Yanna Yannakakis traces the creation of Indigenous custom as a legal category and its deployment as a strategy of resistance to empire in colonial Mexico.
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.
"Aimed at a scholarly audience, Yanna Yannakakis' Since Time Immemorial explores how Spanish authorities and indigenous elites navigated the ambiguous boundary between custom and law in16th-century Mexico. Deeply reasoned and argued, this book should be of interest to both history majors and experts interested in the legal framework of Spanish Mexico." - Noah Zachary (World History Encyclopedia) "Yannakakis has written a sophisticated and eminently readable text that could serve as an introduction to legal historical methods as well as a longue-durÉe study of Mexican Native communities. It is an exemplary model for thinking about law from the bottom up without losing sight of imperial foundations or a historically romanticizing a Native past." - Karen B. Graubart (Colonial Latin American Review) "Since Time Immemorial shows persuasively how preconquest custom shaped the laws governing the Indigenous world of postconquest Mexico. But it equally demonstrates the complex ways that traditional customs were manipulated to refect new realities as well as how new customs contributed to the evolution of legal practices in colonial society." - Jeremy Baskes (Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe)
Yanna Yannakakis is Associate Professor of History at Emory University, author of The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca, and coeditor of Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, both also published by Duke University Press.
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