The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico’s Toluca Valley, 1650-1800

Abstract

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 of house complexes, with results almost akin to historical archaeology. Pizzigoni delves into the intricacies of evolving Nahuatl kinship terminology and naming patterns. Readers will learn much about the ubiquitous and varied saints who also inhabited native homes; testators carefully assigned holy images to heirs, even designating plots of land for a saint’s care. While such personal piety was not evident in the sixteenth-century Culhuacan testaments, a century later the cult of saints was firmly rooted and “people in the [Toluca] Valley saw them as companions of their daily life” (p. 36). Moving beyond the house, Pizzigoni surveys native modes of production, paying particular attention to the patchwork of native land parcels, valuable magueys, domesticated animals, and commerce. People interacted with their local community and its officials as well as the church and its cofradías.The exploration of the cult of saints and burial practices offers a tantalizing case study of the rise of baroque piety. Some of this is familiar. For example, the dying wanted to be buried in the church, in a shroud and in an increasingly sophisticated manner. Other details bespeak an intriguing mixture of Spanish and indigenous ways. Planning for funerals, people wanted the ringing of bells, which is seldom written in the testaments as campanas but rather as miccatepoztli, or “dead-person metal” (p. 186). Testators and notaries evoked the Christ child in a rich Nahuatl phrase that translates as “her precious revered jewel of an only child” (p. 192). Despite their formulaic nature, these testaments reveal a devout native people personally and emotionally involved with their faith. Certainly much cultural change had occurred in the houses and altepetl of the Toluca Valley.Pizzigoni insists that Nahuatl sources provide the only way to get an untainted look into the native world, although she often admits to Spanish influence. Discussing native landholding practices, she asserts that “we are firmly on indigenous ground” (p. 89). Yet Spanish loanwords such as corral, solar, and the units of measurement vara and surco had rooted themselves in these eighteenth-century documents. Likewise, land disputes were mediated by Spanish magistrates with Spanish legal principles at play — a fact largely ignored in this study. Pizzigoni stresses the persistence and evolution of native ways despite the fact that people in the Toluca Valley had regular interactions with Spanish landowners, tax collectors, and priests as well as mixed-race people. Indeed, The Life Within could speak to larger questions of Hispanization, Christianization, or imperial rule. Pizzigoni, however, sidesteps these fundamental questions of colonial history. Her study completely neglects the issue of local manifestations of the Bourbon reforms. Furthermore, she ignores much pertinent scholarship. She has a keen eye for primary source material on gender and social change, for example, yet fails to substantively engage with relevant authors including Steve Stern, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, or myself. Occasionally this leads to serious missteps, such as her simplistic understanding of depósito (custody of women).Pizzigoni’s strength is her concentration on the Nahuatl testaments and on language (work begun in her 2007 volume of primary sources, Testaments of Toluca). Her study demonstrates that Nahuatl was alive well into the late colonial era. Pizzigoni argues that the native language was not eroding but rather evolving. While Spanish words and concepts worked their way into written Nahuatl, the result was to gird native society.Scholars of indigenous languages will find much valuable data here. The text will interest graduate students and scholars of Mexican ethnohistory. Undergraduates and other readers may find the writing style dense; some may be frustrated that Pizzigoni writes constantly in the present tense. Generally arguments are sparse in The Life Within. Despite her rich source material, Pizzigoni too often avoids engaging with the larger, vital issues raised.