Emory historian Yanna Yannakakis’ original plan was to research and analyze the role of interpreters and the process of translation in the legal system of colonial Mexico.
Once she began digging into Indigenous language records and court translations, she unearthed much more: how the special legal category for “native custom” recognized by both the Catholic Church and Spanish court developed over centuries.
Yannakakis’ resulting book tracing the evolution of that legal framework, “Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico” resonates with the concerns of Indigenous social movements across Latin America.
Her rigorous scholarship also recently earned Yannakakis two major awards. This month, she was awarded the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award from the American Society for Legal History. In January, Yannakakis will accept the Friedrich Katz Prize in Latin American and Caribbean History, one of the top awards from the prestigious American Historical Association.
“I was interested to see how Indigenous elites and authorities were able to incorporate colonial law, which recognized custom as a legal category, to their own advantage,” says Yannakakis, professor and chair of Emory College’s Department of History.
“I don’t want to overstate their power, given Indigenous communities were a protected class within a system that existed to exploit their labor,” she adds.
“What’s important is it reveals this constant process of Indigenous people ingeniously adapting the rules and norms that come from their own societies and other sources to face the challenges of the moment.”
An ethnohistorian who specializes in Mexico’s Indigenous communities, Yannakakis has long been interested in centering native people’s experiences during colonization.
Her first book, “The Art of Being In-Between,” revealed how Indigenous brokers negotiated with Spanish colonizers to create a measure of cultural and political autonomy.
Her latest work builds on that understanding. To show specific ways in which Indigenous people leveraged colonial institutions for their communities, she scoured hundreds of years of records, including legal codes, missionary records, pictographic records, lawsuits, labor agreements, land-use deals, and simple contracts and wills.
For instance, pre-Hispanic communities were often built on military conquest, with noble lineages entitled to the labor of commoners. By the early 16th century, shortly after Spanish invasion and conquest, Indigenous leaders began asserting those rights in Spanish courts.
The result was often the ability to carve out autonomy within the hierarchy of the Spanish Empire, while also officially adapting to Spanish and Catholic norms, such as ending the tradition of polygyny as a means to solidify military alliances.
“This is such an innovative work of archival history, based on an extensive reading of historical documents that are very difficult to access and understand, that connects legal and colonial history in a sophisticated way,” says Joe Crespino, the division dean of humanities and social sciences and Jimmy Carter Professor of History.
“Yanna has been teaching from these sources for years,” Crespino adds. “She is a committed teacher and an exceptional scholar who is very beloved and respected by her colleagues and her students.”
Yannakakis’ “History of Mexico” course, which she is again teaching this fall, includes significant discussion on the relationship of native communities to the Spanish crown, showing the connections between the colonial and contemporary eras in the country.
The history also plays a large role in her colloquium on the role that legal and religious institutions played in Latin America’s conquest and Christian missionization.
Longer term, she would like to expand a first-year seminar on Indigenous social movements into a regular offering, using her recent findings to expand on how Indigenous activists in Latin America are using federal and state recognition of “native custom” to push for rights to land, resources and autonomy in the present-day.
“What is important is that these customs can still grant political space and standing in places like Mexico,” Yannakakis says. “This deep colonial past is very much alive in contemporary Indigenous politics.”