Drawing upon a body of 220 Nahuatl-language testaments, Caterina Pizzigoni takes the reader into the indigenous world of late colonial Mexico. The study fits squarely into the language-driven ethnohistorical scholarship pioneered by James Lockhart and Sarah Cline, among others. Pizzigoni makes valuable contributions to Nahuatl studies, especially by advancing research into the eighteenth century. These late colonial testaments contrast greatly with the 1580 corpus from Culhuacan treated by Cline and reveal significant changes in the lives of indigenous people. However, Pizzigoni seldom makes clear arguments about her research, instead leaving readers to interpret her data about native people after two centuries of colonial rule.
The household anchors this study, which uses the testaments to provide “a taste of the life of the people that passed through it” (p. 236). Beginning in the house, Pizzigoni details its human and sacred residents and the spaces they inhabited. She unearths the physical aspects...
