Abstract This article delves into the role of local languages during early conflicts over the cacicazgos in the village of Chiapan. It posits that the Spanish cabildo of Ciudad Real attempted to establish its authority by showcasing its knowledge of Nahuatl and the remarkable translation skills of its Indigenous interpreters. On occasion, the city council sought to undermine the interpretations made by the Indigenous supporters of the Dominican friars. Ultimately, the essay suggests that those Indigenous individuals who spoke both Chiapanec and Nahuatl had more opportunities for political communication. Their bilingualism enabled them to mediate conflicts between the encomenderos of their villages and the Dominican friars. Through their mediation, the Hispanic authorities and religious clergy considered these Indios to become caciques.

Abstract This article explores how colonial Mexican historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl challenged colonialist ideologies of dispossession in his narration of pre-Hispanic events. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Indigenous communities in central Mexico experienced a series of epidemic outbreaks and encroachments on their lands by Spanish settlers. In this context, Alva Ixtlilxochitl identifies the Spanish conquest of Mexico, which established both political authority and the supreme territorial claim, as a prerequisite for subsequent violations of Indigenous land rights. This article argues that his Historia de la nación chichimeca (History of the Chichimec Nation) offers a counternarrative to colonial justifications for land dispossession by drawing an analogy between colonial situations and the Chichimec occupation of the Toltec territory. His unique approach is illuminated through comparison with his earlier works and crucial sources like the pictorial Codex Xolotl and Torquemada’s Monarquía indiana (Indian Monarchy).

Abstract This article examines the role of California Indian oral tradition in the Franciscan mission music programs in Alta California. It argues that California Indian men and women negotiated mission music instruction, which sought to produce musicians who could read and write European music, by adapting traditional ways of learning by ear. The oral history by Julio César (Luiseño), recorded in 1878, as well as those of other California Indian musicians, grounds this study of Native music-making at the missions. His recollections guide the first sections, locating his experiences at Mission San Luis Rey between 1838 and 1849. A section follows on California Indian music-making and Franciscan music instruction. As contested spaces, the California missions encompassed both European choral and instrumental repertories and California Indian song, instrumental playing, and dance. The final section explores Indigenous agency in mission music instruction, proposing that California Indian oral tradition and memory played a greater role in sustaining mission music demands, including Indian music teachers and directors as proxies for the missionaries. This article challenges previously held assumptions that California mission music programs revolved primarily around the Franciscans. Rather, Indian musicians appear to have had more presence and agency than scholars have recognized.

Abstract Indigenous Panay Bukidnon people of the Philippines have chanted long narrative poems called sugidanon since at least the sixteenth century. These poems were traditionally performed by binukot (secluded) women and feature binukot women as active characters. This article examines three sugidanon epics alongside two Hiligaynon-language Catholic devotional poems written by Spanish missionaries. These writers appropriated selectively from Panayanon poetry forms, idioms, and gender categories to create a new Christianized Visayan model woman with comparatively lower prestige than her precolonial counterpart. Fashioned after Mary, this new feminine ideal elevated a Hispanicized view of the binukot as a pious and domesticated foil to Indigenous Panayanon religious practitioners (babaylan) who were most often women but also effeminate men or intersex individuals. Panayanon people also adapted to Spanish colonialism by incorporating Mary alongside Indigenous figures such as the babaylan and female ancestors depicted in sugidanon epics.