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Leslie Offutt, Kevin Terraciano. Codex Sierra: A Nahuatl-Mixtec Book of Accounts from Colonial Mexico., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1298–1299, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae288
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Kevin Terraciano’s Codex Sierra: A Nahuatl-Mixtec Book of Accounts from Colonial Mexico adds much to our understanding of Indigenous agency and resilience in the early decades after the Spanish entrance into New Spain. Terraciano’s study offers both a broad overview of the history of the Mixteca Alta in a period of unprecedented change and a fine-grained analysis of the Codex Sierra itself, a Nahuatl text authored most likely by Indigenous writers for whom Nahuatl was a second language. As both a history and a linguistic analysis, Terraciano’s work succeeds remarkably well.
The Codex Sierra, a libro de cuenta (book of accounts) spanning the years 1550–64, emerged from the pueblo of Santa Catalina Texupan, in the northwestern portion of present-day Oaxaca state. It captured the midcentury dislocation and transformation in the aftermath of the devastating 1545 cocoliztli (hemorrhagic fever) epidemic, when native communities experienced severe population loss and forced congregación (the relocation and nucleation) of dispersed and underpopulated communities, a process that challenged traditional power and economic relations within and among communities. In those critical years, new modes of production (in Texupan’s case, silk production) were introduced, opening Texupan to a market economy; this same period saw a shift from secular to Dominican control of the evangelization project and the increasing destabilization of the traditional native nobility. There is much in Texupan’s experience that mirrors the well-documented experiences of the Nahuas of central Mexico; what sets Terraciano’s account apart is his narrower focus on a more peripheral region, with different ethnic and linguistic groups than the native Nahuatl speakers of central Mexico (even as the text of the Codex is written in Nahuatl). In Terraciano’s treatment, the world of the Mixteca Alta comes much more clearly into focus.
