In Transatlantic Ties, Ida Altman offers a study of peninsular-colonial social relations through a case study of migration from the Castilian town of Brihuega to Puebla de los Angeles in New Spain. The chapters are thematically based — economics, politics and public life, religion, marriage and the family, and social relations. Within these chapters, case studies of individuals and families (lucid, though at times densely genealogical) anchor the author’s generalizations on the particularities of quotidian experience in the two locales. Transatlantic Ties is offered as the second half of a study first presented in Altman’s 1989 publication of Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century (Univ. of California Press). The present book complements the earlier study by presenting a pioneering, multisited account of unassuming migrants, for the most part commoners who left a deteriorating peninsular environment (Brihuega, with its waning textile industry and concomitant declining...

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