Customer Reviews

Indian Women of Early Mexico

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This collection of scholarly essays, mostly relating to Nahuas in the Valley of Mexico but containing some pieces on Mayan-speaking communities in Yucatan, should be very helpful to students, studied and amateur, of the American-Hispano cultures following the Spanish assault on these areas. All the selections relate directly to the lives of women in these areas, as the title would lead you to expect, but readers will find that this approach sheds light on the lives of common people generally and the social structures as seen from the below. Readers do not need to belong to one or another school of women's studies to enjoy the book and profit from it. Writing style is mostly very straightforward and in fact even vividly concrete, with little academiotic harangue.
I got hold of this book in the course of Nahuatl language study, and several of the essays were in fact valuable for this purpose. Generally, the writers assume that readers will pay close attention to Nahuatl, Mayan and Spanish language elements, but it is not necessary to actually have a background in these languages to use the work.

Contents:

Mexica women on the home front : housework and religion in Aztec Mexico / Louise M. Burkhart
Aztec wives / Arthur J. O. Anderson
Indian-Spanish marriages in the first century of the colony / Pedro Carrasco
Gender and social identity : Nahua naming patterns in postconquest Central Mexico / Rebecca Horn
From parallel and equivalent to separate but unequal : Tenochca Mexica women, 1500-1700 / Susan Kellog
Activist or adulteress? The life and struggle of Doña Josefa María of Tepoztlan / Robert Hasket
Matters of life at death : Nahuatl testaments of rural women, 1589-1801 / Stephanie Wood
Mixteca cacicas : status, wealth, and the political accommodation of native elite women in early colonial Oaxaca / Ronald Spore
Women and crime in colonial Oaxaca : evidence of complementary gender roles in Mixtec and Zapotec societies / Lisa Mary Sousa
Women, rebellion, and the moral economy of Maya peasants in colonial Mexico / Kevin Gosner
Work, marriage, and status : Maya women of colonial Yucatan / Marta Espejo-Ponce Hunt and Matthew Restall
Double jeopardy : Indian women in Jesuit missions of Nueva Vizcaya / Susan M. Deeds
Women's voices from the frontier : San Esteban de Nueva Tlaxcala in the late eighteenth century / Leslie S. Offutt
Rethinking Malinche / Frances Karttunen.

Extensive notes.