From colony to nationhood in Mexico
Subtitle: laying the foundations, 1560-1840
By: Sean F. McEnroe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9781107006300
Subjects: History; Colonization; Tlaxcalan Indians; Ethnic relations; HISTORY / Latin America / General
Description: "In an age of revolution, Mexico's 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 empire's 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 region's chief magistrate. One of San Miguel's Tlaxcalan stoneworkers had been accused of an adulterous liaison with a townswoman"--
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction; 2. Tlaxcalan vassals of the north; 3. Multiethnic Indian republics; 4. Becoming Tlaxcalan; 5. Exporting the Tlaxcalan system; 6. War and citizenship; 7. Modern towns and casteless towns; 8. Conclusion.