Weaving the Past is the first comprehensive history of Latin America's indigenous women. Concentrating mainly on native women in Mesoamerica and the Andes, Susan Kellogg also uncovers the history of indigenous people in other parts of South and Central America, including lowland peoples in and beyond Brazil, and Afro-indigenous peoples, such as the Garifuna of Central America. Common to these diverse peoples has been women's long history of labor and industry, political activism, and family and community sustenance. Here we meet women as diverse as Malinche, the translator and sometime consort of Hernan Cortes; Rigoberta Menchu, an activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner; and Domitila Barrios de Chungara, an activist in Bolivia's mining communities in the 1970s. Spanning prehispanic, colonial, and modern Latin America, Weaving the Past is a work of remarkable historical synthesis, drawing upon a wide range of sources from archaeology, anthropology, religion, and politics. Book jacket.

Susan Kellogg is Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of Houston.