This is a big, ambitious book; indeed, a daring one. Like John Tutino's celebrated Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (2011), The Mexican Heartland takes in a long stretch of Mexican history for a key region from the beginnings of Spanish colonization in the sixteenth century. Rather than general surveys, these are thesis-driven books that aim for, as the earlier text put it, “a regional history in global context, integrating production and regime power, patriarchy, ethnicity, and religion” (p. 23). Both books draw on the author's many years of accomplished, original research and his command of advances in scholarship since the 1960s, especially by Mexican and North American historians and social scientists.
Making a New World centers on the Bajío region north of the Valley of Mexico and mining areas nearby and further north during the colonial period, with an occasional glimpse ahead...
