Colonial Written Culture in the Coixtlahuaca Basin, Oaxaca, Mexico (original) (raw)

This chapter is about the communitarian writing traditions that flourished before Mexican independence. It looks at the role of indigenous language writing in one of the linguistically most diverse areas of Oaxaca, the Coixtlahuaca basin and the adjacent Teotongo valley, where Chocho (Ngiwa), Mixtec (Tu’un Savi), and Nahuatl were all spoken and written simultaneously during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, producing a unique multilingual documentary record. The chapter focusses on the social and political role of writing in indigenous languages, the change from one writing system to the other, the eventual hierarchy among the languages and writing systems, and the resulting choice of language and writing system.