Yanna Yannakakis

Yanna Yannakakis, Associate Professor (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, B.A. Dartmouth College).  Social and cultural history of colonial Latin America, history of Mexico, ethnohistory, history of legal systems, and the interaction of indigenous peoples and institutions in Mexico.  My first book The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca (Duke University Press, 2008) examines how native cultural brokers negotiated with Spanish courts and the Catholic Church to open and maintain a space for the political and cultural autonomy of indigenous elites and their communities during Mexico’s colonial period.  The book won the 2009 Howard Francis Cline Memorial Award given by the Conference on Latin American History for the best book on the history of Latin America’s indigenous peoples.

My current research includes my book project “Mexico’s Babel: Translation, Law, and Society in Oaxaca from Colony to Republic,” which analyzes how the use, interplay, and translation of Spanish and indigenous languages in local courts structured inter-ethnic relations, knitted together state-centered and customary law, and put into dialogue Liberalism and cultural pluralism. Set in Oaxaca, Mexico’s most polyglot region, the project illuminates how language policy, linguistic practices, and translation shaped popular access to courts and the interpretation and application of the law from circa 1660-1852.  Mexico’s Babel has won the support of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS 2011 Faculty Fellowship) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH 2011 Summer Research Stipend).  I have also co-edited a book with Gabriela Ramos of Cambridge University, Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in New Spain and the Andes (forthcoming, Duke University Press), which considers native writers and functionaries and their varied forms of knowledge in a comparative framework.  My recently published article “Allies or Servants?  The Journey of Indian Conquistadors in the Lienzo of Analco” Ethnohistory 58:04 Fall 2011 intersects with the theme of indigenous intellectual production through its interpretation of an indigenous pictorial document chronicling the history of a group of ‘Indian conquistadors’ who allied with Spaniards to conquer a remote region of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.  By analyzing the document’s narrative, spatial, and stylistic elements alongside archival documentation, I show how native people used histories of the conquest to refashion collective identities in early colonial Mexico. The article won the 2012 Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies Ligia Parra Jahn Award and the 2012 Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section Best Essay in the Humanities Prize.  Finally, I am currently collaborating with Martina Schrader-Kniffki of the University of Mainz/Germersheim on a project that integrates the fields of History and Socio-Linguistics to analyze translation practices in bilingual pastoral (Church) literature in Spanish and Zapotec (one of Oaxaca’s many indigenous languages), and Zapotec-language criminal documents and their Spanish court translations.  Our co-authored chapter, “Sins and Crimes: Zapotec-Spanish Translation in Catholic Evangelization and Colonial Law (Oaxaca Mexico)” is forthcoming in Klaus Zimmerman, Martina Schrader-Kniffki, and Otto Zwartjes, editors, Missionary Linguistics VII/Lingüística Misionera VII: Translation/Traducción (John Benjamins Publishing Company).