In Since Time Immemorial Yanna Yannakakis traces the invention of Native custom, a legal category that Indigenous litigants used in disputes over marriage, self-governance, land, and labor in colonial Mexico. She outlines how, in the hands of Native litigants, the European category of custom—social practice that through time takes on the normative power of law—acquired local meaning and changed over time. Yannakakis analyzes sources ranging from missionary and Inquisition records to Native pictorial histories, royal surveys, and Spanish and Native-language court and notarial documents. By encompassing historical actors who have been traditionally marginalized from legal histories and highlighting spaces outside the courts like Native communities, parishes, and missionary schools, she shows how imperial legal orders were not just imposed from above but also built on the ground through translation and implementation of legal concepts and procedures. Yannakakis argues that, ultimately, Indigenous claims to custom, which on the surface aimed to conserve the past, provided a means to contend with historical change and produce new rights for the future.

Yanna Yannakakis is Associate Professor of History at Emory University, author of The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca, and coeditor of Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, both also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  xiii
Part I. Legal and Intellectual Foundations: Twelfth through Seventeenth Centuries
1. Custom, Law, and Empire in the Mediterranean-Atlantic World  23
2. Translating Custom in Castile, Central Mexico, and Oaxaca  45
Part II. Good and Bad Customs in the Native Past and Present: Sixteenth through Seventeenth Centuries
3. Framing Pre-Hispanic Law and Custom  73
4. The Old Law, Polygyny, and the Customs of the Ancestors  109
Part III. Custom in Oaxaca’s Courts of First Instance: Seventeenth through Eighteenth Centuries
5. Custom, Possession, and Jurisdiction in the Boundary Lands  139
6. Custom as Social Contract: Native Self-Governance and Labor  171
7. Prescriptive Custom: Written Labor Agreements in Indian and Spanish Jurisdictions  199
Epilogue  229
Notes  237
Bibliography  273
Index  305