Yanna Yannakakis
Biographic Data
| ID | 193273 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yanna Yannakakis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yanna |
| FAMILY NAME | Yannakakis |
| SIGNATURE | YANNAKAKIS Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | Emory University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 77 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Interpreting the History of Native Custom in Oaxaca, Mexico
This article addresses the opportunities and challenges for researching the history of Indigenous custom during a period in which constitutional and legal reform have led to the recognition of customary law as an official framework for local governance and the administration of justice in Oaxaca, Mexico. The article begins by situating Oaxaca's laws within the context of broader neoliberal reforms in Latin America characterized by the promulgatio…
Taking the Courts to the Fields: Law, Violence, and Agrarian Custom in Colonial Oaxaca, Mexico
This article, part of the forum “The Everyday Materials of Colonial Legal Spaces,” analyzes how Spanish law intersected with longue-durée Indigenous histories to pattern performative judicial violence in disputes over boundary lands separating Indigenous communities. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when population growth and expansion and commercialization of the livestock industry put pressure on Indigenous lands, Native jud…
Justice on the Mountain: Travel, Security, and Native Authority in Colonial Oaxaca, Mexico
Objective/Context: This article analyzes how long-distance travel and struggles over highway security shaped the relationship between Native communities and Spanish civil and ecclesiastical authorities in Oaxaca’s Villa Alta district during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Methodology: I engage in a close reading of criminal cases of murder and theft on a treacherous stretch of the Camino Real to show how Native people took on signi…
A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond
Recent global legal histories argue that jurisdictional competition between authorities, often at the edges of territories, ordered empires and nations. But we still need more concrete, grounded understandings of how local actors understood and produced jurisdiction, and we need clearer methodologies for recovering those understandings from archives that privilege imperial, often European concepts of law, authority, and territory. A single case f…
Miriam Melton-Villanueva. The Aztecs at Independence: Nahua Culture Makers in Central Mexico, 1799–1832
Scholars continue to uncover Mesoamerican indigenous-language wills as they move beyond national and provincial capitals to rural communities where local residents maintain municipal and parochial archives. In The Aztecs at Independence: Nahua Culture Makers in Central Mexico, 1799–1832, Miriam Melton-Villanueva demonstrates that the colonial tradition of native-language testament production persisted through the first decades of the nineteenth c…
Between the "Old Law" And the New: Christian Translation, Indian Jurisdiction, and Criminal Justice in Colonial Oaxaca
In midcolonial Villa Alta, Oaxaca, New Spain, indigenous political conflict intersected with the extirpation of idolatry to shape an arena of native social life and colonial legal culture about which we know little: Indian jurisdiction over crime. Through analysis of bilingual missionary texts and a unique corpus of Zapotec-language criminal records, this article highlights the role of indigenous judges as translators and innovators of legal proc…
Beyond Jurisdictions: Native Agency in the Making of Colonial Legal Cultures. A Review Essay
Colonial law as an arena for cultural contestation and hegemonic process has displaced an older view of law as a tool of imperial domination. Rich studies based on archival work in local judicial and notarial archives in Africa and the Americas, complemented by a wide range of sources from colonial and metropolitan archives, emphasize the role of indigenous peoples in shaping legal institutions, practices, bodies of law, and ideas about justice. …
Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes
Making Law Intelligible: Networks of Translation in Mid-Colonial Oaxaca
Sins and Crimes: Zapotec-Spanish translation in Catholic evangelization and colonial law in Oaxaca, New Spain
Indigenous People and Legal Culture in Spanish America
This article reviews recent literature on indigenous people and the legal systems in colonial Mexico and the Andes, with special emphasis on legal engagement as a form of politics and the making of legal culture. Through mastery of alphabetic writing systems, literacy, and Spanish language, native peoples used colonial courts as an arena in which to resolve conflict within and among Indian municipalities, and with Spanish officials, both civil an…
Mesoamerican Memory: Enduring Systems of Remembrance
Two generations of ethnohistorical scholarship have successfully challenged the notion that the Spanish conquest was a cultural cataclysm for Mesoamerica’s indigenous peoples. The proof is in the provincial, municipal, and village archives of Mexico as well as repositories in Europe and North America, which contain a treasure trove of colonial-era codices, lienzos, maps, and native-language written records. The question of how native people modif…
Introduction: How Did They Talk to One Another? Language Use and Communication in Multilingual New Spain
This introduction poses the central question of this special issue: how did New Spain's colonial institutions and ethnically diverse colonial subjects use Nahuatl to administer and navigate a multilingual society? In response, I lay out a framework drawn from the articles and my own research that emphasizes the following themes: the importance of place and regional context in studies of language use; cleavages and connections between writing and …
Allies or Servants? The Journey of Indian Conquistadors in the Lienzo of Analco
This article analyzes ambiguities in the roles and identities of the indigenous allies of the Spanish conquerors of Oaxaca's Sierra Norte by putting into dialogue the Lienzo of Analco-an indigenous-produced cartographic narrative of the conquest of the sierra-and archival documentation. The Lienzo of Analco communicates the story of the conquest in an area far removed from pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican power centers from the perspective of lesser or …
Space and Place in the Mexican Landscape: The Evolution of a Colonial City
Book Review| January 01 2011 Space and Place in the Mexican Landscape: The Evolution of a Colonial City By Fernando Núñez, Carlos Arvizu, and Ramón Abonce. Edited by Malcolm Quantrill. (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2007. x + 192 pp., introduction, maps, photographs, illustrations, bibliography, index. $40.00 cloth.) Yanna Yannakakis Yanna Yannakakis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2011) 5…
The Search for the Codex Cardona: On the Trail of a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Treasure
Book Review| April 01 2011 The Search for the Codex Cardona: On the Trail of a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Treasure The Search for the Codex Cardona: On the Trail of a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Treasure. By Bauer, Arnold J.. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. xi +208 pp., 8 color illustrations, bibliography, index. $21.95 paper, $74.95 cloth.) Yanna Yannakakis Yanna Yannakakis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnoh…
Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America
Book Review| July 01 2010 Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America Edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O'Hara. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. xiv + 303 pp., foreword, introduction, bibliography, index. $23.95 paper, $84.95 cloth.) Yanna Yannakakis Yanna Yannakakis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2010) 57 (3): 510–511. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-2010-029 Views Ic…
Witnesses, Spatial Practices, And a Land Dispute in Colonial Oaxaca
At approximatety eight o'clock in the morning on the 22nd of June, 1719, Don Gaspar Agüero de los Reyes y San Pelayo, the alcalde mayor (Spanish magistrate) of the district of Villa Alta, Oaxaca, prepared to depart on horseback from the town square of the Zapotec pueblo of San Juan Juquila toward four disputed parcels of land. Standing with him in the square were the cabildo officers of San Juan Juquila and San Juan Tanetze, who had been engaged …
The Art of Being In-between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca
The Renaissance of Oaxaca City's Historical Archives
This research note is meant to serve as a working tool for scholars interested in pursuing archival investigations in Oaxaca City. Over the last fifteen years, the city has experienced a cultural renaissance characterized by renovation of its colonial architectural treasures and the establishment of institutions dedicated to the arts. This cultural renewal has provided the context for an equally impressive reinvigoration of the city's archives, t…
Indigenous People and Legal Culture in Spanish America
This article reviews recent literature on indigenous people and the legal systems in colonial Mexico and the Andes, with special emphasis on legal engagement as a form of politics and the making of legal culture. Through mastery of alphabetic writing systems, literacy, and Spanish language, native peoples used colonial courts as an arena in which to resolve conflict within and among Indian municipalities, and with Spanish officials, both civil an…
Witnesses, Spatial Practices, And a Land Dispute in Colonial Oaxaca
At approximatety eight o'clock in the morning on the 22nd of June, 1719, Don Gaspar Agüero de los Reyes y San Pelayo, the alcalde mayor (Spanish magistrate) of the district of Villa Alta, Oaxaca, prepared to depart on horseback from the town square of the Zapotec pueblo of San Juan Juquila toward four disputed parcels of land. Standing with him in the square were the cabildo officers of San Juan Juquila and San Juan Tanetze, who had been engaged …
Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes
Between the "Old Law" And the New: Christian Translation, Indian Jurisdiction, and Criminal Justice in Colonial Oaxaca
In midcolonial Villa Alta, Oaxaca, New Spain, indigenous political conflict intersected with the extirpation of idolatry to shape an arena of native social life and colonial legal culture about which we know little: Indian jurisdiction over crime. Through analysis of bilingual missionary texts and a unique corpus of Zapotec-language criminal records, this article highlights the role of indigenous judges as translators and innovators of legal proc…
Mesoamerican Memory: Enduring Systems of Remembrance
Two generations of ethnohistorical scholarship have successfully challenged the notion that the Spanish conquest was a cultural cataclysm for Mesoamerica’s indigenous peoples. The proof is in the provincial, municipal, and village archives of Mexico as well as repositories in Europe and North America, which contain a treasure trove of colonial-era codices, lienzos, maps, and native-language written records. The question of how native people modif…
Beyond Jurisdictions: Native Agency in the Making of Colonial Legal Cultures. A Review Essay
Colonial law as an arena for cultural contestation and hegemonic process has displaced an older view of law as a tool of imperial domination. Rich studies based on archival work in local judicial and notarial archives in Africa and the Americas, complemented by a wide range of sources from colonial and metropolitan archives, emphasize the role of indigenous peoples in shaping legal institutions, practices, bodies of law, and ideas about justice. …
The Art of Being In-between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca
Allies or Servants? The Journey of Indian Conquistadors in the Lienzo of Analco
This article analyzes ambiguities in the roles and identities of the indigenous allies of the Spanish conquerors of Oaxaca's Sierra Norte by putting into dialogue the Lienzo of Analco-an indigenous-produced cartographic narrative of the conquest of the sierra-and archival documentation. The Lienzo of Analco communicates the story of the conquest in an area far removed from pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican power centers from the perspective of lesser or …
Introduction: How Did They Talk to One Another? Language Use and Communication in Multilingual New Spain
This introduction poses the central question of this special issue: how did New Spain's colonial institutions and ethnically diverse colonial subjects use Nahuatl to administer and navigate a multilingual society? In response, I lay out a framework drawn from the articles and my own research that emphasizes the following themes: the importance of place and regional context in studies of language use; cleavages and connections between writing and …
Interpreting the History of Native Custom in Oaxaca, Mexico
This article addresses the opportunities and challenges for researching the history of Indigenous custom during a period in which constitutional and legal reform have led to the recognition of customary law as an official framework for local governance and the administration of justice in Oaxaca, Mexico. The article begins by situating Oaxaca's laws within the context of broader neoliberal reforms in Latin America characterized by the promulgatio…
Taking the Courts to the Fields: Law, Violence, and Agrarian Custom in Colonial Oaxaca, Mexico
This article, part of the forum “The Everyday Materials of Colonial Legal Spaces,” analyzes how Spanish law intersected with longue-durée Indigenous histories to pattern performative judicial violence in disputes over boundary lands separating Indigenous communities. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when population growth and expansion and commercialization of the livestock industry put pressure on Indigenous lands, Native jud…
Justice on the Mountain: Travel, Security, and Native Authority in Colonial Oaxaca, Mexico
Objective/Context: This article analyzes how long-distance travel and struggles over highway security shaped the relationship between Native communities and Spanish civil and ecclesiastical authorities in Oaxaca’s Villa Alta district during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Methodology: I engage in a close reading of criminal cases of murder and theft on a treacherous stretch of the Camino Real to show how Native people took on signi…
The Renaissance of Oaxaca City's Historical Archives
This research note is meant to serve as a working tool for scholars interested in pursuing archival investigations in Oaxaca City. Over the last fifteen years, the city has experienced a cultural renaissance characterized by renovation of its colonial architectural treasures and the establishment of institutions dedicated to the arts. This cultural renewal has provided the context for an equally impressive reinvigoration of the city's archives, t…
Witnesses, Spatial Practices, And a Land Dispute in Colonial Oaxaca
At approximatety eight o'clock in the morning on the 22nd of June, 1719, Don Gaspar Agüero de los Reyes y San Pelayo, the alcalde mayor (Spanish magistrate) of the district of Villa Alta, Oaxaca, prepared to depart on horseback from the town square of the Zapotec pueblo of San Juan Juquila toward four disputed parcels of land. Standing with him in the square were the cabildo officers of San Juan Juquila and San Juan Tanetze, who had been engaged …
The Art of Being In-between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca
Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America
Book Review| July 01 2010 Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America Edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O'Hara. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. xiv + 303 pp., foreword, introduction, bibliography, index. $23.95 paper, $84.95 cloth.) Yanna Yannakakis Yanna Yannakakis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2010) 57 (3): 510–511. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-2010-029 Views Ic…
Allies or Servants? The Journey of Indian Conquistadors in the Lienzo of Analco
This article analyzes ambiguities in the roles and identities of the indigenous allies of the Spanish conquerors of Oaxaca's Sierra Norte by putting into dialogue the Lienzo of Analco-an indigenous-produced cartographic narrative of the conquest of the sierra-and archival documentation. The Lienzo of Analco communicates the story of the conquest in an area far removed from pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican power centers from the perspective of lesser or …
Space and Place in the Mexican Landscape: The Evolution of a Colonial City
Book Review| January 01 2011 Space and Place in the Mexican Landscape: The Evolution of a Colonial City By Fernando Núñez, Carlos Arvizu, and Ramón Abonce. Edited by Malcolm Quantrill. (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2007. x + 192 pp., introduction, maps, photographs, illustrations, bibliography, index. $40.00 cloth.) Yanna Yannakakis Yanna Yannakakis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2011) 5…
The Search for the Codex Cardona: On the Trail of a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Treasure
Book Review| April 01 2011 The Search for the Codex Cardona: On the Trail of a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Treasure The Search for the Codex Cardona: On the Trail of a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Treasure. By Bauer, Arnold J.. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. xi +208 pp., 8 color illustrations, bibliography, index. $21.95 paper, $74.95 cloth.) Yanna Yannakakis Yanna Yannakakis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnoh…
Introduction: How Did They Talk to One Another? Language Use and Communication in Multilingual New Spain
This introduction poses the central question of this special issue: how did New Spain's colonial institutions and ethnically diverse colonial subjects use Nahuatl to administer and navigate a multilingual society? In response, I lay out a framework drawn from the articles and my own research that emphasizes the following themes: the importance of place and regional context in studies of language use; cleavages and connections between writing and …
Indigenous People and Legal Culture in Spanish America
This article reviews recent literature on indigenous people and the legal systems in colonial Mexico and the Andes, with special emphasis on legal engagement as a form of politics and the making of legal culture. Through mastery of alphabetic writing systems, literacy, and Spanish language, native peoples used colonial courts as an arena in which to resolve conflict within and among Indian municipalities, and with Spanish officials, both civil an…
Mesoamerican Memory: Enduring Systems of Remembrance
Two generations of ethnohistorical scholarship have successfully challenged the notion that the Spanish conquest was a cultural cataclysm for Mesoamerica’s indigenous peoples. The proof is in the provincial, municipal, and village archives of Mexico as well as repositories in Europe and North America, which contain a treasure trove of colonial-era codices, lienzos, maps, and native-language written records. The question of how native people modif…
Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes
Making Law Intelligible: Networks of Translation in Mid-Colonial Oaxaca
Sins and Crimes: Zapotec-Spanish translation in Catholic evangelization and colonial law in Oaxaca, New Spain
Beyond Jurisdictions: Native Agency in the Making of Colonial Legal Cultures. A Review Essay
Colonial law as an arena for cultural contestation and hegemonic process has displaced an older view of law as a tool of imperial domination. Rich studies based on archival work in local judicial and notarial archives in Africa and the Americas, complemented by a wide range of sources from colonial and metropolitan archives, emphasize the role of indigenous peoples in shaping legal institutions, practices, bodies of law, and ideas about justice. …
Between the "Old Law" And the New: Christian Translation, Indian Jurisdiction, and Criminal Justice in Colonial Oaxaca
In midcolonial Villa Alta, Oaxaca, New Spain, indigenous political conflict intersected with the extirpation of idolatry to shape an arena of native social life and colonial legal culture about which we know little: Indian jurisdiction over crime. Through analysis of bilingual missionary texts and a unique corpus of Zapotec-language criminal records, this article highlights the role of indigenous judges as translators and innovators of legal proc…
Miriam Melton-Villanueva. The Aztecs at Independence: Nahua Culture Makers in Central Mexico, 1799–1832
Scholars continue to uncover Mesoamerican indigenous-language wills as they move beyond national and provincial capitals to rural communities where local residents maintain municipal and parochial archives. In The Aztecs at Independence: Nahua Culture Makers in Central Mexico, 1799–1832, Miriam Melton-Villanueva demonstrates that the colonial tradition of native-language testament production persisted through the first decades of the nineteenth c…
A Court of Sticks and Branches: Indian Jurisdiction in Colonial Mexico and Beyond
Recent global legal histories argue that jurisdictional competition between authorities, often at the edges of territories, ordered empires and nations. But we still need more concrete, grounded understandings of how local actors understood and produced jurisdiction, and we need clearer methodologies for recovering those understandings from archives that privilege imperial, often European concepts of law, authority, and territory. A single case f…
Justice on the Mountain: Travel, Security, and Native Authority in Colonial Oaxaca, Mexico
Objective/Context: This article analyzes how long-distance travel and struggles over highway security shaped the relationship between Native communities and Spanish civil and ecclesiastical authorities in Oaxaca’s Villa Alta district during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Methodology: I engage in a close reading of criminal cases of murder and theft on a treacherous stretch of the Camino Real to show how Native people took on signi…
Taking the Courts to the Fields: Law, Violence, and Agrarian Custom in Colonial Oaxaca, Mexico
This article, part of the forum “The Everyday Materials of Colonial Legal Spaces,” analyzes how Spanish law intersected with longue-durée Indigenous histories to pattern performative judicial violence in disputes over boundary lands separating Indigenous communities. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when population growth and expansion and commercialization of the livestock industry put pressure on Indigenous lands, Native jud…
Interpreting the History of Native Custom in Oaxaca, Mexico
This article addresses the opportunities and challenges for researching the history of Indigenous custom during a period in which constitutional and legal reform have led to the recognition of customary law as an official framework for local governance and the administration of justice in Oaxaca, Mexico. The article begins by situating Oaxaca's laws within the context of broader neoliberal reforms in Latin America characterized by the promulgatio…
Colonialism (16 works) · Latin American history and culture (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · History (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Archaeology (11 works) · Indigenous (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Historical Studies in Latin America (9 works)