Los primeros mexicanos. La vida criolla en el siglo XVI Open Access

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of history writing. There is the meticulously documented analysis of a specific aspect of history, and there is the broad survey of an epoch or of a people’s historical experience. Both have their limitations as an approach to truth; the first may be too clinical, like an autopsy, the second too subjective, with imaginary elements, but judiciously selected and in equilibrium, both are components of the best kind of historical study. The work here considered clearly falls into the second category and the author does not entirely escape its temptations, for he sometimes transposes the materials of his sources, mostly secondary in nature and mainly the narratives of early chroniclers and of 19th and 20th century historians, into colorful passages with invented discourses and dialogues for the sake of readability. It is essentially cultural history with literary overtones, useful and accurate enough in spirit, depicting in a kind of mural the religious and secular festivals of the 16th century in New Spain or Mexico, funerals, processions, mascaradas, the dread rites of the Inquisition, and the like, together with numerous portraits of saints and sinners of the period. Three or four chapters narrate in detail the incidents of the Ávila conspiracy of the middle 1560’s, a frustrated rebellion against the Crown’s laws to prevent an entrenched feudalism in New Spain though the institution of the encomienda, in which Martín Cortés, the son of the Conqueror, played an enigmatic role. The book closes with critical commentary on Creole literary figures and their writings and, summed up in the conclusion, is an illuminating discussion of the sharp differences of character and outlook which divided the Peninsular Spaniard from the American-born Spaniard, or Creole, already evident in the markedly changed attitudes and psychology of the conquistadors and their immediate descendants. Already these “first Mexicans” of the 16th century expressed the feelings and resentments that ultimately resulted in the secession of these overseas subjects from the Spanish empire. This is the second edition of a useful and revealing work originally published in 1953.