) attempts an interpretation of Zapotec and Nahuatl concepts across custom’s broad arch, but the lens clouds up here. Should we expect to find pre-Columbian paragons to Spain’s Siete Partidas—codified legal bodies with relative independence from the sociopolitical cultures of pre-Columbian polities? As for Nahua tlamanitiliztli (custom), chapter 2 argues it was both a “body of pre-Hispanic law recorded in pictographic text” that, in an unfortunate depletion of evidence, was “likely destroyed” after conquest and also a reflection of the “normative order” (52). Existing evidence favors the latter, embodied in “moral” rhetoric, which this work locates in the early colonial Codex Mendoza, and in perhaps the most discussed Mexican inquisitorial case, which ensnared the polygynous don Carlos of Tetzcoco. However, whether one can neatly separate don Carlos’s dynastic self-regard from Nahua traditional custom and whether the Mendoza’s representation of pre-Columbian customs palatable to Spanish observers might be regarded as an impartial legalistic compendium both remain open questions.
Some of this work’s conceptual gambits stand on precarious ground. On the basis of an apparent misreading of Juan de Córdova’s grammar, chapter 2 argues (61) that “the term quela… has a wide range of meanings,” including “corn stalk,” “essence,” and a “grammatical function” (as nominalizer). This is inaccurate, as colonial Zapotec variants had unrelated terms that differed only slightly in pronunciation due to tone or stress (as known from contemporary languages), but appeared with similar spellings. Thus, the grapheme quela referred to near homophones that were different words, just as “a record” and “to record” are distinct in English. Moreover, evidence for a putatively crucial Zapotec notion rests on the mistranslation of a phrase occurring in a single 1661 case: leo golaza, as “old law.” The phrase is a version of the Valley Zapotec term (xi)layòo co-làça (“the ancient land/earth”), which Córdova’s 1578 dictionary glossed as “in another, ancient time” (170r) without referring to “law.” In addition to usage in other texts, this case’s very claimant demonstrated that the Spanish term ley (law) was borrowed not as leo, but as ley, for she fluidly used the term rey (“king”; 254, n.87–88), showing that her Zapotec variant borrowed terms ending in /ej/ without sound changes. More importantly, “ancient times” is remarkably different from “old law.” Chapter 4 aptly notes how Zapotec actors strategically derided china golaza (ancient labor) as obligations related to idolatry, but omits a most spectacular use of quela (custom): as the designation for traditional ritual protocols that were not yet “ancient,” for they continued, despite Christian sanctions, into the early eighteenth century.
In contrast, Part III presents an admirable analysis of how Indigenous notions of land ownership and labor evolved in late colonial Oaxaca. Chapter 5 elucidates a transition to partnership contracts for Native polities such as Tlaxiaco, which introduced novel notions of liability. Chapter 6 is an enthralling exploration of communal reciprocity, and chapter 7 ably mines 83 references to costumbre (custom) in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century documentation, in which custom was redefined to support an egalitarian ethos for communal labor. In the end, this sprawling work will invite useful debates, and further inform inquiries plumbed by earlier comparative studies by Allan Greer, Brian Owensby, and others about resilient Indigenous legal cultures and troubling colonial (dis)possessions in the Americas.
