To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America

by Mónica Díaz (Editor)

Overview

The conquest and colonization of the Americas imposed new social, legal, and cultural categories upon vast and varied populations of indigenous people. The colonizers' intent was to homogenize these cultures and make all of them "Indian." The creation of those new identities is the subject of the essays collected in Díaz's To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America. Focusing on central Mexico and the Andes (colonial New Spain and Peru), the contributors deepen scholarly knowledge of colonial history and literature, emphasizing the different ways people became and lived their lives as "indios." While the construction of indigenous identities has been a theme of considerable interest among Latin Americanists since the early 1990s, this book presents new archival research and interpretive thinking, offering new material and a new approach to the subject to both scholars of colonial Peru and central Mexico.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826357731
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	06/15/2017
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Mónica Díaz is an associate professor of history and Hispanic studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: India Identities in Colonial Spanish America Mónica Díaz 1

Part 1 Discerning Indigenous Voices: Frameworks and Methods

Chapter 1 Artifact, Artifice, and Identity: Nativist Writing and Scholarship on Colonial Latin America and Their Legacies Rolena Adorno 31

Chapter 2 Holograms of the Voiceless: Indian Slavery and Servitude in Early Colonial Lima, Peru Nancy E. van Deusen 55

Part 2 Community and the Articulation of Identities

Chapter 3 Mobilizing Muleteer Indigeneity in the Markets of Colonial Peru Rachel Sarah O'Toole 95

Chapter 4 Indios Chinos in Eighteenth-Century Mexico Tatiana Seijas 123

Chapter 5 Shifting Identities: Mestizo Historiography and the Representation of Chichimecs Amber Brian 143

Part 3 Translation and Alterity in Colonial Texts

Chapter 6 Voicing Mesoamerican Identities on the Roads of the Empire: Alarcón and the Nahualtocaitl in Seventeenth-Century Mexico Viviana Díaz Balsera 169

Chapter 7 The Indigenous Sacred as Evil Otherness in Early Colonial Andes Rocío Quispe-Agnoli 191

Part 4 Indigenous Intellectuals

Chapter 8 Writing the Nahuatl Canon: Ethnicity, Identity, and Posterity According to Chimalpahin Susan Schroeder 219

Chapter 9 Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl: A New Native Identity Pablo García Loaeza 243

Afterword Yanna Yannakakis 267

Index 271

Editorial Reviews

"The authors in this collection—through creative methodologies—offer excellent pathways for future scholars to illuminate diverse perspectives on Native identities in colonial Latin America. . . . This rich volume demonstrates the many ways that Native peoples could adapt, reimagine, and redefine Indigenous citizenship during the colonial period in Spanish America."

—Tribal College Journal

From the Publisher