Writings on Colonial Mexico

Developments in colonial Mexican history over the past thirty years have an excitement of their own. A generation ago students in this field seemed to be completing an established cycle without having yet decided upon any new directions for the future. Many young scholars in Mexican studies chose to work in the history of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, periods that had until then received relatively little serious attention. Anthropology for a time seemed to have more to say about Mexico than did history. Then gradually colonial studies began their recovery. New methods and new points of view made their appearance. Led by persons capable of seeing the subject from new vantage points—Silvio Zavala and José Miranda in Mexico, Lesley Byrd Simpson and Woodrow Borah in the United States, François Chevalier in France—historians of colonial Mexico began a process of reinterpretation that is still under way. The methodological innovations came principally from social science. The conceptual models were European, particularly French. But each new method and each new concept had to be made congruent with the known colonial Mexican ambiente. Applied to the body of information that was already in existence, and reinforced with new data from the archives, these influences are now in process of transforming the field.

The material dealt with in this article is abundant and complex. I propose to treat it first in relation to the conventional sub-periods— the age of conquest, the post-conquest sixteenth century, the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth century—and then in relation to some special themes and general tendencies.¹

Age of Conquest

The age of conquest, the most famous single period of Mexican and of all Spanish American colonial history, and the one that formerly received the largest share of historical attention, has steadily declined from its once paramount position. The Spanish sources for conquest were thoroughly explored by nineteenth-century historians, no major new sources have come to light, the traditional treatment of conquest is out of favor among professional historians, and the familiar saga is regarded as one to which little meaningful detail can be added. The conquest of Mexico is still understood to be the prototype and most important of all American conquests. Conquest is still a topic in textbooks and in comprehensive general treatments of Spanish America, of the type of Morales Padrón, Historia general de América (1962). But a change in emphasis is immediately apparent if we compare older histories—for colonial Mexico we think of Bancroft or Orozco y Berra— with those of more recent times. General treatments of colonial Spanish American history, such as The Spanish Empire in America (1947) of Clarence Haring or the Historia de España y América (1961) of Jaime Vicens Vives practically refrain from mentioning conquest. Even general histories of Mexico—the work of Charles Cumberland (1968) is a good example—may now have little to say on this topic.²

On closer inspection of course it becomes evident that what has happened is not the absolute elimination of conquest from the historians’ repertory but rather the rejection of the narrative epic of conquest, the rejection of the classic, or W. H. Prescott, handling of conquest. Prescott is still read occasionally, but the innumerable details of conquest are not easily reconciled—they have never been easily reconciled—with our understanding and treatment of the full three centuries of colonial history. Whereas this once meant the promotion of conquest and the demotion of the rest of the history, it now means the reverse. In the absence of a flourishing new literature, what we have now is new publication of the primary conquest texts, above all Cortés and Bernal Díaz.

Of the Cartas de Relación of Cortés the new editions and printings of the thirty years under review illustrate the widest possible range of interpretation. Eulalia Guzmáris edition of the letters (1958) presented the conquistador as a self-seeker and prevaricator, a characterization that the scholarly world has never fully accepted. The Graz edition of 1960 offered a facsimile of the Vienna Codex (the “original” manuscript of the letters), a useful publication but one with only a limited appeal (approximately 250 copies have been sold to date). More recently—omitting mention of a number of editions—A. R. Pagderi’s translation (1971) has given us the best English version, together with notes and glossary and maps and a full explanatory apparatus.³ One’s impression is that a considerable part of what might have been— under other circumstances—conquest scholarship or conquest reinterpretation in article or book form has appeared instead as commentary in new editions of the Cartas de Relación.

Bernal Díaz is a different case. Bernal Díaz provokes neither an equivalent emotionalism nor an equivalent scholarship. While the figure of Cortés carries the full array of conquest issues, Bernal Díaz has for us a much more limited and specific image. We are attracted to Bernal Díaz for his more modest role, his plainness and honesty, his self-identification as a soldier doing his best. Bernal Díaz harbors anti-establishment thoughts but is loyal in the end, as he should be. We do not really like to think of him as a conquistador. Bernal Díaz’s version of the conquest has a strong appeal, and there can be no doubt that it has become a more popular version than that of Cortés. I would hardly have believed it before making a survey for the preparation of this article, but the fact is that new editions of Bernal Díaz averaged more than one a year in the decade of the 1960s. As might be expected, no one of the new editions makes a significant scholarly contribution.

It is probably true (I may regret these words at some future time) that conquest, already so well known and so thoroughly understood, is not now going to be appreciably revised through any increment of new data. In the reconstruction of the warfare what we have had is a filling in of detail and a probing of limited side issues. Robert Chamberlain’s meticulous examination of conquest in Yucatán (1948) and Honduras (1953) provided us with a written history for those regions nearly as detailed and as comprehensive as that for central Mexico.⁴ In 1948, following the fourth centenary of the death of Cortés, a group of students in Spain published Estudios cortesianos, with some new data on the conquistador and his companions and their relations with others;⁵ and several of the authors—perhaps especially Josefina Muriel and Amada López de Meneses—have published relevant contributions elsewhere. It should be noted also that with respect to Cortés’s character, motivation, strategy, and purpose, the tendency of modern studies has been toward increased subtlety of interpretation. Ramón Iglesia, in a seminal work of 1942, identified Cortés as the charismatic leader, the letter writer who concentrated on the external and visible, the conquistador who admired Aztec civilization and at first proposed a policy of peaceful assimilation.⁶ A more sceptical trend was initiated by H. R. Wagner (1944), and scepticism (and antipathy) were carried to an extreme by Guzmán (1958) and Romero Vargas (1963-1964). Cortés’s intellectual indebtedness to Spanish legalism and his conception of empire were elaborated by Victor Frankl (1962) and José Valero Silva (1965). Finally J. H. Elliott, relating the conquest to the political factionalism of the period of Charles V, has explained Cortés’s actions and letters as efforts to win the support of the crown. In view of the rivalry that prevailed among Spaniards, Elliott reminds us that in some respects Montezuma was the least formidable of Cortés’s enemies.⁷ Thus conquest, so long seen as isolated drama, is gradually being connected with the main stream of Spanish and Spanish-American history.

The principal innovation in our current assessment of conquest source materials, on the other hand, is the new popularity accorded to the writings from the Indian side. The defeated Indian has always evoked a certain sympathy—the tradition comes to us from Las Casas and is still very much alive—but for a long time the sympathy remained unrelated to the special Indian reporting. Modern Nahuatl studies in Mexico, by Ángel Maria Garibay Rintana and Miguel León Portilla,⁸ while they have not led to the discovery of any new sources on conquest, have made the writings on the Indian side far more accessible in European languages. The native voices, with their terse, graphic observations, their seeming (but deceptive) naïveté, their unexpected points of view, provoke a special twentieth-century response. The texts tend to be short, and their most effective presentation has been in anthology form: Visión de los vencidos (1959), translated into English as The Broken Spears (1962), consisting of Indian writings on the conquest of Mexico and especially the siege of Tenochtitlán-Tlatelolco; and El reverso de la conquista (1964), dealing with the conquest of Mexico and other less well-documented conquests, including the Maya.⁹ Obviously the Indian sources do not take the place of the Spanish ones. But they do provide a fillip and a new perspective, and they do something to satisfy our need for an alternative version of the conquest, a version that avoids both the self-centered preoccupation of Cortés, the fearless leader, and the self-conscious homeliness of Bernal Díaz, the representative of the Spanish rank and file.

Biographies of conquistadores still leave much to be desired. The post-conquest life of Cortés, despite an immense richness of source material, has been studied only in part,¹⁰ and the difficulty of obtaining data seems to prohibit more extensive biographical treatment of most of his followers. From the work of C. Harvey Gardiner we have learned as much as the documentation will tell us about Martín López, the carpenter of the brigantines, and about Gonzalo de Sandoval.¹¹ Others have attempted biographical or semi-biographical treatment of Pedro de Alvarado, Bernal Díaz, and Nuño de Guzmán. But in conquistador biography, with the publication of Men of Cajamarca by James Lockhart, Peru has moved ahead of Mexico.¹²

Post-Conquest Sixteenth Century

Over all, the post-conquest sixteenth century is the period to which students have characteristically turned when it became evident to them that the conquests had been sufficiently examined. A generation ago the available primary texts—Motolinía, Mendieta, Torquemada, Cervantes de Salazar, and many others—as well as the serious works of research, gave a major emphasis to this period. The post-conquest sixteenth century could be approached as an outgrowth of the conquest period and a field in need of research for the rounding out of conquest studies, as the conquest period itself became less fruitful. We knew, or thought we knew, what happened in the conquest. But what did it all mean? What were the sixteenth-century consequences of conquest? Could one offset the blood-and-thunder traditions of conquest with some sober analytic institutional history that would place Spaniards in a more favorable light and at the same time respect the canons of judicious scholarly investigation?

In retrospect it would seem that these questions, or questions like them, underlay the principal Mexican colonial studies of the 1930s and 1940s, studies that have done so much to redirect the course and outline the character of subsequent scholarship. It was as if conquest, and the attention given to conquest, had attached to Spanish imperialism a stigma from which it would have to be freed. Students accordingly looked for a) subjects that would modify to Spain’s advantage the excessive charges of the Black Legend, and b) subjects capable of “respectable” scholarship in modern terms, i.e., cultural or institutional studies, or studies “solidly based” on archival investigations. The preferred period was always the sixteenth century—the same century as the age of conquest—for it was here, if anywhere, that alternative hypotheses of colonial origins could be developed and the most plausible foundations of colonialism identified.

The major response to this challenge, and probably the outstanding single scholarly work in the field in the decade of the 1930s, was the “Conquête spirtuelle” du Mexique by Robert Ricard (1933).¹³ Ricard scrupulously avoided the military conquest, presented a history of missionary labor as if it were the antithesis of the history of conquest, and yet ultimately saw the whole as a kind of conquest after all. A nonSpaniard, Ricard was the first to utilize without partiality the complex Mendicant literature, and he was indefatigable in his search for sources new and old. His point of view combined the devout with the practical, the particular with the universal. Students reading him now inevitably find some old-fashioned features. Our current inclination is to attribute less by way of independence and originality to the missionaries, and to think of them as much more closely bound to the institutions of encomienda and corregimiento than Ricard, relying principally on missionary records, allowed. But when we consider the magnitude of the task he undertook and the skill with which he organized his topic and controlled his sources, we must recognize the “Conquête spirituelle” as one of the genuine classics of the field.

In Spain, where the Black Legend aspect of conquest was most sensitively felt, a corresponding response lay in the field of legal-administrative research. Students of the administrative structure of empire and of imperial legislation still depend heavily on the works of Rafael Altamira, José M. Ots Capdequí,¹⁴ and others of this school, and though the writings are often thought by the freer thinkers of a later generation to be turgid and uninspired, they have a discipline and an inner consistency that command respect. Their emphasis on the legal “reality,” rather than on the ephemera of actual happening and human conduct, opens them to the charge of partiality. But it is a partiality that, in the outstanding cases, falls short of apologetics and distortion, and without them our knowledge of the institutional base of colonial history would be much less extensive than it is. Beyond that, one’s strong impression is that for most historians this Spanish preoccupation with institutional legalism and formalism has fallen short of exonerating Spanish conduct. Legal history continued, or revived, a tradition of the sixteenth century, in which the abstractions of law took the place of concern for what people did, whereas, in the more behavioral historical outlook of our day, it is the action itself and the analysis of the action that are assigned the primary position. Thus, it would appear that for the nonHispanic world of criticism Ricard did more to offset the negative implications of conquest than any Spanish historian.

Several other writings stand out in the 1930s and early 1940s for their departure from earlier traditions and their clear prefigurement of the important work to come. In the publications of Silvio Zavala some fundamental material on sixteenth-century encomienda became available, especially on attitudes toward and legal efforts to control the institution.¹⁵ In addition to encomienda, Zavala was attracted to the philosophical aspect of Spanish imperialism, the question of just war between Spaniards and Indians, and the issue of Indian slavery. His carefully documented Instituciones jurídicas en la conquista de America (1935) publicized these and related subjects for a new generation. A rapid series of studies—La “Utopia” de Tomás Moro en la Nueva España (1937), Ideario de Vasco de Quiroga (1941), New Viewpoints on the Spanish Colonization of America (1943), Servidumbre natural y libertad cristiana (1944)—made Zavala’s material, for a time, the newest and most attractive of all Mexican research.¹⁶

The early work of two United States scholars, Lesley B. Simpson and Lewis Hanke, may also be understood in this context. Both published extensively before 1945. Simpson’s initial studies in the field dealt with encomienda (1929) and with other administrative controls over Indians, including repartimiento labor, enslavement, and congregación (1934-1940).¹⁷ Hanke sought to identify, above all, the ideological expressions of Spanish imperialism. His earliest writing dealt with the political theories of Las Casas (1935) and the requerimiento (1938).¹⁸ Like Zavala, Hanke demonstrated an ability to select and emphasize intriguing items of the history. As with a number of other studies of the period, including those of Altamira and Ots Capdequí, as well as some of Zavala’s researches, Hanke’s works did not relate exclusively to the colony of Mexico. But they immediately became a part of the Mexicanist’s bibliography, and their influence was probably greater for research on Mexico than for any other part of Spanish America. To the new generation of scholars the work of Zavala, Simpson, and Hanke seemed less technical, less formidable, more innovative, and more interesting than did the work of the Spanish legal-institutional historians, with which it otherwise had many affinities.

It seems clear that all these studies were pointing the way toward the type of research that emerged in the late 1940s and which, with some variation, has persisted ever since. But two further elements were needed: a more local orientation in the regions and towns of colonial Mexico and a direct concern with Indians.

The attention given to local history, especially local Indian history, is what principally distinguishes work in this period since the late 1940s, and it has given the post-conquest sixteenth century an immense new bibliography and a new historiographical lease on life. The concept of localism had always been present, of course. Many communities boasted local antiquarians who published, sometimes amateurishly, in the Boletín of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, or some similar periodical. The Boletín of the Archivo Nacional de la Nación was already issuing illustrative local documentation. Ricard had demonstrated the potentialities of a local concern, with attention to events outside the main centers, and to the differential conduct of individuals and groups on the scene. And Zavala and Hanke had occasionally dipped into local events, as in the Quiroga communities of Santa Fe or the peaceful conversion of Vera Paz. But it seems likely that important influences came also from other quarters, especially anthropology and the special field of Mexican art history. In anthropology the idea of the community study was at that time in its heyday. The tradition went back to Manuel Gamio’s great work on Teotihuacán in the early 1920s, and though it suffered a relapse thereafter, it was revived in the 1930s and 1940s.¹⁹ Its period of major prominence may be identified between the two works on Tepoztlán, by Robert Redfield (1930) and Oscar Lewis (1951).²⁰ Lewis gave more attention to the colonial history of his community than most, and he worked for a time, not wholly successfully, in the Archivo General de la Nación. With respect to art history, where provenience and local styles are always matters of importance, there existed already a connoisseur’s tradition of visits made to local towns and studies undertaken of local churches and monasteries. The imperatives for a community emphasis were far greater in art history than in political history. Manuel Toussaint, the dean of Mexican art historians, had published on Taxco (1931) and Pátzcuaro (1942), and his Paseos coloniales (1939) paid more attention to provenience and localities—Tepozotlán, Atitlaquía, Teposcolula and many others—than did any general history.²¹

For all historians, Mexico could be understood as a land of thousands of distinct communities. But of the writers of the major works of history only Ricard seemed to have responded to this fact. The thought must have occurred simultaneously to many students that the new need was for studies of what “really happened” in the diverse areas of the post-conquest colony. Several individual historians moved from ideological topics to concrete local topics at the time. John Parry, known as the author of The Spanish Theory of Empire (1940), gave us in 1948 our first examination of a regional audiencia and its problems.²² José Miranda moved from Victoria y los intereses de la conquista de América (1947) to a detailed study of Indian tribute (1952).²³ Miranda’s tribute history, to be sure, retained many features of the way the legal-institutional historians thought. But it depended upon the town-by-town record of tribute exaction (published at the same time, as El libro de tasaciones),²⁴ and it had a specificity of local exemplification that much enhanced its value. Woodrow Borah, a pioneer in this as in so much else, was one of the first serious students to work in the archives of Oaxaca, and the result was his article on tithe collection (1941) and much of the data for his major study of the silk industry (1943).²⁵ Zavala’s discussions of labor history in the prefaces to Fuentes para la historia del trabajo (1939-1946)²⁶ likewise drew their innovating conclusions from enactments for individual communities. The seminal demographic study of Sherburne F. Cook and Simpson (1948) was essentially an accumulation of data on specific towns, and George Kubler’s Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century (1948), one of the outstanding works of all time on the post-conquest sixteenth century, depended throughout on the exact and comparative data from distinct communities.²⁷ An indication of the abrupt character of this reorientation in the historian’s perspective may be appreciated in the maps that were published as adjuncts to the scholarly studies of these years. The maps of both Cook and Simpson, Population of Central Mexico, and Kubler, Mexican Architecture, were themselves scholarly contributions, emphasizing the districts and the towns. Not since Ricard had any historical work included any comparable map, and the Kubler map and the Cook-Simpson map went far beyond Ricard for comprehensiveness and accuracy. Not until Peter Gerhard, Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (1972),²⁸ a regional compendium of extraordinary scope and detail and value, would we have an equivalent step forward in historical mapping.

Ricard, Zavala, Simpson, and Hanke all dealt in one way or another with Indians, or with relations between whites and Indians, but none of the four examined Indian society itself or depended on any scientific, or anthropological, knowledge. However sympathetic and understanding, all wrote from a non-Indian point of view. It remained for a differently oriented student, Robert Barlow, to demonstrate the availability of Indian texts and their application to reconstructions of history. For this there was also some precedent, as in the much earlier work of Eduard Seler. But Barlow brought to the task an energy and zest and personal quality that were unique. His interests were archaeological as well as historical, and part of his achievement pertains to the artifacts and texts of the pre-conquest societies. But for his time he was a major authority also on early colonial Indian manuscripts and on codices relating to the post-conquest period. Much of his material was published in Tlalocan in the interval between 1943, when he founded this journal, and 1951, when he died. But a large part also was left unpublished (and because of his particular working habits unpublishable). Barlow never wrote the major work that he might have written, but he was, nevertheless, an influential figure in the transition to an Indian history for the post-conquest sixteenth century.²⁹

The first large-scale statistical study of the Indian was The Population of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century (1948) by Cook and Simpson,³⁰ a demographic analysis that made an immediate impact on the field. It is true that in a swiftly changing scene the work fell rapidly out of date and that it is now rarely consulted. Its understanding of “clerical” and “military” estimates, its multiplication factors for deriving total from partial population figures, its mistaken identifications and other errors, all give it an antiquated look. But we should not forget that Cook and Simpson established the pattern of demographic analysis that still persists. If some of the details of the 1948 study are no longer valid, this is partly because so much has been done in this subject during the intervening twenty-five years. Books that endure often do so through the absence of competition, for they fail to stimulate further scholarship, they dominate the bibliography by default, and thus no one knows how vulnerable they really are. The 1948 work of Cook and Simpson stands at the opposite extreme. It did generate other studies, and these demonstrated its weaknesses sooner than might otherwise have been the case.

As every student knows, the new demographic writings followed thick and fast in the University of California’s Ibero-americana series. Cook, Simpson, and Borah were the principal authors. With respect simply to the number of persons being studied, the chief scholarly result was a new estimate of 25.2 million for central Mexico in 1519, presented in the 1963 study of Cook and Borah, The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest,³¹ and probably the single best-known “finding” of all Mexican research in recent years. If the Cook-Simpson figure of some 11 million was criticized, as it was, for being too high, the new Cook-Borah figure appeared to conservative readers even more exaggerated, and it became the subject of discussion and controversy. Could America conceivably have had a larger population than Europe in the sixteenth century? Were the Matrícula de tributos and other essentially Aztec documents capable of being interpreted in demographic terms? If so, were they really trustworthy? Could one extend backward in time the population graph derived from later colonial tribute records and similar texts, or were the demographic changes too complex to permit simple extrapolation? These, and many other problems raised by the new demography, received frequent comment in the aftermath of the Cook and Borah work of 1963, and many of the relevant subjects are still regarded as controversial. Colonial Mexico was an obvious forerunner here. Only now are we beginning to see examinations of the native population of other parts of America that can begin to be compared, in scope and precision, with those already presented for Mexico.

But the population of 1519 was only one of the subjects of the new demography. Another was the dramatic decline in Indian numbers in the sixteenth century, a decline that could be quite convincingly traced in quantitative terms from about 1560 on. Pursuing this, Cook and Borah developed their progressively more-sophisticated procedures for converting partial population figures into total population figures for selected dates. With a new precision they examined the Spanish colonial tribute system and its changes over time. Indian society in its original composition and in its changing structure throughout the sixteenth century received close attention. In The Population of Central Mexico in 1548 (I960)³² Borah and Cook subjected to analysis one of the principal documents of the pre-1560 period, the Suma de visitas, and compared its data with those of the later period, reaching new conclusions on visitations and exempt classes and other topics. Slave and mayeque Indians not included in the Suma were included in later counts, and this explains why the later figures could be larger, even though the total population declined. Thus the supposed increase in population during the 1550s and 1560s, earlier noted by Kubler, could be explained away. In The Indian Population of Central Mexico, 1531-1610 (1960) Cook and Borah found a rate of population decline nearly twice as great in the lowlands as in the highlands. Again in The Population of the Mixteca Alta, 1520-1960 (1968) they plotted, for a limited region, the changes during the whole period from conquest to modern times, demonstrating that despite the recovery of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the area had more inhabitants in the early sixteenth century than it has today.³³

Other work on sixteenth-century Indians has been abundant in the period since World War II, and the number of students engaged on researches on Indians has steadily increased. The documentation relating to Spanish controls over native peoples has been examined with a new thoroughness, as in studies by Jean-Pierre Berthe (on enslavement) and Howard Cline (on the civil congregation). Case studies of Indian towns or Indian areas by Delfina López Sarrelangue, Ronald Spores, and others now provide us with concrete local data that make it possible to trace the changing conditions of native life in the postconquest years. My own works—on Tlaxcala for the sixteenth century, and the Valley of Mexico for the colonial period in general—are basically studies of Indian communities under successive Spanish pressures.³⁴ The extensive and intricate codex literature also, relating to both pre-conquest and post-conquest history, is progressively being brought under control. Birgitta Leander’s work on the Códice de Otlazpan, and Joaquín Galarza’s and Hanns Prem’s glyphic translations, exemplify the new skills in this area.³⁵ The work of Pedro Carrasco has been especially fruitful in deriving ethnohistorical data from colonial texts. In the tradition of Barlow, but with more professional knowledge of the techniques of history and anthropology, Carrasco uses written or pictorial texts in Spanish or Nahuatl to provide data on Indian family structure, caciques, lineages, land tenure, marriage, and whatever else they can illuminate.³⁶ Codical studies everywhere have been stimulated by the superb new editions of Mexican pictorials issued by the Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt in Austria.

Finally, in this connection we should comment upon the last volumes of the Handbook of Middle American Indians, edited by Robert Wauchope.³⁷ Beginning with Volume 12, and continuing through Volume 15, the HMAI deals with Indian history, or “ethnohistory,” principally of the post-conquest sixteenth century. But it is significant that the editors decided in 1959, when they first began discussions on this matter, that the HMAI was not the place, and the materials were not ready at hand, for substantive works of Indian history. Instead the context and sources of that history, and the intricate bibliographical interrelations of the sources, are the subject matter of these volumes. The work is a monument to the vision and scholarship and editorial skill of the late Howard Cline, and it includes important articles by him, as well as by Henry B. Nicholson, John Glass, and many others, on such subjects as the Relaciones geográficas, Sahagún, the pictorial codices, and the prose writings of the Indian tradition. Throughout, the main point of view is bibliographical, and it is anticipated that students will use and depend on these materials for many years in the future.

It is clear that during the past few decades historiographical work has been directed in large part to the Indian. Relatively few outstanding works remained uninfluenced by this major trend. The continuing studies in religious history, while they have not been able to avoid the subject of Indians, have nevertheless tended to preserve the Hispanic perspective. We think here of John Phelan’s important study of Mendicant intellectual history, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans (1956), the researches on Zumarraga (1961) and the Mexican Inquisition (1969) by Richard E. Greenleaf and on Vasco de Quiroga by Finían B. Warren (1963), and of Enrique Dussel’s study of the episcopacy (1970), and Jakob Baumgartner’s work on the liturgical” mission (1971-1972).³⁸ The prefaces and commentaries in the many new editions of Motolinía, Cervantes de Salazar, and other sixteenth-century classics, especially those written by Edmundo O’Gorman, fall in the same category. In social history the private letters studied by Enrique Otte and Norman Martin’s work on vagabonds (1957) are exceptions to the anthropological direction of modern research on the post-conquest sixteenth century, as are the few works dealing with Spanish colonial culture, such as Irving Leonard’s Books of the Brave (1949), and the continuing studies of Las Casas.³⁹

Seventeenth Century

As every student of this subject knows, we have done less well with the seventeenth century than with the sixteenth. The reasons seem clear. In the sixteenth century one can study the beginnings of things, how they were founded, and how they grew. To Ricard the sixteenth century was the période fondamentale, the one on which all else depended.⁴⁰ In this view the seventeenth century necessarily assumed a secondary status; everything that happened seemed derivative. At the most, seventeenth-century history seemed to express the realization or implementation of principles originating in the sixteenth. Hence, very little was done with the seventeenth century, beyond calling attention to our ignorance of it. But in recent years we do have some treatments of seventeenth-century subjects, and the interesting point is that while they depend upon traceable continuities from the sixteenth century, they have a distinctly new emphasis. Students seem now to be interested in this period more for its reaction against sixteenth-century stresses and its deviation from sixteenth-century patterns than for its simple or linear fulfillment of sixteenth-century potentialities.

One theme has been land tenure, a subject in which again Simpson was an early pathfinder. In Exploitation of Land in Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century (1952) Simpson’s point was that the territories vacated by Indians through depopulation were seized by new Spanish owners and used for agriculture and grazing. Simpson’s terminal date was 1620, taken as the approximate climax of an economic crisis, “as is indicated by the marked falling off in the demand for land grants.”⁴¹ It was a quantitative analysis based on the maps of the sixteenth-century population studies, and it did indeed demonstrate the immense formal bestowal of the lands of New Spain to the new owners through the sixteenth century and, at a declining rate, into the first quarter of the seventeenth century.

The comprehensive examination of this subject by François Chevalier, La formation des grands domaines au Mexique,⁴² appeared also in 1952 and gave more attention to the seventeenth century. Whereas Simpson’s chief sources were records of the original mercedes, Chevalier looked more to the developed estate, the hacienda. Much of his work, to be sure, traversed the period of origins, the disruption of original land tenure, and the expansion of cattle ranches and other landed institutions in the sixteenth century. But this was now relatively familiar ground, and Chevalier emphasized that the “new rural communities dominated by family aristocracies were developments of the later period. Their greatest prominence came in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and they were to suffer prolonged attack in the nineteenth and especially in the twentieth centuries. Of course, neither Simpson nor Chevalier dealt with the post-independence phases, but the reader’s sense of the chronology of hacienda history was much clarified by their studies, and the scholarly progress made since G. M. McBride’s original outline of the Land Systems of Mexico (1923)⁴³ now seemed enormous. A salient point was the difference between the sixteenth century, a time of numerous, small and modest-sized mercedes, and the seventeenth century, a time of large estates and powerful hacendados.

It is no disparagement of Chevalier’s achievement to observe that for all its merits his work left much undone. The details of the economy of the haciendas, for the seventeenth century, as for later periods, had still to be brought into organized form. Hacienda typology, regional variants, and the relationship to other forms of landholding still need much more work if the complexity of these subjects is to be understood. The aristocratic society of the hacienda—its men and women, the cousins and the hangers-on, the intricacies of its patronage, and many other social, or socioeconomic, features of its operation—remain obscure. What will solve these problems is systematic assault upon the archives by students alert to the questions and their implications. The process has already been begun, notably by William Taylor, who shows, for Oaxaca, a pattern of a less extreme Spanish usurpation and a more persistent Indian landholding than that described for the north by Chevalier or by others as a “standard” Mexican pattern.⁴⁴

The second major subject to emerge in recent researches on the seventeenth century relates to the overall economic condition of the colony. Again a point of departure is the Indian depopulation research of the Berkeley demographers. In New Spain’s Century of Depression (1951),⁴⁵ Borah developed the hypothesis that population loss in the sixteenth century meant a corresponding reduction in the labor force and, hence, in productivity; and that Spanish colonial society through the seventeenth century accordingly suffered shortages of supplies. Borah related depopulation to the decrease in mining output, to the development of repartimiento and peonage, and to the emergence of the hacienda as a Spanish-controlled productive unit. Similar depopulation elsewhere in Spanish America had similar results, and the demographic and economic decline of Spain itself in the seventeenth century further contributed to the Mexican depression.

Refinement of the thesis of the seventeenth-century depression has arisen from several quarters during the last two decades. It has tended to focus on specific features of the problem: mining, export and import, and the development of a new economic self-sufficiency in the colony. The statistics of Pierre and Huguette Chaunu on the colonial transatlantic trade indicated a commercial decline only in the 1620s, whereas Borah had located the beginning of the downward trend in the epidemie of 1576-1579.⁴⁶ Peter Bakewell, studying Zacatecas, found that the decline of the great silver center came only with the collapse of production after 1635. Data such as these were not wholly irreconcilable with the depression thesis, for the whole movement might have been so gradual and so complex that a depopulation starting in the 1570s manifested itself as depression in trading goods and silver only generations later. Indeed, though Borah’s explanation for depression began in the 1570s, the depopulation itself began in the 1520s.

The more marked tendency of recent years nevertheless has been to question explicitly the validity of a “century of depression.’ Bakewell’s principal work so far, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700,⁴⁷ besides contributing much new information on the northern economy, offers a clear alternative to some fundamental tenets of the depression thesis. Bakewell shows that depopulation did not seriously reduce the supply of workers in the mines, for these characteristically gravitated toward free labor and draft labor. The supply of mercury was a more important factor than depopulation in limiting the output of silver. What changed was nothing less than the basic character of the colonial economy. In the sixteenth century the white population depended on Indian productivity. In the seventeenth century the economy had become capitalistic, and it was freed from its dependence on Indians. The reason why New Spain imported fewer goods from the parent country after the 1620s was not that it could not afford those goods. Rather it no longer needed them.

In brief, then, two distinct lines of investigation converge on the crisis of the seventeenth century. In the Berkeley studies there is a progression or internal linkage: Indian depopulation, vacated land, grazing, tighter labor systems, hacienda and peonage, inflation, economic scarcity. In the studies that emphasize silver and oceanic commerce a reduced attention is given to Indian depopulation and problems of the labor supply. Here it is the financial records and the statistics of oceanic trade that provide the data. The student of colonial Mexico has traditionally approached these latter subjects, not through local studies—as with conquest or Indian depopulation—but through surveys of the entire imperial operation—as in the famous researches on prices by Earl J. Hamilton and on the Seville trade by the Chaunus. John Lynch, likewise reviewing the subject from an imperial perspective, further questions the hypothesis of an imperial economic crisis, arguing that Spain’s recession provided the opportunity for colonial expansion, and that a major shift in the economic balance occurred from parent country to colony.⁴⁸ Comparative colonial history is still another promising line of investigation. A survey by David Brading and Harry Cross, admittedly somewhat speculative, comparing colonial silver mining in Mexico and Peru, attributes the Mexican depression wholly, or almost wholly, to the reduced supplies of royal mercury after 1630. In comparison with Peru, Brading and Cross are led to speak of an “artificial” occasion for the crisis in Mexico (because of deliberate royal withholding of mercury), and they dismiss the Hamilton figures on silver import as reflections of inefficiency and corruption.⁴⁹

Though the conclusions tend now to be articulated in polar terms, the hope, of course, is that the various interpretations of the seventeenth century, or many of them, will eventually be reconciled. In all scholarly work there is a natural initial tendency to hypothesize generalities based on the immediate evidence examined. Reconciliation, then, consists of qualifying these generalities in relation to other generalities, while the evidence and its more limited application remain valid. Chevalier’s picture of the hacienda may not be wrong so much as broadly sketched. It depends to a large degree on documentation from northern Mexico, and it tends to overlook deviations from what are understood to be standard patterns. Chevalier explains the hacienda more in terms of characteristic Spanish drives than in terms of changes in local population. But of course both “causes” were present, and a remaining task is to identify their interrelationship. Similarly with the depression. Most of the consequences of depopulation sketched by Borah do make sense. If the mining economy did resolve its particular labor problem successfully, this eliminates a portion of the depression thesis, but it does not in itself destroy the remainder. If the total economy changed, depopulation was surely a factor in that change, for the change consisted precisely of an emancipation from Indian labor and supplies. A tentative interpretation is that Borah’s conclusions are drawn from the agricultural economy, that Bakewell’s and others’ come from the mining economy, and that again the task is to examine the interrelationship.

Eighteenth Century

Our tradition of research in eighteenth-century Mexican history stands, with respect to quantity, somewhere between the meager seventeenth century and the abundant sixteenth century. The original eighteenth-century documentation itself offers comprehensive sources of the type of Eusebio Buenaventura Beleña, Antonio Villa-señor y Sánchez, and Fabián de Fonseca and Carlos de Urrutia,⁵⁰ and this gives the period an historiographical advantage, at least over the seventeenth century. The Bourbons filled their bureaucratic posts with able people and exacted of them literate surveys of what they saw, and historians have profited from an explicit primary-secondary documentation that is lacking for the seventeenth century. The late colonial viceregal memorias were masterpieces of exposition. In the writings of Alexander von Humboldt we had as precise a picture of Mexico ca. 1800 as anyone was likely to want.⁵¹ This, with the ample documentation for the sixteenth century, induced an even greater neglect of the seventeenth century; for when one has the beginning and end, one is tempted to think that one has it all.

Moreover just as the sixteenth century recommended itself as a beginning, so the eighteenth century recommended itself as an end result prior to independence. Historical thinking here has tended to focus upon the Enlightenment as the abstract agency of eighteenth-century change, and specifically upon the Bourbon reforms as the crucial application of the Enlightenment for the Hispanic world. Studies of these subjects were mainly institutional for a long time. The traditional approach has been to select a particular subject or set of subjects not studied before—the Mining Guild of Walter Howe (1949), the Fuero Militar of Lyle McAlister (1957), the Banco de San Carlos of Calderón Quijano (1963)—and to examine it against the background of Enlightenment, or reform, or the conditions of the late colony. Some first-rate studies emerged from this point of view, and the result has been an accumulated body of data of very respectable size and range.⁵² But for the eighteenth century we cannot, as we can for the post-conquest 16th century, identify an early group of avant-garde historians whose writings stimulated others, and to whom we now look back as the leaders of a new tradition. Advances in eighteenth-century work appear later and less systematically than do those of the post-conquest sixteenth century, and Mexico is seen less as a special subject and more as a part of the total empire. The uniqueness of Mexico, so evident to Ricard and others for the period 1525-1570, is now less evident.

For historians in Mexico the changed intellectual climate of the eighteenth century and, especially, the ideological antecedents of the independence movement have been favorite subjects. The writings include Pablo González Casanova, El misoneismo y la modernidad cristiana en el siglo XVIII (1948); Gloria Grajales, Nacionalismo incipiente en los historiadores coloniales (1961); and Bernabé Navarro, Cultura mexicana moderna en el siglo XVIII (1964).⁵³ The writings fit with a more far-reaching theme of modern Mexico, namely historical self-identification and the definition of the national spirit and meaning, subjects that non-Mexicans pursue, naturally, from a certain distance. The relation between a self-contained history, developing from earlier periods, and the imported ideologies of independence has been a matter of concern here, and the perspectives have been political, intellectual, and cultural. Unlike most colonial studies by non-Mexicans, the work on the eighteenth century by Mexican scholars perceives the subtle relationships between ideological and social history and retains an underlying awareness of what was to follow independence.

It has always been supposed that peninsulares monopolized the high political positions of the colony. But innovative recent work has demonstrated some important qualifications in this view, which is another consequence of the tendency to concentrate on the sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries. It is clear now that, at least for a time in the eighteenth century, creoles held a majority of the offices of the Audiencia of Mexico, and that these offices were available to them through royal sale. M. A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler, using new documentation from Seville and Simancas, have shown that in the first half of the eighteenth century the crown sold approximately one-fourth of the American audiencia offices, and that creoles were appointed in far larger numbers than we once believed. Specifically for the Mexican audiencias the Burkholder-Chandler researches, as well as those of Brading and others, open some fascinating avenues for study.⁵⁴ The peninsular-creole relationships need to be determined for all periods. The sale of Mexican offices needs to be precisely studied, and the important pioneering work of Parry on this subject needs to be carried further, especially with respect to the salaried offices of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We must inquire more closely into the processes of the late eighteenth century when presumably the creole influx was halted. That so fundamental a misconception could have persisted so long with respect to audiencias inevitably raises further questions with respect to the other offices in the government, both high and low. As of the present, the whole subject of the political situation of creoles is open to many questions; and in the years to come students will surely be rethinking their long-standing interpretation of the relation of creole society to the independence movement.

In the work of Nancy Farriss (1968)⁵⁵ we have for the first time an account of the eighteenth-century alienation of the clergy from the crown, an important matter in a colony where the clerical role in independence was so strong. Asunción Lavrin and others have been active also in researches on the history of ecclesiastical institutions in the eighteenth century.⁵⁶ The economics of late colonial church history, a subject of far-reaching importance, is also beginning to appear, particularly in reference to land. In Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (1972) Taylor identified the church as the leading late colonial landlord in Oaxaca, and he specified for the first time for any eighteenth-century region the processes of ecclesiastical acquisition. At least for Oaxaca it is wrong to assert that the principle of ecclesiastical mortmain prohibited alienation. Recent dissertations, not yet fully published, of James D. Riley and Herman Konrad on the management of Jesuit estates are also extremely informative on church land.⁵⁷ Lavrin has published some good studies of the economies of the late colonial nunneries. But there is still no work on eighteenth-century church wealth as a whole or on the large role of the church as a financier to compare with that of Michael Costeloe and Jan Bazant for the 19^th century.⁵⁸ An evident tendency in colonial ecclesiastical history is still to concentrate on the post-conquest sixteenth century and, except for the continuing mission area in the north, to treat the remainder of the colonial period with a certain caution. The reason seems to be that the church is regarded as a more attractive institution in its mission role than in its landlord and banker role. But this is not the kind of consideration that ought to affect historical research.

The concept of the seventeenth century as a period of crisis and depression inevitably evokes a corresponding concept of the eighteenth century as a period of progress and prosperity. But just as depression is far from being a uniform attribute of the seventeenth century, so the evidence for prosperity in the eighteenth is elusive, inconsistent, and complex. We should note that, by convention, “eighteenth century” in these studies may refer to a period beginning about 1750, and that the transition from “seventeenth century” to “eighteenth century” remains quite vague. In the broader perspective, the quantifiable evidence for the seventeenth century demonstrates decline, while that for the eighteenth century demonstrates increase. But two of our foremost eighteenth-century studies—Epidemic Disease in Mexico City, 1761-1813, (1965), by Donald Cooper, and Precios del maíz y crisis agrícolas, 1708-1810, (1969), by Enrique Florescano—address themselves directly to variants in this pattern.⁵⁹ Cooper’s is a comprehensive study of epidemics, the social conditions within which epidemics flourished, and the administrative inability to control them. Florescano’s is a modern, technically adept examination of maize prices, showing some extreme fluctuations and identifying cyclical periods of “crisis.” The timing of these processes, like the timing of the seventeenth-century “depression,” is a matter of much complexity. Florescano demonstrates an unexpected parallelism of movement between maize prices in Mexico and wheat prices in Europe. In a detailed study of the Oaxaca cochineal trade, Brian Hamnett finds a productivity limited precisely by the Bourbon reforms. Oaxaca alcaldes mayores and Spanish merchants had developed a prosperous cochineal trade dependent on the repartimiento or distribution of funds to Indians, but reform (which sought to abolish the repartimiento) disturbed the traditional economy and weakened the power of Mexico City over the area.⁶⁰

In the major work of Brading, Mines and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico (1971),⁶¹ the new socioeconomic perspectives have been applied with striking results to the late eighteenth century. Brading depends on earlier studies and goes beyond them. A reassuring feature of his work for more conventional students is his insistence on the sustained relevance of older themes, including the reforms, the Gálvez visita, and the expulsion of the Jesuits. Brading’s innovation lies in his judicious reworking of these topics, now in relation to the local Guanajuato economy, the lives and careers of individuals, and the perpetuation of their families and fortunes.

In Guanajuato and the Bajío, the Bourbon commercial reforms brought a change from control by a wealthy minority to participation by a larger number. A looser trade system modified the old monopoly. In the area that was soon to become primary in the Hidalgo revolution, new economic opportunities affected mining, agriculture, manufacture, and trade. But the class that exploited most fully the new economic opportunities here was the peninsular class, for immigrants from northern Spain provided the initiative and drive while creole energies lagged. A frequent event was the marriage of the ambitious peninsular immigrant to the wealthy creole heiress. Brading is the first student of Mexican history to engage in the kind of combined genealogical-financial research that has been so successful in European historiography. Genealogy, which not so long ago occupied the lowest position in the historians’ list of sub-fields, has taken on a new meaning, and it has become an essential tool for investigations of families—especially families of wealth—in society. Limited, purposeful genealogical research may be expected to play an important role in Mexican historiography during the coming years. From the point of view of scholarship it should surpass in importance both the older genealogy—elitist and personally motivated—and biography, which has never been a major part of our writing on colonial Mexico.⁶²

Topics and Trends

Some important works fall outside the chronological divisions. The student of colonial Mexico must be aware of the relevant literature on colonial Spanish America as a whole: Magnus Mömer on race mixture and on Spanish residence in Indian towns, and Peter Boyd-Bowman’s studies of colonists’ peninsular origins. The general literature contains much that refers directly to New Spain. In addition, the social history of other particular areas of colonial America studied by Juan Friede, Richard Konetzke, and others seems to be increasingly relevant for comparative purposes. And of course much of what is written on the Black Legend, peninsular-creole relations, intendancies, and other general subjects is applicable in different degrees.⁶³

The continuing drift toward social history is evident in all periods. The movement has roots that extend back to the early years of this century, but each generation of historians seems to move farther in a social direction than its predecessor. Obviously the accelerated changes in our own society require an historical correlative far beyond anything known or needed in the first half of the twentieth century. The movement is partly economic, or “socioeconomic.” But the point is that it effectively departs from the institutional framework that controlled this history for so long.

It is in researches on the history of the colonial Indians and on colonial relations between Indians and Spaniards that the generation since World War II has made perhaps its largest and most conspicuous contribution, and when one thinks back to the conditions of the 1940s the reasons for its doing so seem quite clear. The institutional perspective, long in vogue, was beginning to be called into question. Students knew the imperial law, but they also knew that this law was not a full or accurate guide to events in the colony, and a new insistence upon colonial realities was recognized as a corrective to legal studies. The Black and White Legends appeared as massive competing abstractions, as if the issue between them could be resolved only by finding out what actually took place in Spanish-Indian relations. Historians everywhere were tempted by the new possibilities offered by social science, here especially anthropology, and though colonial Mexico cried out for studies in the anthropological vein, anthropologists themselves ignored the field. A sharp disciplinary boundary separated studies of the pre-conquest Indian from studies of the post-conquest Indian. Only a very few pioneering individuals had bridged this gap, and an obvious disparity existed between what was known of the one and what was unknown of the other. Moreover history everywhere was moving from the elites to the grass roots, and in Mexico the particular grass roots people that invited consideration were the Indians.

In the period after World War II studies of the colonial Indian came to be assigned to the field called ethnohistory, a field whose coming of age may be dated approximately by its inclusion as a separate section (under the broad designation Anthropology) in the Handbook of Latin American Studies (1960). Ethnohistory includes both a pre-conquest branch and a post-conquest branch, and—as might be supposed—the former has appealed more to persons trained in anthropology and the latter more to persons trained in history. As Nicholson declared in the first ethnohistory contribution in the HLAS, the distinctive feature of ethnohistory is its utilization of written sources for the reconstruction of Indian culture and history. Nicholson’s own emphasis in ethnohistory lay in the pre-conquest period, but his informed Handbook bibliographies remain a valuable record of the whole subject. In addition to Nicholson a number of other persons, and especially Cline, prepared expository articles delineating the character and limits of ethnohistory, and the subject rapidly earned a position among the categories of research on the American past—notably in Mexico but also increasingly in Peru and other areas of the hemisphere. We do not deal in this summary article with recent research on the pre-conquest Indians, but it should be noted that this subject also has undergone a huge expansion in the mid-twentieth century. As Alcina Franch has argued, much of it qualifies as “history” in a certain sense, and it relates at many points to the researches, principally of course the ethnohistorical researches, on the colonial period. The Alcina Franch position for history has a parallel in the archaeological work of Thomas Charlton, relating late Aztec and colonial finds. In Mexican archaeology it now is at least possible that an artifact thought to be late Aztec may in reality be seventeenth-century.⁶⁴

Pre-conquest history is being connected with post-conquest history in other ways. In The Hummingbird and the Hawk (1967) R. C. Padden examines the clash between Indian and Spanish cultures, represented by Huitzilopochtli (the hummingbird) and Cortés (the hawk). Padderis history runs from late Aztec times to the mid-sixteenth century, and though it includes the conquest, its main concern is with the definition and interrelationship of two opposing views of sovereignty and religion. A related concept, carried still further, underlies Jacques Lafaye’s imaginative synthesis, Quetzalcóatl et Guadalupe (1974). Whereas Padden concludes with the inquisitorial sentences of Bishop Zumárraga and the prosecution of Indian apostates, Lafaye continues through the colonial period, tracing the evolution of Mexican history to independence. His focus is on two manifestations of Mexico’s “spiritual symbolism,” the Aztec god-hero Quetzalcoatl, identified with St. Thomas, and the Aztec mother-goddess, Tonantzin, identified with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Lafaye’s talent lies in making connections that other historians have not noticed, and he interprets these figures in the light of the whole complex of Mexico’s colonial history: conquest, proselytism, the Inquisition, utopianism, creoles and peninsulares, and much more, concluding with Mier and Iturbide and the “conscience nationale.”⁶⁵

Historical work on colonial Indians still relates primarily to the sixteenth century, but increasingly we are seeing studies that carry Indian subjects through the colonial period or even to the twentieth century.⁶⁶ The book that many regard as the best general treatment of the whole history of Meso-America, Sons of the Shaking Earth (1959) by Eric Wolf,⁶⁷ is primarily a history of Indians, with a long section on preconquest societies, and a remarkable continuity and consistency from beginning to end. Together with a full knowledge of the literature, Wolf brings to the subject a capacity for evocative expression and skillful selectivity. Modern college students and general readers, searching for their most effective introduction to Mexican history, are often more satisfied by Sons of the Shaking Earth with its Indian orientation than by conventional histories.

Demography began as an Indian subject but has now been extended into all dimensions of the society. In its broader application demography includes not simply the size of the population but its internal divisions, its family composition, the rate of changes, the movements from place to place, ages of women at marriage, and many similar subjects. The major demographers of colonial Mexico—Cook and Borah—have indeed moved from counting Indians to other more varied areas of demography. Colonial Mexico has many millions of raw data for this, both in the principal and familiar archives and in the unknown number of local archives that no historian has yet examined. In Essays in Population History (1971-1974) Cook and Borah review the materials of the demographic history of Mexico for a variety of periods and segments of the population, and they provide detailed studies of age groups, ethnic groups, birth rates, and other aspects of the long-term demographic history of particular areas.⁶⁸ The immensity of the task and the inherent difficulties in the utilization of much of this material are serious obstacles. Among others, McAlister (1963) presented the organization and stratification of colonial society as a “rational” or abstract system. We are now beginning to have analyses of another kind, analyses based on the computerized print-outs of baptismal, marriage, and burial records, and it seems certain that this will refine our existing materials on the size, distribution, and changes in the Negro population, the mulatto population, and the other traceable subdivisons of the people of the colony.⁶⁹

Many considerations made land tenure a crucial subject for modern investigation. One of the most obvious transformations of colonial times was from Indian ownership of land to Spanish ownership of land, and everyone recognized this as a basic theme of Mexico’s rural past. Land usurpation clearly lay behind some of the motivation for both the Revolution of 1910 and the land reform movements of the 1930s. The opulent, romantic, exploitative haciendas of the Porfiriato must have had colonial origins. Were not the great families of Mexico the ones that had held their haciendas since early colonial times, displaying their class consciousness in rural splendor generation after generation? But which were the great families, and exactly when did they acquire their haciendas? Once acquired, did the haciendas remain in the possession of the same families? What was the timing of the colonial metamorphosis from a society dominated by encomenderos to a society dominated by hacendados? In the light of questions like these, it frequently appeared that the usurpation of Indian land in Mexican history was a topic somewhat like the rise of the middle class in European history, in that historians assigned it to any and all periods indifferently; it seemed to be a subject that everyone talked about and no one understood.

Students are turning in increasing numbers now to the various aspects of the history of land tenure. The data of Simpson and Chevalier, the pioneers of the early 1950s, are being elaborated, refined, and extended by G. Michael Riley, Taylor, Konrad, James D. Riley, Jean-Pierre Berthe, Elinore M. Barrett, Ursula Ewald, Wayne Osborn, Ward Barrett, and any number of others.⁷⁰ The subject has many ramifications: the relation with encomienda⁷¹ in the early period and with Consolidación after 1804, ethnohistory, labor, agricultural systems, productivity, supply of foodstuffs, settlement patterns, and the social order. One can hardly pick up a recent number of any of the serious journals in the field without encountering articles on one or more of these subjects.

Although it is in every way a part of the history of colonial Mexico, we have not dealt here with the history of the Borderlands. This is because in practice the subject tends to be treated separately, and because very competent analyses of the Borderlands literature already exist. Borderlands historiography, in general, tends to retain the emphases of the sixteenth century, especially on warfare against Indians and the programs of Christianization, for these subjects are basic to the study of northern expansion. Scholars now pay less attention to the details of expeditionary marches and individual exploits (the Borderlands equivalent of the decline of conquest and related topics in the south) and more to the economic and social conditions of the frontier and the rigors of white-Indian relationships. The Indian has received a new attention here as elsewhere, and expectedly the Indian who has risen to recent prominence is less the submissive Indian of the mission than the Indian who was slaughtered and abused by Spaniards, killed by Spanish-borne diseases, and provoked to rebellion against Spanish restraints. It remains true, as it has been since the early years of Bolton, that some of the most dedicated scholarship on colonial Mexico has been applied to the history of the Borderlands.⁷²

A number of works cited above with reference to particular periods contain material also, usually in lesser degree, on other periods. William H. Dusenberry’s study of the mesta (1963), Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán on the Negro population (1946), Bernardo García Martínez’s review of the Marquesado del Valle (1969), and many other works contain data on all periods.⁷³ In a single volume, Spanish Central America (1973),⁷⁴ Murdo Macleod has brought the whole colonial history of Central America up to a par with the colonial history of Mexico. The emphases of most students, nevertheless, tend to be those of the larger literature, with the data clustering near the beginning and end, and with a large middle range relatively unstudied. Indeed, the more one examines this bibliography the more one is struck by the differences—in the history and in the treatment of the history—between the sixteenth century and the eighteenth century, and the more intricate the transition appears from the one to the other. Between the world of Ricard and the world of Brading and Florescano there remains a gulf in our understanding, and a fundamental task for the colonial historian is to establish credible connections between the two.

One might expect this gulf to narrow in the seventeenth century. But it is precisely in our interpretations of the seventeenth century that the differences between the two perspectives appear in their clearest form. Only a short time ago students of colonial Mexico could be divided into two groups, those who inclined toward the Black Legend and those who inclined toward the White Legend. This is no longer the case. Among research scholars it is only the older generation now that continues to worry about either one. The center of gravity is moving forward from the sixteenth century, which is the great period for evidence on the Black Legend and the White Legend, into the terra incognita of the later colony. It is perhaps a second stage of the movement that left conquest behind. In the later period we encounter an old bugaboo from another area, namely the decline of Spain, as well as a relatively new bugaboo, the “crisis” of Europe. In the seventeenth century Mexican history draws closer to European history, the parent country carves out new relationships, and New Spain’s depression is added to the lengthening series of European difficulties. Unlikely as it may seem, Mexico now finds itself listed not just with Spain but with the Ottoman Empire, Poland, the Balkans, and Hungary, as a troubled area of the seventeenth century. What are the relations between Mexico and these distant places? What are the connections between the situation of the parent country and that of the colony, between the problems of Mexico and the problems of Peru and the rest of America? Were the problems solved and, if so, how and when? What does all this do to our understanding of the sixteenth century and the eighteenth?⁷⁵

Answers to these and related questions may be expected in increasing numbers and from many sources in the time to come. The problem is receiving an unexpected degree of attention from persons who are not historians at all but who are interested in modern economies and who bring to colonial Mexico a new set of concepts and relationships and a new vocabulary. Traditionally minded students of colonial Mexico will ignore at their peril these external commentaries, with their talk of peasants and of the role of capital, of feudal and modern economies, of development, underdevelopment, dependency, and modernization. In the 1960s and early 1970s, for the first time and without any warning that he had been aware of, the student of colonial Mexico found himself obliged to clarify his position on Marxism. Was colonial Mexico basically feudal or basically capitalistic? Most of the historians whose works we have commented on above would probably have taken the position that colonial Mexico was post-feudal and precapitalist, or that it was capitalist in mining while it remained feudal in agriculture, or they would have declared the question to be meaningless. But conventional Marxism had no doubt that colonial Mexico was feudal. Now the new Marxism declares the Latin American colonies to have been capitalist, and modern underdevelopment is seen as an outgrowth of capitalism, not feudalism. We may not be quite certain what this means, and we may readily criticize the “empirical history of the writers on these topics. But my point is that many intelligent and well-informed people are taking the discussion of these subjects seriously.⁷⁶ Meanwhile local colonial studies, such as Brading’s on Guanajuato, provide data on historical dependence, not just of one capital city on another, or through the hierarchy, but directly on the crown.

Moreover all this comprises only one part of the expansion of the field. Another is the increasing internationalism of historical work on colonial Mexico and on all of Latin America. We now have French, German, English, and American periodicals devoted exclusively or in large part to Latin American history. Scholarship in England has surged forward dramatically, especially with relation to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. German scholars have introduced team research in their investigations of the Puebla-Tlaxcala area, where all the features of a local society and its environment, past and present, are being studied.⁷⁷ New methods and new perspectives are at every hand. Old beliefs are being challenged and discarded, or adapted to fit with new beliefs. In this subject, as in so many others, we are in a period of rapid enlargement and change. The negative aspect is that it is no longer physically possible, as it once was, for any one individual to keep up with the field. The positive aspects cannot yet be specified in their entirety and their richness of implication and detail. They will be the subject of future bibliographical surveys, like this one (but written by other students), over the next ten or twenty or thirty years.

Author notes