This book is a history of the Mixtec Indians of southern Mexico who were among the most populous cultural and language groups of Mesoamerica at the time of Spanish conquest. The work is largely based on an extraordinary collection of primary sources, translated and analysed by the author, that were written by Mixtecs in the roman alphabet from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. To complement this native-language corpus, the author has examined pre-conquest and early colonial pictorial writings, Spanish-language civil and trial records and Nahuatl (Aztec) texts. The book addresses many interrelated topics, including writing, language, socio-political organisation, local government, social and gender relations, land tenure, trade, rebellion, religion, ethnicity, and historical memory. In its focus on indigenous concepts, the book introduces a new terminology and new categories of analysis in colonial Mexican history, and revisits the question of cultural change among indigenous peoples under colonial rule.