About the Author

Caterina Pizzigoni is Associate Professor in the department of History at Columbia University. She has published Testaments of Toluca (Stanford University Press, 2007), and articles in Ethnohistory and the Colonial Latin American Review, as well as in various anthologies.

Reviews

"The research for this book was clearly painstaking and the author's command of the details that made up the lives of the people of the Toluca Valley is impressive. Pizzigoni excels at minutiae and meticulous analysis ... [T]his fine book adds to knowledge of indigenous society and provides an excellent example of the kind of information to be gleaned from a detailed analysis of testaments." - Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, American Historical Review "This study builds on Caterina Pizzigoni's previous book, Testaments of Toluca, to present a full discussion of Nahua society and sub-regional variation in the Toluca valley of central Mexico ... [A] detailed and well-documented description of local indigenous society, its variants, and people in a key region of central Mexico in the later colonial period." - Ida Altman, Journal of Latin American Studies "A substantial expansion of her earlier work on indigenous-language testaments of Toluca, Caterina Pizzigoni's new book makes an important contribution to the historiography of colonial Mexico ... [Pizzigoni] provides here an in-depth analysis of 220 testaments and additional related documents that shed refreshing new light on the daily lives of indigenous people in the Toluca Valley." - Cheryl E. Martin, The Americas "This is a highly accomplished study that adds welcome texture to an already advanced understanding of indigenous village life outside the domestic sphere." - D. C. LaFevor, CHOICE "This remarkable book builds on all that has gone before in studies of the Nahuatl-speaking indigenous peoples of colonial Mexico, yet it also breaks new ground. If the field has concentrated on the earlier period, this book focuses on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If much of the prior work has centered on the corporate arena, this book focuses on the household, on actual people in real situations, with gender analysis at the very center. It uses the largest corpus of Nahuatl wills yet brought to bear on a single study and at the same time has few equals in combining Nahuatl sources with Spanish ones. It is, in short, a tour de force." - Camilla Townsend, Rutgers University