About

Kevin Terraciano is the Robert N. Burr Endowed Professor and Chair of the UCLA Department of History. His research focuses on Colonial Latin America, Ethnohistory, and Mesoamerica. As a distinguished faculty member, he contributes to the understanding of historical processes in Latin America through an ethnohistorical lens, emphasizing the cultural and social dynamics of the region.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Archaeology
• Law
• Humanities
• Classics
• Art
• Ethnology
• Geography
• Ancient history
• Genealogy
• Anthropology
• Art history
• Ecology
• Demography

Selected publications

• Simposio de lenguas indígenas de America Latina: pedagogía y práctica

  UNM’s Digital Repository (University of New Mexico) · 2026-04-24

  article1st authorCorresponding

  *This event will be held at 2:00 PM PST Este simposio ofrece una oportunidad para que educadores, investigadores y estudiantes dialoguen y compartan avances en pedagogía, recursos y estrategias para la enseñanza de lenguas indígenas de las américas en contextos académicos de los EE.UU. Kevin Terraciano (Historia, UCLA, Náhuatl) Adrian Roque Corona (Facilitadora de LAISA, Hñähñu) Marisol Nechochea Estacio (Fellow de LAISA, Quechua) Silvia Lucrecia Carrillo Godinez (Fellow de LAISA, Maya Mam) Pacual Roberto Tahay Tzaj (Fellow de LAISA, K’iche’)

  Publisher

• El legado de Atonaltzin: La historia pictográfica de la región de Coixtlahuaca; Siglos XI a XVI

  Hispanic American Historical Review · 2025-09-30

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Descendants of Aztec pictography: the cultural enyclopedias of sixteenth-century Mexico <i> <b>Descendants of Aztec pictography: the cultural enyclopedias of sixteenth-century Mexico</b> </i> , by Elizabeth Hill Boone, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020, 264 pp. (ISBN 9781477321676)

  Colonial Latin American Review · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Sociology
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• The Early Iberian American World

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-11-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In the sixteenth century, Iberian kingdoms claimed extensive territories in North and South America and the Caribbean Sea. The Portuguese sailed from Lisbon to the Azores to Brazil while developing trade routes to Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan. Castilians shipped silver mined in New Spain and Peru across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to Seville and Manila. In this transformative period, the nascent nation states of Spain and Portugal integrated the human and natural resources of the Americas into a global network of labor and exchange. Iberia represented the cutting edge of Europe’s overseas expansion. The surge in military-mercantilist activity was driven more by merchants, companies, investors, and free agents than by royal initiative. Iberians also led Europe in adapting laws and theories of governance designed to incorporate new subjects and to maintain control of distant lands. In the sixteenth century, Iberian institutions sponsored innovative projects to collect knowledge on the “new world” and its peoples. In many ways, then, Iberia had set the stage for Europe and America’s engagement with the wider world by 1600.

  PublisherDOI

• Presidential Address: Memories of Better Times before the Christians Came to Mexico and Guatemala

  Ethnohistory · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • History

  Abstract The author presented a draft of this essay as a presidential address at the 2012 meeting of the society in Springfield, Missouri. The theme of the meeting was “the apocalypse,” referring to a popular belief that the Mayan calendar predicted a cataclysmic event to occur in that year. The address proposed that the apocalypse had already occurred in the sixteenth century, when the Maya and many other Indigenous groups of the Americas were devastated by diseases brought by European immigrants. The author examined how the destruction was documented in Spanish surveys called the Relaciones geográficas, which were completed after a major epidemic devastated the Indigenous population of Mesoamerica. The author did not submit the paper for publication at the time. The current pandemic has lent some modest perspective to the many epidemic diseases that have swept through the Americas since the late fifteenth century. The author submitted this revised version of the original essay after editing the content, adding notes, and citing relevant works published since 2012.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Mapping Indigenous Land: Native Land Grants in Colonial New Spain</i>. By Ana Pulido Rull

  Western Historical Quarterly · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Geography
  • Political Science

  Ana Pulido Rull has written a first-rate book on a genre of painting in New Spain known as mapas de mercedes de tierras, preserved in the Mapoteca section of the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City. Many of us who have worked on the history of Indigenous communities in New Spain have consulted one or more of these “maps,” but Pulido is the first to study the entire corpus systematically, examining how Native artists crafted the paintings on behalf of communities or native elites to (1) request royal land grants, (2) oppose petitions for land grants that threatened their own interests, or (3) negotiate the terms of a land grant. Pulido dedicates a chapter to each of these three functions, after describing land distribution in New Spain and how Indigenous artists adapted Mesoamerican conventions of representing space to the early modern European genre of mapmaking. Numerous...

  PublisherDOI

• Preface and Acknowledgments

  University of Texas Press eBooks · 2019-12-31 · 2 citations

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author

  he Florentine Codex has inspired and catalyzed interdisciplinary scholarship over many decades.It has been scrutinized from multiple perspectives-as an incipient ethnography, a literary work, a dictionary, a historical record, and a theological reflection-and found to be all of these and more.Created by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and his indigenous collaborators, the document records two languages, features over two thousand images, and engages a broad range of fundamental questions, including those of authorship, literacy (both verbal and visual), intercultural dialogue, and historical memory.The Florentine Codex occupies a prominent nexus between the pre-Hispanic past and the New Spanish colonial present and, as such, opens up a fertile space to investigate the various epistemic systems that met, intermingled, and clashed in sixteenth-century Mexico.Until recently, studies of the manuscript focused on the very important task of translating and comprehending the bilingual texts.We acknowledge our collective debt to the illustrious scholars who have gone before us and share our appreciation for this magnificent illuminated manuscript.Breaking new ground, the authors in this collection of essays direct their critical analyses to the images of the Florentine Codex: their pictorial sources, their material components, and their correspondence with the accompanying narratives.In resituating the paintings within their textual matrix and a Nahua-Christian context, this volume as a whole complicates a Eurocentric understanding of the images and foregrounds the roles and agency of their indigenous makers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Un testamento zapoteco del valle de Oaxaca, 1614

  Tlalocan · 2019-01-23 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  En este artículo, colaboran lingüistas e historiadores en la transcripción, traducción y análisis de un texto escrito en zapoteco del Valle de Oaxaca en 1614, hallado en el ramo de Tierras del Archivo General de la Nación. El documento fue entregado como evidencia en un litigio con respecto a un terreno entre don Gerónimo de Grijalva, cacique y principal del pueblo de San Sebastián (sujeto a San Juan Tecticpac), y miembros del pueblo de San Sebastián. En respuesta, los miembros del cabildo zapoteco presentaron treinta y cuatro fojas de instrumentos y papeles en apoyo de su reclamo. Los papeles incluyen veintidós documentos distintos escritos en zapoteco, incluyendo testamentos y documentos sobre los terrenos que pertenecían a miembros del pueblo que datan de 1568 a 1792, referentes de alguna manera de la tierra disputada. La última voluntad y el testamento de Sebastián López, analizado en el presente trabajo, es uno de los menciona- dos documentos. Este artículo resume el litigio y el testamento en detalle, señala varios elementos importantes de su rico contexto histórico y presenta una vista de conjunto del zapoteco colonial del Valle con ejemplos del documento analizado.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Comments on Louise M. Burkhart’s “The Solar Christ in Nahuatl Doctrinal Texts of Early Colonial Mexico”

  Ethnohistory · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  I admire Ethnohistory’s many outstanding articles on Indigenous peoples of North America. But the articles that have influenced me most, perhaps naturally, tend to concern my own field of specialization, Mesoamerica. Nevertheless, I am reminded with each meeting and journal issue that one of the American Society for Ethnohistory’s most valuable contributions to the field is that it brings together people who do research in North, Central, and South America, and many other parts of the world.The society’s interest in Indigenous peoples and cultures outside of North America developed gradually, however. A review of the journal’s history reveals that it was not until the late 1960s that articles on “Latin” America began to appear in print. The first was a study of Aymara kingdoms in the sixteenth century by John Murra (1968), followed by William Griffen’s (1970) study of nativistic movements in Nuevo Mexico during the “Pueblo” Revolt of the late seventeenth century and a broad survey of “Middle American studies” by Robert Carmack (1971). This trickle turned into a slow stream by the late 1980s. Susan Kellogg (1986) published a pioneering article on Aztec inheritance patterns, using a variety of original Nahuatl- and Spanish-language records for the study of native property transmission in Mexico City before and after the conquest. Two years later, Robert Haskett (1988) examined the Nahua elite of Cuernavaca in the colonial period, based primarily on Nahuatl-language archival records. In the same year, Louise Burkhart (1988) wrote on the Christian-Nahua concept of the solar Christ. I think that each of the last three articles deserves recognition for employing new approaches to the study of changes in the early colonial period.After much deliberation, I have chosen to focus on Burkhart’s article, which appeared in my first year of graduate study, when I began to work with James Lockhart on colonial-era documents written in Nahuatl and other languages of Mesoamerica. I remember that her article made a distinct impression on me at that time.The abstract of the article reads: “The friars who ministered to the Nahua (Aztec) Indians incorporated into their Nahuatl teachings Old World symbolism which used the sun as a metaphor or type for Christ. The solar Christ had different connotations in Nahuatl because of differences between Christian and Nahua views of cosmology, morality, history, and the symbolism of sun and light. Indians today view Christ as a solar deity; Christian teaching may be one source of this identification” (Burkhart 1988: 234).There are several reasons to commend Burkhart’s article. First, it is a compact, polished essay that examines numerous dense sixteenth-century Nahuatl-language texts, offering many transcriptions and translations of the original language. Second, she displays a firm command of the Old and New Testament, late medieval theology, and mendicant strategies in New Spain. Third, she presents a clear theoretical framework, applying the concept of typology to various Spanish and Nahuatl texts and examining the language of those texts to identify points of convergence and divergence between Christian doctrine and Nahua cosmology without simplifying a complex matter. In doing so, Burkhart went beyond notions of “syncretism” and “survival” that were current at the time to reach a deeper understanding of processes of cultural contact. Fourth, she used several twentieth-century ethnographic accounts to suggest the longevity of this concept, without attributing it to either an Indigenous or a European origin, but rather acknowledging the possibility of multiple influences. Fifth, the writing is lucid and the argument compelling. This remarkable article, the result of her first conference paper, demonstrates not only an impressive skill set but also a maturity and clarity that have characterized Burkhart’s impressive body of scholarship since that time. This article appeared in the same year that her first book, The Slippery Earth, was published (Burkhart 1989). Like the article, her book examines native-language doctrinal writings to reconstruct a dialogue between Nahuas and priests, between Indigenous culture and Christianity, in the first generations after contact. Like the article, the book is now a classic in our field.There is no question that Burkhart’s article represented a new realm of scholarship, based on a close reading of native-language writings, one that has blossomed in the decades since 1988. And it is worth noting that she did not study at UCLA under James Lockhart, as did so many colonial Mexican scholars (trained in the United States) who read native-language texts. But she corresponded with him and commanded his respect. In fact, he commented on a draft of her article, and in many ways the conclusions that she drew in the article correspond with Lockhart’s (1992) concept of “double-mistaken identity” that he elaborated in his Nahuas after the Conquest. The concept described a process by which Nahuas and Europeans were not fully aware of the different interpretations that they held of the same concept, each proceeding from their own understanding or perception, a mutual misunderstanding that enabled many types of cultural interactions in the colonial period and beyond, such as the veneration of Christ as a solar deity.Other innovative articles on Mesoamerica followed Burkhart’s “Solar Christ,” using similar methodologies, such as Stephanie Wood’s (1991) fascinating study of late colonial títulos in her “Cosmic Conquest” article. Lisa Sousa and I were inspired by Wood’s work to publish a transcription and translation of two títulos primordiales from Oaxaca, written in the Nahuatl and Mixtec languages (Sousa and Terraciano 2003). In my first article published in the journal, when I transcribed and translated a Mixtec murder note written in 1684 (Terraciano 1998), I cite Burkhart more than once because she provided a model for my study of how Mixtecs and Spaniards may have held different ideas about concepts such as sin, shame, and adultery. And in my analysis of the “three texts” of Book XII of the Florentine Codex (Terraciano 2010), I sought Louise’s advice in translating an ambiguous Nahuatl-language passage in the manuscript.Since the late 1980s, the stream of articles in Ethnohistory on Latin America has turned into a river. In the 1990s, geographical coverage began to expand beyond central Mexico to the Andes, Amazonia, and Venezuela, to Yucatan and the Caribbean. The range of topics expanded, too; special issues appeared on women, the hacienda, sexuality, and writing. Nowadays, there are as many articles published in the journal on Latin America as on North America. Former editors Neil Whitehead and Matthew Restall deserve much credit for soliciting papers and planning special editions. But this movement is larger than the journal itself. The diversity of topics presented at our annual meetings, and the range of submissions to the journal, represent the society’s expanding membership and its movement toward becoming more of an international organization that engages hundreds of ethnohistorians worldwide.

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 3 Reading between the Lines of Book 12

  University of Texas Press eBooks · 2019-12-31 · 12 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Lisa Sousa

  Occidental College

  17 shared

• Matthew Restall

  Pennsylvania State University

  15 shared

• Pamela Munro

  2 shared

• Brook Danielle Lillehaugen

  Swarthmore College

  2 shared

• Aaron Huey Sonnenschein

  2 shared

• Michael Galant

  Center for Economic and Policy Research

  2 shared

• Jonathan Cutrell

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  1 shared

• Paul Clifton

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award (2001)
• Eby Award for the Art of Teaching (2001)
• Two Faculty Recognition awards from the UCLA Academic Advanc…
• UCLA Faculty Gold Shield Prize for Academic Excellence (2012…