Anyone who has seen the Codex Florentino’s picture of Doña Marina interpreting between Moctezuma and Cortés knows that the image and idea of an interpreter standing in the space between two other people is a visual and cultural cue crucial to making sense of Latin America’s historical experience. The mere fact of adding a third term to easily paired notions of conqueror-conquered or Spaniard-Indian challenges the methodological individualism underlying so much historical writing. Broadly speaking, this is the premise of Yanna Yannakakis’s interesting book, The Art of Being In-Between.
According to Yannakakis, local native leaders in Oaxaca from 1660 to 1810 served as cultural intermediaries and political brokers between colonial rulers and ruled. In performing their mediation they “held the colonial order in balance” by defusing tensions but also, ironically, by abandoning the middle space and rebelling on occasion, as she argues they did during the Cajonos Rebellion...
