Lisa Sousa has made an extraordinarily valuable contribution to the field. Her thorough study of indigenous women's lives in the populous, sedentary cultures of highland Mexico is based on research in Nahuatl, Ñudzahui (Mixtec), Bènizàa (Zapotec), and Ayuuk (Mixe) sources. The Nahuatl sources predominate in the record and hence in the book, but Sousa has made as thorough a job of it as is possible. She regularly provides the original quotations in the indigenous languages immediately after the English translations, so experts in the different arenas can follow her work.
Even more remarkable, perhaps, is that Sousa, rather than choosing either to attempt to uncover precolonial patterns or to provide a record of women's lives under the colonial regime, has chosen to do both. She is interested in exploring the complementary and interdependent gender roles of the preconquest era—to the extent that they can be known—and then placing records from...
