SELECTED ONGOING PROJECTS

Codex Sierra.  I am working on a translation and analysis of the Codex Sierra, a sixteenth-century Nahuatl-language book of accounts from Oaxaca. In its use of pictographic and alphabetic text in parallel columns, the codex is an extremely valuable source for the early colonial period. I have written a preliminary article on the codex, titled "El contexto histórico del Códice Sierra, 1550-1564," which will be published in Códices y documentos sobre Mexico: tercer simposio, published by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, and edited by Constanza Vega Sosa (forthcoming, 2001).

Mixtec Texts.  I am compiling a volume of Mixtec-language documents from the colonial period, with full transcriptions and translations. Each document will be introduced by brief commentary. This project will result in the first published collection of Mixtec-language texts. On this project, I am collaborating with Professor Maarten Jansen (University of Leiden).

Zapotec Texts.  This project builds upon my previous research and language training. While working in Oaxacan archives, Lisa Sousa and I have located hundreds of Zapotec-language documents, written in the roman alphabet from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The collection is comparable to the Mixtec-language corpus on which my first book is based.

Since 1999, Professor Pamela Munro (UCLA, Linguistics), Professor Lisa Sousa (Occidental, History) and I are collaborating on a project to translate and analyze Zapotec-language documents from the colonial period.  Professor Munro has worked with Zapotec speakers and has published a dictionary, in collaboration with Felipe Lopez, of a Zapotec language from the Valley of Oaxaca (San Lucas Quiaviní).  Lisa Sousa and I have worked with similar archival records written in Spanish, Nahuatl, and Mixtec.  In collaboration with several graduate students from Linguistics and History, we are working with photocopies of documents from Mexican archives.  The immediate goal of our project is to analyze texts from both historical and linguistic perspectives.  There are three ultimate goals: (1) to publish one or more volumes of fully analyzed and annotated texts; (2) to contribute to the documentation and analysis of modern Zapotec languages, informed by the historical record; and (3) to use these texts for historical purposes and for the study of language change. Working with speakers of Zapotec languages in Los Angeles and Oaxaca, we are developing new approaches in both linguistics and history.

I invite students who are interested in these types of research projects involving Colonial Mexico to contact me about the possibility of graduate study at UCLA.