David Tavárez’s monumental 2022 book, Rethinking Zapotec Time: Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico, is a groundbreaking monograph that critically reexamines how Zapotec Indigenous communities (in present-day Oaxaca, Mexico), think about, conceptualize, and experience time. In doing so, this book is part of a growing number of recent discourses coming out of Latin American studies that complicate Eurocentric understandings of time as linear and uniform. Instead, Tavárez proposes a more nuanced approach that acknowledges the diversity of temporal frameworks across cultures in the early modern world. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research, this book is a long-awaited study that represents a major contribution to the study of Mesoamerican indigeneity and history. The hefty tome is extensively illustrated with eight full-color plates, forty-two black-and-white images ranging from pre-conquest Mesoamerican codices to contemporary ethnographic photography, and twenty-five extremely useful tables (some of which are multiple pages long) that condense and systematize data into an easy to consult format that will be invaluable to all students of Zapotec culture and colonial Mexico. The book is further accompanied by an appendix, extensive endnotes, and a bibliography.

The book offers the first in-depth and comprehensive examination of an important collection of collective confessions, divinatory manuals, and four songbooks (all of them in the Zapotec language) that were surrendered to Fray Ángel Maldonado by thirty-seven Northern Zapotec communities during a trial in 1704–05. These documents are housed today in the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Spain. Maldonado, who was the bishop of Oaxaca at the beginning of the eighteenth century, granted amnesty to these Zapotec communities in exchange for these documents after the communities had been accused of the serious crime of idolatry, which would have otherwise been a major punishable offense. Although nearly two centuries had passed since the Spanish conquest, Zapotec Indigenous traditions with pre-Hispanic roots continued to thrive (even if clandestinely) at the start of the eighteenth century.

Students of Mesoamerican Indigenous cosmology and spirituality will be particularly fascinated by Tavárez’s meticulous and detailed comparisons (and discussion of discrepancies) between the calendar count according to the Zapotec tradition and the more widely studied Nahua tradition. He also details Zapotec deities, sacred beings, and their respective rituals and feasts. These topics are dealt with in the first half of the book in chapters 2 to 5. The sixth chapter, which is also the longest, deals with the centerpiece of Zapotec ritual labor: the summoning of ancestors. Here Tavárez demonstrates continuity between ancient (pre-Hispanic) semasiography and in seventeenth-century songs that brought ancestors to the present. He brings into the discussion as evidence ritual art objects dating as far back as Monte Albán to make these points.

Chapter 7 deals with the issue of cultural resistance, broadly defined, and through his reading of the divinatory manuals Tavárez argues that Northern Zapotec communities fully engaged in less orthodox Christian devotions and that they generated a discourse about Indigenous ancestral knowledge through skepticism about orthodox Catholicism. Provocatively, Tavárez proposes that these Indigenous Christian devotions may have been more subversive than idolatrous (i.e., the quiet and underground observation of Zapotec deities).

Tavárez offers students of early modernity a nuanced take on the role of the Catholic Church in colonial contexts. He complicates black-and-white understandings of conversion and demonstrates the tremendous agency that Indigenous communities had in the creation of an Indigenous folk or popular Church, one in which profound Indigenous customs and beliefs survived and were embedded within nominally Catholic worship. Still, engagement with decolonial theory and critiques of coloniality/modernity are notably absent in the work, though such discussion may be outside the scope of Tavárez’s intended project, which is otherwise thoroughly researched. Tavárez does a tremendous service to early modern and global studies by showcasing the brilliant and trailblazing contributions coming out of recent books in Latin American studies. He reminds us that there is still much to disentangle in the archives on colonial Mesoamerica and thus his book will be a must-read for generations to come.