ABOUT THIS BOOK

Originally published in Mexico as Gobierno y Sociedad en Nueva Espana, Ethelia Ruiz Medrano's seminal study Reshaping New Spain is now available in an updated English edition.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Ruiz examines the developing colonial institutions in Mexico and how they changed indigenous land ownership and labor laws to favor the new bureaucrats. This portrait of the emerging government in New Spain fills a critical niche in Latin American studies.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ethelia Ruiz Medrano is a researcher at the Direccion de Estudios Historicos, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia in Mexico and a visiting professor at The Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of 3 books with the University Press of Colorado, and the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.

REVIEWS

"... careful and abundantly documented, and tends above all to demonstrate the willingness of the Crown to allow substantial adjustments to policy by colonial officialdom, provided its essential jurisdiction was maintained.... Ruiz Medrano and the University Press of Colorado are to be congratulated for making her work accessible to an English-speaking readership....I will be asking my university library to order several copies of this important monograph."
—Adrian Pearce, Journal of Latin American Studies

“Provides a valuable, detailed account of the economic benefits of high office and the importance of kinship and social networks in early colonial New Spain. All colonialists will benefit from reading Reshaping New Spain."
—Mark A. Burkholder, New Mexico Historical Review

"[C]learly written and well-argued . . . a further development in the study of institutional-social relationships that is so much needed in Latin American history."
—Hispanic American Historical Review

“This book makes a very useful contribution to historians' understanding of the early colonial process."
—Jeremy Baskes, The Americas

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Tables and Maps

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The First Attempts at Royal Contral over the Territory

2. Reshaping New Spain

3. A Royal Official as Entrepreneur

Conclusions

Comments on the Source Material

Appendix

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

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