This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

At least a hundred indigenous Indian languages are known to have been spoken in Mesoamerica, but it is only in the past fifty years that many of them have been adequately described. Professor Suárez draws together this considerable mass of scholarship in a general survey that will provide an invaluable source of reference.

Honorable Mention, Bandelier/Lavrin Book Award in Colonial Latin America, Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies (RMCLAS), 2019 Honorable Mention, The Alfred B. Thomas Book Award, Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS), 2019 Scholars have written reams on the conquest of Mexico, from the grand designs of kings, viceroys, conquistadors, and inquisitors to the myriad ways that indigenous peoples contested imperial authority. But the actual work of establishing the Spanish empire in Mexico fell to a host of local agents—magistrates, bureaucrats, parish priests, ranchers, miners, sugar producers, and many others—who knew little and cared less about the goals of their superiors in Mexico City and Madrid. Through a case study of the province of Michoacán in western Mexico, Promiscuous Power focuses on the prosaic agents of colonialism to offer a paradigm-shifting view of the complexities of making empire at the ground level. Presenting rowdy, raunchy, and violent life histories from the archives, Martin Austin Nesvig reveals that the local colonizers of Michoacán were primarily motivated by personal gain, emboldened by the lack of oversight from the upper echelons of power, and thoroughly committed to their own corporate memberships. His findings challenge some of the most deeply held views of the Spanish colonization of Mexico, including the Black Legend, which asserts that the royal state and the institutional church colluded to produce a powerful Catholicism that crushed heterodoxy, punished cultural difference, and ruined indigenous worlds. Instead, Nesvig finds that Michoacán—typical of many frontier provinces of the empire—became a region of refuge from imperial and juridical control and formal Catholicism, where the ordinary rules of law, jurisprudence, and royal oversight collapsed in the entropy of decentralized rule.

Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources comprises Volumes 12 through 15 of the Handbook of Middle American Indians, published in cooperation with the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University under the general editorship of Robert Wauchope (1909–1979). The Guide has been assembled under the volume editorship of the late Howard F. Cline, Director of the Hispanic Foundation in the Library of Congress, with Charles Gibson, John B. Glass, and H. B. Nicholson as associate volume editors. It covers geography and ethnogeography, especially the Relaciones Geográficas (Volume 12); sources in the European tradition: printed collections, secular and religious chroniclers, biobibliographies (Volume 13); sources in the native tradition: prose and pictorial materials, checklist of repositories, title and synonymy index, and annotated bibliography on native sources (Volumes 14 and 15). Volume 12, which is Part One of the Guide, contains the following: “Introduction: Reflections on Ethnohistory,” “Introductory Notes on Territorial Divisions of Middle America,” “Viceroyalty to Republics, 1786–1952: Historical Notes on the Evolution of Middle American Political Units,” “Ethnohistorical Regions of Middle America,” “The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577–1648,” “A Census of the Relaciones Geográficas of New Spain, 1579–1616,” and “The Relaciones Geográficas of Spain, New Spain, and the Spanish Indies: An Annotated Bibliography,” all the foregoing by Howard F. Cline. In addition it includes: “Colonial New Spain, 1519–1786: Historical Notes on the Evolution of Minor Political Jurisdictions” by Peter Gerhard; “The Pinturas (Maps) of the Relaciones Geográficas, with a Catalog” by Donald Robertson; “The Relaciones Geográficas, 1579–1586: Native Languages” by H. R. Harvey; and “The Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Central America, 1740–1792” by Robert C. West. The Handbook of Middle American Indians was assembled and edited at the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane University with the assistance of grants from the National Science Foundation and under the sponsorship of the National Research Council Committee on Latin American Anthropology.