Mexico's Indigenous Communities

A rich and detailed account of indigenous history in central and southern Mexico from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, Mexico's Indigenous Communities is an expansive work that destroys the notion that Indians were victims of forces beyond their control and today have little connection with their ancient past. Indian communities continue to remember and tell their own local histories, recovering and rewriting versions of their past in light of their lived present. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano focuses on a series of individual cases, falling within successive historical epochs, that illustrate how the practice of drawing up and preserving historical documents--in particular, maps, oral accounts, and painted manuscripts--has been a determining factor in the history of Mexico's Indian communities, especially in the significant issue of land ownership. Mexico's Indigenous Communitiesis a unique and exceptional contribution to Mexican history. It will appeal to students and specialists of history, indigenous studies, ethnohistory, and anthropology of Latin America and Mexico.

Ethelia Ruiz Medrano is a researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e His toria in Mexico, and a visiting professor at the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of three books with the University Press of Colorado and the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.