and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca, and coeditor of Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico, and reported the following:
Page 99 falls toward the end of Chapter 3 “Framing Pre-Hispanic Law and Custom,” a little over a third of the way through the book. In the chapter, I compare two iconic sixteenth-century accounts of Mesoamerican Indigenous custom: the Codex Mendoza, a pictographic text produced by Native painter-scribes for a Spanish audience sometime in the 1540’s, and a royal survey known as the Relaciones Geográficas, conducted by Spanish King Phillip II from 1579-85. On page 99 I analyze several responses to the Relaciones Geográficas by Indigenous communities from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca that focus on Native laws and customs prior to the Spanish conquest. The first concerns a pictorial map produced by a Native mapmaker from the Ñudzahui (Mixtec) community of Teozacoalco. The map evinces an Indigenous perspective of space and uses Native iconography to delineate the territory, landscape, and ruling genealogy of the town. At the same time that it draws from Indigenous pictorial conventions, the map also conforms to Spanish norms of dynastic inheritance: straight-line succession, preferably to a direct male descendant. This Spanish norm clashed with pre-Hispanic Indigenous laws in which lateral kin – brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces – were eligible for rulership. Gradual accommodation to Spanish expectations of dynastic rulership appeared across Ñudzahui pictorial texts over the sixteenth century as complex, lateral webs of Native royal succession gave way to vertical king lists that expressed straight-line succession. The pictorial texts had the paradoxical effect of convincing Spanish officials that straight-line succession was in fact Indigenous custom. This became clear in 1614 when Spanish King Phillip III issued legislation requiring viceroys, judges, and Spanish governors to maintain the “ancient law and custom” of succession by linear descent in the entailed estates of Native nobles (cacicazgos). After discussing the Teozacoalco map, I move on to analyze Indigenous customs of noble funereal pageantry, testation, and sartorial styles. In survey responses about these aspects of Native custom, analogies were often drawn between Indigenous practices and Spanish ones. The editorial flourishes – perhaps inserted by the interpreter, notary, or the respondents themselves – served to reconfigure Native customs through a mirroring process in which survey participants recognized elements of Spanish practice in Native guise, thereby aligning Native and Spanish norms.Learn more about Since Time Immemorial at the Duke University Press website.
Page 99 captures a central point of my book: rather than being ancient and autochthonous as often assumed, Indigenous custom in colonial Mexico was the product of intense interaction between Native and Spanish norms over time and in a variety of contexts, including remote provincial capitals, Native communities, Christian missions, and Spanish courts. Custom was a European juridical category that originated in medieval Roman law. Broadly construed, it referred to social practice that over time took on the normative power of law within a territorially based community. Spanish conquerors and administrators established a multi-jurisdictional legal-administrative framework through which to govern the territories they claimed in the Americas. Custom figured centrally in this system since Spanish legislation recognized the semi-autonomous jurisdiction of Native rulers and allowed them to govern their communities according to their “old laws and customs” provided that they did not contravene Christianity and Spanish law. With this in mind, Native people brought claims to Spanish courts that they legitimized through recourse to custom. They tailored their versions of custom to the circumstances of the claim or dispute and modified them to align with Spanish norms and expectations. When Spanish judges ruled in favor of those claims, they became the local norm, and sometimes made their way into Spanish legislation. In this way, Native custom shaped Spanish law, and Native people wove colonial norms into the fabric of everyday life, including practices of self-governance, marriage, inheritance, labor, and land tenure. Over the long term, imperial recognition of Native custom provided Native people with a constrained space within which to fashion and refashion their communities and adapt to colonialism.
Page 99 also reveals the centrality of translation to the making of Native custom in colonial Mexico. Missionary friars produced bilingual dictionaries, grammars, catechisms, and confessional manuals that translated Christian concepts and legal terminology from Spanish into Native languages, thereby creating new meanings that drew from Native and Spanish epistemologies. The translation of ideas recorded in Indigenous pictorial writing and mapmaking and the modification of Native forms of expression by European ones represented another facet of colonial translation and meaning making. The map of Teozacoalco provides a clear example.
So yes, the Page 99 Test works for my book – at least partially. It does not encapsulate the whole book in a single page; rather, it points to key themes and approaches that undergird my argument and method.
--Marshal Zeringue
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