In the last fifteen years, scholarship on indigenous imagery from colonial Latin America has grown substantially in breadth and sophistication. Across the 1990s, as scholars rejected the dichotomy of resistance to colonial rule versus acquiescence, studies of indigenous agency and creativity became prominent, as did analyses of visual culture and ethnic identity. Recently, as more nuanced understandings of colonial processes have developed (especially in the fields of anthropology and history), interpretive frameworks have again begun to shift. Less crucial is indigenous agency, pure and simple; more pressing questions now concern indigenous practices as constituent of, and pivotal to, colonial society. Alessandra Russo’s El realismo circular represents a good example of this current work. It builds upon some of the sharpest earlier scholarship, yet proposes new ways of thinking about indigenous painting—in this case, maps from Mexico. The maps Russo examines were originally bureaucratic documents created between 1540 and 1660 as part of the land grant (merced) process in New Spain. Her book represents the first extended study to focus explicitly upon indigenous merced maps, some eight hundred of which are currently housed in the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) in Mexico City. Russo works across this archive and raises...