Yannakakis, "Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico"

Duke University Press has published Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (2023), by Yanna Yannakakis (Emory University). A description from the Press:

In Since Time Immemorial Yanna Yannakakis traces the invention of
Native custom, a legal category that Indigenous litigants used in
disputes over marriage, self-governance, land, and labor in colonial
Mexico. She outlines how, in the hands of Native litigants, the European
category of custom—social practice that through time takes on the
normative power of law—acquired local meaning and changed over time.
Yannakakis analyzes sources ranging from missionary and Inquisition
records to Native pictorial histories, royal surveys, and Spanish and
Native-language court and notarial documents. By encompassing historical
actors who have been traditionally marginalized from legal histories
and highlighting spaces outside the courts like Native communities,
parishes, and missionary schools, she shows how imperial legal orders
were not just imposed from above but also built on the ground through
translation and implementation of legal concepts and procedures.
Yannakakis argues that, ultimately, Indigenous claims to custom, which
on the surface aimed to conserve the past, provided a means to contend
with historical change and produce new rights for the future.

Advance praise:

“Rejecting an older bibliography that romanticized Native customs as
ancient and autochthonous, Yanna Yannakakis studies how customs were
formulated, how they changed, and how they became central to both law
and politics during the colonial period. Rather than conserving a past,
she astutely points out that customs enabled a host of different actors
to adjust to a present and dream of a better future.” — Tamar Herzog

“Since Time Immemorial
is a compelling study of how Indigenous communities in colonial Mexico
adapted European concepts of custom to their own communal lifeways. It
shows how they advanced those reformulated versions in Spanish courts of
law, responding strategically to global changes and challenges in the
name of local custom, ironically. As with her first book, The Art of Being In-between,
Yanna Yannakakis has written a classic in the field of Latin American
history.” — Kevin Terraciano

More information, including free access to the Introduction, is available here.

-- Karen Tani