So stated the native officials of the Zapotec pueblo of Santa María Yaviche, Oaxaca, in 1760. What they meant will become clearer at the end of this article; for now, their words invite us to ask: How can there be a different legal custom today? Isn't custom supposed to be invariable over time? Isn't the point that it is not new, but old? Indeed, whether revealing that a tradition was invented or tracing a practice's perdurance, historians have told us that the power of customary law is precisely that it is above time, that it can defy obsolescence and, as such, resist modernity. 2 Custom is distinguished not so much by its historical nature as by its ahistoricity. 3 This article examines three exemplary instances of intracommunity civil disputes in eighteenth-century Spanish America to spotlight a turning point within native invocations of legal custom. Indigenous litigants living in the Spanish empire embedded multiple temporal schemata in their conceptions of costumbre (custom). Two of these temporal frames, which we might gloss as The author thanks the editors and two anonymous readers for HAHR, as well as Kunal Parker and Yanna Yannakakis for astute readings of this article. 1. ''Juan Ló pez principal del pueblo de Santa María Yaviche se queja de que los naturales de su pueblo lo quieren despojar de las garantías de las que gozan los principales,'' 1760, Archivo del Poder Judicial de Oaxaca (hereafter cited as APJO), Villa Alta, Civil, leg. 17, no. 16, fol. 28v. 2. J. G. A. Pocock, in Ancient Constitution, 14, argues that customary (common) law's power hinged on the fact that it can ''never become obsolete'' because it can always harken to a vague origin in ''immemorial'' time-a well-worn phrase familiar to any historian using Spanish legal documents. 3. By this, I mean in the conceptualization of historical actors and, to a degree, in scholarly renderings of non-Western and/or past legal systems as static and different than more historicized, ''modern'' systems. As Sally Falk Moore puts it, ''The very concept of 'customary law' has legitimating implications.'' Moore, ''History and the Redefinition,'' 277. On the historiographical split between those who historicize legal systems and those who portray them as possessed of an essential identity, see Parker, ''Repetition in History.''

So many Indian men had moved, fled or died because of the labor draft to the silver mines of Potosí that only women were left to govern in some Andean communities. Or so the rumor went. In 1682, the cabildo of the imperial mining capital informed the king that such reports were greatly exaggerated. “This could not be true, even in the case where not one male Indian was left in the entire Kingdom,” its statement reads. “Although the pueblos have been depopulated, there are still more than enough [men] to fill offices in conformity with cabildo ordinances.”

IN THE HEART OF Ñudzahui (Mixtec) territory in southern Mexico, a group of indigenous commoners built a temporary court for a Spanish judge. 1 It was the rainy season, July 1683, and the court was made of movable materials-most likely sticks and branches, perhaps a reed roof or a piece of cloth to create shade, maybe a few flowers adorning it to make it like a ceremonial arch. Observers referred to it alternately as "receiving quarters" or a "receiving house," and sometimes simply as a recibimiento, which in the Spanish of the time could connote an antechamber. The terms reveal that, despite being put up rapidly on land near wheat fields on the outskirts of four indigenous municipalities, the structure was intended for serious legal business. 2 In fact, the Spanish colonial judge, known as the alcalde mayor, was on his way there. He was traveling to the area from the closest Spanish tribunal in the region, in Yanhuitlan, Teposcolula, in the Oaxaca region, to issue a summary decision in a land dispute between two native villages, San Andrés Sinaxtla and San Mateo Susuquitepeque. 3 Word was that the ruling would favor San Andrés. Still, the formalities for the reading of the decision were required just the same. For obvious reasons, the villagers of San Mateo were not going to like the ruling, and a restless group of women and men from the pueblo gathered. They focused their ire on the makeshift court: the struc-The authors would like to thank Kristin Mann and the anonymous readers and editorial reviewers for the AHR for their generous engagement with this article. 1 "Tay Ñudzahui" ("people of the rain place") is the term of self-ascription used in the native language (the Ñudzahui language) in this region. See Kevin Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, Calif., 2002). In the scholarly literature, the term "Mixtec," derived from Nahuatl (the indigenous language of central Mexico), is used most widely to refer to the people and the language, and "Mixteca" to the region. 2 In the legal dispute showcased in this article, participants and witnesses consistently talked about the recibimiento, rancho, and casa, as it was alternately called, as "being [located] in" or "near" a paraje, which is a site or place. Thus it was expressly a structure-like a court-rather than a site alone. Archivo Histórico Judicial de Oaxaca [hereafter AHJO], Teposcolula [hereafter T], Criminal series [hereafter Crim.], legajo [hereafter leg.] 18, expediente [hereafter exp.] 28, 1683. 3 In the 1683 dispute examined here, the term amparado is used repeatedly, indicating that the litigating parties hoped for summary justice without a full and costly suit due to their status as native litigants. On natives' adaption of the amparo mechanism, which had been part of medieval Spanish law, see Brian P.

Bianca Premo introduces readers in her complex, challenging essay to the field of childhood studies that emerged officially in Latin America in the 1990s. But, reiterating the theme of Joseph Hawes's "Hidden in Plain Sight," Premo lays out the substantially longer history of the field as scholars of family history, of slavery, of illegitimacy, and of gender have been actually tracking childhood and children for many decades. Premo delineates the interactions among these disciplines while also indicating some of the distinguishing characteristics of Latin American childhood. She introduces notions of "circulating" childhoods passed in a variety of institutions and contexts rather than within one family, and of children adjusting to the economic pressures of globalization by multiplying the meanings of family and in the process, gaining more mothers.-M.S.

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