Kevin Terraciano

Kevin Terraciano (professor of history and director of the Latin American Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles) introduces, transcribes, translates, and elucidates a rare, extant, multilingual libro de cuentas (“book of accounts”) covering the years 1550 to 1564 from Santa Catalina Texupan in Oaxaca (Ñundaa in Mixtec; present-day Tejupan). The account book for the settlement’s caxaco comunidado (caja, or “community chest”), the Codex Sierra contains columns of pictorial illustrations (in pre-conquest Mesoamerican style), Nahuatl commentary (with Mixtec and Spanish loanwords), numerical accounting (in Mesoamerican, Arabic, and Roman numerals), and dates (in both Mesoamerican and Christian calendars). Written in the first decades after the Spanish conquistadors established the colony of New Spain, the Codex Sierra “illustrates indigenous agency and resilience during a period of unprecedented change” (3)

Ably and interestingly introduced, beautifully reproduced, and meticulously transcribed and translated, Codex Sierra: A Nahuatl-Mixtec Book of Accounts from Colonial Mexico is a fine example of how interesting primary source documents, especially illustrated ones, can be exhibited and explicated for the benefit of academic readers. Scholars of language, colonialism, and Latin America of every bent (economic, social, cultural, etc.) can find something useful in Terraciano’s presentation of the Codex Sierra. Historians of discovery and exploration will not find any explorers here, but some references to indigenous mapping and land practices, which are useful to recall. Terraciano’s main point, that the colonial encounter between “conquerors” and the “conquered” was always a complicated dance of hybridization and accommodation, is always rewarding to remember and exhibited well here.… (more)