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 and interplay 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 and linguistic practices 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 am also co-editing a book with Gabriela Ramos of Cambridge University, titled “Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in New Spain and the Andes.” Our goal is to create a more comparative framework for the study of indigenous intellectual production in Spanish America. Finally, I have just completed a research project that analyzes an indigenous pictographic manuscript 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. The document is a cartographic history with both European and Mesoamerican stylistic elements that provides insight into the hybridization of representations of space, time, history, and collective identity in early colonial Mexico. The article “Allies or Servants? The Journey of Indian Conquistadors in the Lienzo of Analco” is forthcoming in the journal Ethnohistory 58:04 Fall 2011.
My Curriculum Vitae