After the Altepetl : Indigenous struggle and the colonial origins of the modern state in sixteenth century central Mexico (original) (raw)
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Historia Mexicana, 1997
Este artículo ofrece una visión de conjunto de la evolución de las comunidades indígenas del México central durante el periodo colonial, del altépetl al pueblo de indios, hasta las décadas finales del siglo XVIII. El autor es ambicioso y logra su pretensión de integrar multitud de temas-naturaleza de los cabildos indígenas y de sus gobernadores, congregaciones, composiciones, generalización del "fundo legal" y las separaciones de pueblos, entre otros-con hallazgos historiográficos de varios investigadores, principalmente Haskett, Chance y Taylor, Hoekstra, Osborn, García Martínez y Tutino. Pero su debilidad, me parece, estriba en el carácter incipiente de su investigación primaria sobre estos temas-al menos hasta el momento de publicar este artículo-, lo que le impide medir, en ocasiones, la complejidad real de los temas que trata: de ahí la explicación de que un texto denso, lleno de elementos y con una visión tan amplia, adolezca de varias imprecisiones, simplificaciones y aún aparentes errores Su debilidad también deriva del camino paradigmático que el autor eli¬ ge: comienza batiendo un modelo ampliamente superado-el que alguna vez creyó en la igualdad de los indígenas en sus co¬ munidades-, para luego caer en otro modelo, el medieval, cjue adopta hasta el punto de desconocer la especificidad del'caso que pretendía explicar.
MEXICO´S INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES: THEIR LANDS AND HISTORIES, 1500-2010, 2010
2010- 2011 University Press of Colorado Top Ten Best Sellers. http://www.upcolorado.com/Public/AnnualReports/3%202011%20annual%20report.pdf "Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. -- P. R. Sullivan, independent scholar" Choice To be publish in Spanish by Fondo de Cultura Económica in 2015, Edición aprobada par su publicación en 2015 por Fondo de Cultura Económica "A rich and detailed account of indigenous history in central and southern Mexico from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, Mexico's Indigenous Communities is an expansive work that destroys the notion that Indians were victims of forces beyond their control and today have little connection with their ancient past. Indian communities continue to remember and tell their own local histories, recovering and rewriting versions of their past in light of their lived present. Ethelia Ruiz Medrano focuses on a series of individual cases, falling within successive historical epochs, that illustrate how the practice of drawing up and preserving historical documents-in particular, maps, oral accounts, and painted manuscripts-has been a determining factor in the history of Mexico's Indian communities for a variety of purposes, including the significant issue of land and its rightful ownership. Since the sixteenth century, numerous Indian pueblos have presented colonial and national courts with historical evidence that defends their landholdings. Because of its sweeping scope, groundbreaking research, and the author's intimate knowledge of specific communities, Mexico's Indigenous Communities is a unique and exceptional contribution to Mexican history. It will appeal to students and specialists of history, indigenous studies, ethnohistory, and anthropology of Latin America and Mexico. Show More Show Less""
2002
This thesis is a library and archive-based study within the field of historical anthropology. It is concerned with one particular case of cross-cultural borrowing that occurred during the sixteenth century Spanish conquest of mainland North America; a process of imperial expansion that resulted in the establishment of several colonial provinces, which comprised all of present-day Mexico, Guatemala and some parts of the United States of America and were administratively dependent on the viceroyalty of New Spain. The thesis focuses on the creation of the most northerly province within this territory, Nuevo Mexico, which - unlike other provinces in the Spanish overseas domains - had a social and political existence before it had an actual geographic embodiment. Rather than the actual politico-geographic entity founded as a colonial "kingdom" in 1598, Nuevo Mexico is understood in this study as a "disembodied imaginary world," mainly consisting of the image of the Az...
Zborover_2014_Dissertation_Decolonizing_Historical_Archaeology_in_Southern_Oaxaca_Mexico
The cultural area roughly corresponding to the modern state of Oaxaca, Mexico, was a dynamic cultural arena which saw the rise and development of multiple complex societies and their respective historiographic traditions. This dissertation focuses on the development and application of integrative approaches to the archaeological, documentary, and oral records from the Chontal highlands in southern Oaxaca, with a particular emphasis on the Chontal community of Santa María Zapotitlán. Following a critique and reconfiguration of the methodological and theoretical tenets of 'historical archaeology', I propose to acknowledge and incorporate Mesoamerican indigenous literate societies within a more inclusive paradigm. Based on data collected in the 'Chontalpa Historical Archaeology Project', I draw my data from a rich documentary corpus of indigenous 'territorialnarratives', archaeological surveys and excavations, visual and archaeometric analysis of artifacts, ethnoarchaeology, and a systematic collection of oral traditions. By subjecting these epistemically independent sources to corroborative, complementary, and contrastive modes of inquiry, I explore low-level spatial and temporal correlates followed by high-level correlates of interregional interaction, colonialism, factionalism, and resistance. These integrative correlates are examined through five diachronic case-studies: 1) Monte Albán's imperialism in the Formative period and interregional interactions in the Classic period; 2) Mixtec, Zapotec, and Pochutec conquests and domination of the Chontalpa in the Early-Late Postclassic; 3) The Aztec incursion and multipolity/inter-ethnic factionalism in the Late-Terminal Postclassic; 4) Chontal and Spanish interregional competition, colonialism, and resistance in the Colonial Period; and 5) The Chontal historical image, from the Colonial through the Modern Period.
Indigenous Commentary on Sixteenth-Century Mexico City
2014
In circa 1550, an indigenous mapmaker painted a watercolor of viceregal Mexico City and its environs. The Uppsala Map has long been a source for examining social life in the Basin of Mexico, yet its description of the city has been one less studied. This essay scrutinizes the mapmaker's graphic commentary on the viceregal capital. In particular, it studies how a narrative figure's corporeal expressions and optic interest presented the city for examination. A formal analysis of the map suggests that the city's traza (urban plan) was not spatially unitary, a point underscored by the actas de cabildo, or municipal decrees, mandated. These demonstrate anxiety over spatial irregularity, which in the opinion of the city council threatened the city's policía (the virtue of living a Christian way of life within an ordered settlement). Lastly, this essay situates the Uppsala Map within the cartographic milieu of the Spanish Atlantic world through a study of cartographic elements that closely resemble those found in Alonso de Santa Cruz's 1542 world map.
This article examines the methods and results of cultural change during the conquest of Mexico and in the early New Spain. It is the attempt to systemize the mechanisms of Christianisation and «Hispanization» -which can be understood as a reciprocal process of the transformation of collective identities. The fact that an indigenous clergy was not created was generally misunderstood as the Nahuas' incapability to meet to the requirements of Spanish morality and civilization («policía»). This had effects on the political as well as on the architectural or historiagraphical spheres. But also the Spaniards and Europeans in general had to question themselves after their contact with the Nahua culture. To be «Spanish» before and after the conquest as well as to be «Spanish» in Spain and in Las Indias did not mean the same.
Calíope, 2021
Hernan Cortés did not conquer the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, with 300 European soldiers as one popular version suggests. In fact, he would never have even reached the spectacular city without the aid of tens of thousands of Amerindian warriors from various polities throughout the region. Many Mesoamerican city-states already in conflict with the Aztecs allied themselves with the Spanish invaders against their domineering imperial Mexica lords. Nevertheless, in English-language academic discourse, we continue to conceptualize the fall of the Aztec empire as a one-on-one conflict between the Mexica ruler, Moctezuma, and the European conquistador. The details we study about this encounter that are accessible in English come from the accounts of the Spanish and their Indigenous, mostly Mexica, informants. Nevertheless, at the moment of the European arrival in Mexico, the Triple Alliance, a confederation of three of the most powerful city-states: the Mexica-Tenochca ("Mexica" or "Aztecs"), the Tetzcocans, and the Tepanecs, maintained power over the region. While the Mexica dominated the alliance militarily, the Tetzcocans and the Tepanecs managed to preserve their autonomy over their own allied tributaries for nearly 100 years. We know this because the Tetzcocans, like the Mexica, had their own chroniclers before and after the arrival of the Europeans. Unfortunately, until the publication of this volume, only a few of their narratives have been accessible to the English-speaking world. This text will open up the study of the Conquest of Mexico and Indigenous participation in the colony of New Spain.
Ethnohistory, 2015
This article analyzes the indigenous testimony in the 1577–86 Relaciones Geográficas for central Mexico with regard to the demographic collapse that followed the Spanish Conquest. Although asked to indicate the causes of the enormous mortality and morbidity, the native informants rarely attributed them to supernatural punishment, a salient idea in both indigenous and Christian religions. Rather, their responses were overwhelmingly secular and critical of colonial policies (forced labor, strict monogamy, settlement consolidation) or consequent cultural conditions (dietary change, adoption of Spanish clothing). Thus the Relaciones offer no support for the commonsense notion—still endorsed by some scholars—that the horrors of demographic collapse led the native population to readily embrace Christianity and colonialism.