Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-251) and index.
Introduction: back to the future : law, politics, and culture in colonial Mexican ethnohistorical studies / Susan Kellogg -- Empire, Indians, and the negotiation for the status of city in Tlaxcala, 1521-1550 / R. Jovita Baber -- Fighting destiny : Nahua nobles and friars in the sixteenth-century revolt of the encomenderos against the king / Ethelia Ruiz Medrano -- Indigenous centurions and triumphal arches : negotiation in eighteenth-century Mexico City / Edward W. Osowski -- The power of the law : the construction of colonial power in an indigenous region / María de los Ángeles Romero Frizzi -- Costumbre : a language of negotiation in eighteenth-century Oaxaca / Yanna P. Yannakakis -- Peace agreements and war signals : negotiations with the Apaches and Comanches in the interior provinces of New Spain, 1784-1788 / Cuauhtémoc Velasco Ávila -- Waterways, legal ways, and ethnic interactions : the Ríos District of Tabasco during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries / José Manuel A. Chávez-Gómez -- Afterword: the consequences of negotiation / Susan Kellogg