Basically this is a study of villages of the twenty-nine alcaldías mayores of central Mexico and Oaxaca during the eighteenth century, although the author makes an attempt to give some general coverage of the remainder of the colonial period and the rest of New Spain.
The core of the book consists of three chapters, one on each of the topics listed in the title: drinking, homicide, and local rural uprisings. The author leads up to these chapters with an introduction in which he defines his terms and delimits his work, and a first chapter in which he presents a view of the colonial society of New Spain, particularly the society of rural Indian villages. Following his three principal chapters, he has a chapter of general conclusions, divided into two parts. In the first part he draws together his observations from preceding chapters; in the second he discusses the position of peasant villages in the general colonial system and society. Appendix A lists peasant uprisings, 1680-1810; Appendix B gives some supplementary material on the incidence of crime.
The author takes a social science approach to his material. Those who expect to find the human interest details that the title might suggest will be disappointed. The material is reduced as far as possible to comparative tables and generalized commentary. Taylor makes his position clear in this regard: “I have emphasized what is general or revealing about uprisings, homicides and drinking and have resisted the temptation to write about many particular cases” (p. 8).
Taylor finds that drinking by villagers increased during the colonial period but that it was not as socially disruptive as has often been thought, and that in some respects it served to reaffirm community solidarity. He recognizes the problem inherent in making a comparison between preconquest and colonial times, because of the difficulty of getting an adequate idea of drinking habits in the period before the conquest. Frequently authors have judged that pre-Spanish drinking must have been rather limited because of the severity of the sanctions against drunkenness in Aztec law. But we all recognize the problem of basing historical conclusions on law. Perhaps the harshness of the sanctions was an indication of the gravity of the problem, as were the sanctions against highway robbery in Europe at the same time.
A question that comes to mind regarding the disruptive effects of drinking within the village community is whether they were not covered up and therefore do not appear in the documentation upon which the historian perforce depends. My personal experience in present-day Mexico is that drunken brawls and even stabbings that occur within a community context may not get on the official record if there is any means of avoiding it. Is there any reason to think that such efforts to avoid “police” involvement did not occur in the colonial period, especially in the more remote areas?
When he gets away from his central themes, the author at times shows an untypical lack of care in his generalizations. For instance, although there were Nahua-speaking villages within the Tarascan empire, I find no data to support his statement that Nahuatl was becoming the lingua franca of politics among the Tarascans (p. 11). Although the Spanish kings had extraordinary powers regarding the Church in their dominions, this does not justify saying that “the temporal monarch was also head of the Church” (p. 19). And although clerics did at times dip their hands into the till of cofradía funds, this did not make the cofradías “an instrument of exploitation set up by the Church to channel village wealth into support of the clergy” (p. 165). He says that the economic basis of colonial rule in eighteenth-century central Mexico and Oaxaca was exploitation (p. 160). But if we accept his definition of exploitation as “the appropriation by non-producers of a portion of the total product of direct producers” (p. 165), is not exploitation the economic basis of all governments?
But in general, one must say that the book shows ample evidence of the author’s careful research in the Mexican archives as well as of his extensive reading of the related published material in history and the social sciences. It is a thoughtful study of a great mass of material and a valuable addition to the social history of colonial Mexico.
