Editing Mixtec (section)

==Mixtecs in the colonial era==
[[File:2013-13-27_Máscara_funeraria_mixteca_Tumba_No._7_Monte_Alban_Museo_de_las_Culturas_de_Oaxaca_anagoria.JPG|thumb|left|250px|Mixtec funerary mask; Grave No. 7, Monte Alban; Museum of Cultures of Oaxaca.]]
[[File:Tumba 1 Zaachila.JPG|thumb|right|The stucco reliefs in the Tomb 1 of Zaachila (The Valley, Oaxaca) reveal a remarkable influence from Mixtec art. The tomb likely belongs to a person whose name is registered in the ''Nuttall Codex''. Tomb 1 of Zaachila, Central Valleys of Oaxaca, Late Postclassic.]]

There is considerable documentation in the Mixtec (Ñudzahui) native language for the colonial era, which has been studied as part of the [[New Philology (Latin America)|New Philology]].  Mixtec documentation indicates parallels between many Indigenous social and political structures with those in the Nahua areas, but published research on the Mixtecs does not primarily focus on economic matters. There is considerable Mixtec documentation for land issues, but sparse for market activity, perhaps because Indigenous cabildos did not regulate commerce or mediate economic disputes except for land.<ref>Kevin Terraciano, ‘’The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteen through Eighteenth Centuries’’. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001, 248–49.</ref>  Long-distance trade existed in the prehispanic era and continued in Indigenous hands in the early colonial. In the second half of the colonial period, there were bilingual Mixtec merchants, dealing in both Spanish and Indigenous goods, who operated regionally. However, in the Mixteca “by the eighteenth century, commerce was dominated by Spaniards in all but the most local venues of exchange, involving the sale of agricultural commodities and Indigenous crafts or the resale of imported goods.”.<ref>Terraciano, ibid. p. 251</ref>

Despite the development of a local exchange economy, many Spaniards with economic interests in Oaxaca, including “[s]ome of the Mixteca priests, merchants, and landowners maintained permanent residence in Puebla, and labor for the ''obrajes'' (textile workshops) of the city of Puebla in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was sometimes recruited from peasant villages in the Mixteca."<ref>William B. Taylor, "Town and Country in the Valley of Oaxaca", ‘’The Provinces of Early Mexico’’, Ida Altman and James Lockhart, eds. Los Angeles, UCLA Latin American Center 1976,  p. 74.</ref> There is evidence of community litigation against Mixtec caciques who leased land to Spaniards and the growth of individually contracted wage labor. Mixtec documentation from the late eighteenth century indicates that "most caciques were simply well-to-do investors in Spanish-style enterprises"; some married non-Indians; and in the late colonial era had little claim to hereditary authority.<ref>Kevin Terraciano, "The Colonial Mixtec Community," Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 80, Feb. 2000 p. 39</ref>