BY MEG SULLIVAN
UCLA Today
As a UCLA graduate student in the ’80s,
Kevin Terraciano was struck by how much his professor, the renowned
Mexican historian James Lockhart, relied on Aztec accounts for
a Native-American perspective on the Spanish conquest.
“I knew that Aztecs were only one of
many indigenous groups in Mexico at the time,” said Terraciano,
now an associate professor of history. “So I asked, ‘What
about the other groups? Did they write in their own languages?
Where are these accounts?’ ”
More than a decade later, Terraciano is winning
accolades for finding the answer to the question that stumped
Lockhart.
Thanks to scholarly sleuthing south of the
border, Terraciano has unearthed hundreds of long-forgotten
documents written by indigenous scribes in the southern Mexican
state of Oaxaca.
Using these 200- to 450-year-old wills, court
documents, notes from government meetings and other records,
the historian has pieced together a picture of colonial Oaxaca
from the perspective of the region’s Mixtec Indians.
Extensive written ac-counts of the European
arrival in the Americas have been found in only two other native
languages: those of the Maya and the Aztec.
“Before Kevin came along, nobody thought
the Mixtec had a written record, so this is a very big deal,”
said John Kicza, a professor of Latin American history and associate
dean of research at Washington State University. “It’s
as though a historian suddenly found a treasure trove of documents
composed by the Cherokee Tribe or Iroquois Confederation after
the landing of the Mayflower.”
Kicza isn’t alone in his enthusiasm.
Terraciano’s “The Mixtecs of Colonial Mexico”
received an honorable mention from the American Historical Association’s
Conference on Latin American History this year and was selected
by the American Society for Ethnohistory as the year’s
best book on indigenous peoples.
Following a hunch, the son of a Rhode Island
mill worker and housewife began poking around community archives
in 1988 in Oaxaca, where Indians had a writing tradition in
pre-Columbian times.
“I’d ask people, ‘Do you
have anything that doesn’t look like Spanish?’ ”
he recalled.
To read what he uncovered, Terraciano had to teach himself Mixtec.
With his wife, Lisa Sousa, an assistant professor at Occidental
College, he then helped the community archives systematize their
holdings. One Oaxacan archivist was so grateful that he named
his newborn Kevin, after Terraciano.
Today, the 2001 UCLA Distinguished Teaching
Award-winner lives in De Neve Plaza as faculty-in-residence
with Sousa and their 6-month-old baby, Isabella.
He now holds the history department position
once occupied by Lockhart, who in 1992 touched off a wave of
interest in Native-American texts with “The Nahuas After
the Conquest,” a seminal exploration of colonial Mexico
as revealed in accounts by Aztec scribes.
“He’s my successor in many senses
of the word,” Lockhart said. “I’m very proud
of him.”
