Winner of the 2002 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize, given by the American Society for Ethnohistory; Honorable Mention for the 2002 Bolton-Johnson Prize, given by the Conference on Latin American History; 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 work is largely based on an extraordinary collection of primary sources, translated and analyzed by the author, that were written by Mixtecs in the roman alphabet from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. To complement this native-language corpus, the author has examined preconquest and early colonial pictorial writings, Spanish-language civil and trial records, and Nahuatl (Aztec) texts. "This is a work of very great importance, and its combination of cutting-edge research and readable style will likely make it a classic. Terraciano attempts to do for the Mixtecs what James Lockhart has accomplished for the Nahuas of central Mexico: to provide an 'inside view' of the colonial Indian culture using contemporary documents written by Indians in their own language.
He presents original data and interpretations on a wide range of topics, constituting an exceptional contribution to our understanding of one of Mesoamerica's major ethno-linguistic groups." - John K. Chance, Arizona State University