From colony to nationhood in Mexico : laying the foundations 1560 1840 In an age of revolution Mexicos creole leaders held aloft the Virgin of Guadalupe and brandished an Aztec eagle perched upon a European tricolor. Their new constitution proclaimed the Mexican nation is forever free and independent. Yet the genealogy of this new nation is not easy to trace. Colonial Mexico was a patchwork state whose new world vassals served the crown extended the empires frontiers and lived out their civic lives in parallel Spanish and Indian republics. Theirs was a world of complex intercultural alliances interlocking corporate structures and shared spiritual and temporal ambitions. Sean F. McEnroe describes this history at the greatest and smallest geographical scales reconsidering what it meant to be an Indian vassal nobleman soldier or citizen over three centuries in northeastern Mexico. He argues that the Mexican municipality state and citizen were not so much the sudden creations of a revolutionary age as the progeny of a mature multiethnic empire In November 1782 Vicente Gonzales de Santianes the governor of Nuevo Leon received a sheaf of documents from a protracted legal dispute in the Indian town of San Miguel de Aguayo. At first glance the case seems so utterly commonplace as to be beneath the notice of the regions chief magistrate. One of San Miguels Tlaxcalan stoneworkers had been accused of an adulterous liaison with a townswoman