1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910723700503321

Autore

Yannakakis Yanna

Titolo

Since Time Immemorial : Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico / / Yanna Yannakakis

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Durham : , : Duke University Press, , [2023]

2023

ISBN

1-4780-9357-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (353 p.)

Disciplina

347.72/0108997

Soggetti

Customary law courts - Mexico - History

Indians of Mexico - Legal status, laws, etc - History

Indians of Mexico - Politics and government

Justice, Administration of - Mexico - History

HISTORY / Latin America / Mexico

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Orthography -- Maps -- Introduction -- Part I. Legal and Intellectual Foundations Twelfth through Seventeenth Centuries -- 1 Custom, Law, and Empire in the Mediterranean-Atlantic World -- 2 Translating Custom in Castile, Central Mexico, and Oaxaca -- Part II. Good and Bad Customs in the Native Past and Present Sixteenth through Seventeenth Centuries -- 3 Framing Pre-Hispanic Law and Custom -- 4 The Old Law, Polygyny, and the Customs of the Ancestors -- Part III. Custom in Oaxaca's Courts of First Instance Seventeenth through Eighteenth Centuries -- 5 Custom, Possession, and Jurisdiction in the Boundary Lands -- 6 Custom as Social Contract: Native Self-Governance and Labor -- 7 Prescriptive Custom: Written Labor Agreements in Native and Spanish Jurisdictions -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In Since Time Immemorial Yanna Yannakakis traces the invention of Native custom, a legal category that Indigenous litigants used in disputes over marriage, self-governance, land, and labor in colonial Mexico. She outlines how, in the hands of Native litigants, the European



category of custom-social practice that through time takes on the normative power of law-acquired local meaning and changed over time. Yannakakis analyzes sources ranging from missionary and Inquisition records to Native pictorial histories, royal surveys, and Spanish and Native-language court and notarial documents. By encompassing historical actors who have been traditionally marginalized from legal histories and highlighting spaces outside the courts like Native communities, parishes, and missionary schools, she shows how imperial legal orders were not just imposed from above but also built on the ground through translation and implementation of legal concepts and procedures. Yannakakis argues that, ultimately, Indigenous claims to custom, which on the surface aimed to conserve the past, provided a means to contend with historical change and produce new rights for the future.