Over the last decade, one of the most striking developments in scholarship on colonial Latin America has been the study of what might be called Indigenous legality. Yanna Yannakakis's rigorous, imaginative, and well-written new book testifies to the vibrancy of this trend and shows how much remains to be done.
Yannakakis builds on recent archival work demonstrating the centrality of law, litigation, and legal consciousness to Indigenous people during the centuries of viceregal rule. Blending legislation and legal treatises with documents from the archive in Oaxaca, she argues that “Native custom” structured legal encounters involving Indigenous people and thereby shaped colonial legality. “Usos y costumbres” as a source of law and a basis for legal action has long been recognized. Yannakakis firmly anchors this insight, revealing that Indigenous custom represented a legal invention of Indigenous actors within a Spanish framework. Of course, divine and natural law established limits to the...
