The Life Within Local Indigenous Society in Mexico's Toluca Valley, 1650-1800 [Hardcover]

The Life Withinprovides a social and cultural history of the indigenous people of a region of central Mexico in the later colonial periodas told through documents in Nahuatl and Spanish. It views the indigenous world from the inside out, focusing first on the householdbuildings, lots, household saintsand expanding outward toward the householders and the greater community. The internal focus of this book provides a comprehensive picture of indigenous society, exploring the categories by which people are identified, their interactions, their activities, and the aspects of the local corporations that manifest themselves in household life.

Pizzigoni brings indigenous-language social history into the later colonial period, whereas the emphasis until now has fallen heavily on the earlier phase. The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emerge as a dynamic time that saw, along with cultural persistence, many new adaptations and creations. Covering a period of over a century and a half, this study goes beyond a monolithic treatment of the region to introduce for the first time a systematic analysis of subregional variation in vocabulary and real-life phenomena, showing how, within larger regional trends, each tiniest community of the Toluca Valley retained markers of its individuality.

This study builds on Caterina Pizzigoni's previous book,Testaments of Toluca, to present a full discussion of Nahua society and sub-regional variation in the Toluca valley of central Mexico . . . [A] detailed and well-documented description of local indigenous society, its variants, and people in a key region of central Mexico in the later colonial period. This remarkable book builds on all that has gone before in studies of the Nahuatl-speaking indigenous peoples of colonial Mexico, yet it also breaks new ground. If the field has concentrated on the earlier period, this book focuses on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If much of the prior workl3½