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2 books match the query 'Colonial Mexico City'
Mapping an Indigenous Future
The Uppsala Map of Colonial Mexico CityJennifer R. Saracino
University of Texas Press, 0
The only known Indigenous-authored rendering of Mexico City from the sixteenth century.
Rediscovered in a Swedish library in the 1800s, the Uppsala Map of colonial Mexico City is a crucial Indigenous-authored document. Nearly a square meter, it was created by Nahua artists in 1540 shortly after the Spanish invasion. The Franciscan-trained artists have long been characterized as having passively adopted European aesthetics in their representation.
Jennifer Saracino challenges this view, arguing that the artists purposefully blended both Nahua and European visual strategies to legitimize and improve their position in colonial society. Building upon archival, ethnohistorical, and archaeological research, Saracino reinterprets the map’s network of roads and waterways, agricultural and urban features, glyphs, and depictions of Nahua people. Saracino argues that, amid dispossession and exploitation, the artists made a visual case for Nahuas to steward the local population and land in collaboration with colonial officials as privileged intermediaries. Challenging the assumption that the map was made merely in service to the crown, Mapping an Indigenous Future contends that these Nahua mapmakers capitalized on their proximity to viceregal elites to appeal for their rightful role as custodians of New Spain.
The Limits of Racial Domination
Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720R. Douglas Cope
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994
In this distinguished contribution to Latin American colonial history, Douglas Cope draws upon a wide variety of sources—including Inquisition and court cases, notarial records and parish registers—to challenge the traditional view of castas (members of the caste system created by Spanish overlords) as rootless, alienated, and dominated by a desire to improve their racial status. On the contrary, the castas, Cope shows, were neither passive nor ruled by feelings of racial inferiority; indeed, they often modified or even rejected elite racial ideology. Castas also sought ways to manipulate their social "superiors" through astute use of the legal system. Cope shows that social control by the Spaniards rested less on institutions than on patron-client networks linking individual patricians and plebeians, which enabled the elite class to co-opt the more successful castas.
The book concludes with the most thorough account yet published of the Mexico City riot of 1692. This account illuminates both the shortcomings and strengths of the patron-client system. Spurred by a corn shortage and subsequent famine, a plebeian mob laid waste much of the central city. Cope demonstrates that the political situation was not substantially altered, however; the patronage system continued to control employment and plebeians were largely left to bargain and adapt, as before.
A revealing look at the economic lives of the urban poor in the colonial era, The Limits of Racial Domination examines a period in which critical social changes were occurring. The book should interest historians and ethnohistorians alike.