While early modern Spaniards were impressed with the Mexica’s legal system, they largely believed that most Indigenous groups were bound by custom. They categorized the original inhabitants of Mexico as “primitive” peoples who lacked the rationality to record positive law in physical formats, a major benchmark of civilized societies according to European racial hierarchies. Indigenous peoples, however, were quick to learn how to navigate the colonial legal system to their advantage without giving up claims to local justice. In Since Time Immemorial, Yanna Yannakakis analyzes the multiethnic mixing of legal cultures by tracing ideas of custom and law from medieval settlements in Europe to the altepeme of central Mexico and Oaxaca. Drawing on a wide range of legal documents, missionary writings, Inquisition records, and Indigenous pictorial histories, the author explains how Spanish theologians, jurists, and administrators made use of the concept of custom to spread colonial rule in the...

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