History Seminar: BANNED HISTORIES: Indigenous Life in Death Records c. 1815 Mexico

Convener(s): Eduardo Posada-Carbo

Speaker(s): Miriam Melton-Villanueva, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Mexican-language testament of Lucaria Maria, 1815

Miriam Melton-Villanueva Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada Las Vegas received her PhD from UCLA, is a Nevada Regents and UNLV Foundation Teacher, a Founding Senior Ford Foundation Fellow, and recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Yearlong Research Fellowship, and a Nevada Regents’ and Foundation Distinguished Teacher.   Her first book, The Aztecs at Independence: Nahua Culture Makers in Central Mexico 1799–1832, is the first ethnohistory to extend beyond the colonial period based on Nahuatl record-keeping that was supposed to have ended by 1800. In her 2025 chapter, “How Indigenous Women Created History in La Florida, 1600,” and in her 2018 Ethnohistory journal piece, “Cacicas, Escribanos, and Landholders: Indigenous Women’s Late Colonial Mexican Texts 1703–1832,” she identifies methods for writing marginalized voices into history. Her current book manuscript “Story and Power: Untold Histories of Sonora Mexico’s Folklore Archive of 1975-1976; explores historias as described in ancestral lore. Her students participate in field research, use archival materials, and reconstruct traditional civic spaces by creating public art.