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How to Make a New Spain presents an unprecedented view of the material worlds of Mexico City in the sixteenth century, drawing from a combination of sources and methodologies. It presents the author's original analysis of over 11,000 items in the probate inventories of thirty-nine Spanish colonizers. It also synthesizes information from archaeological excavations of Spanish houses at the center of Mexico City.
List of contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Terminology and Gentilics
- How to enter the material and social worlds
- Chapter 1: How to make money
- Chapter 2: How to build houses
- Chapter 3: How to furnish a house
- Chapter 4: How to get pottery and food
- Chapter 5: How to dress the part
- Chapter 6: How to build sociotechnical systems: tools, livestock, and slaves
- Chapter 7: How to link wealth and consumption, or not
- Conclusion: The Material Worlds of Spanish Colonizers
- Appendix 5.1: Items of clothing in the probate inventories
- Appendix 6.1: Tools listed in the documents
- Appendix 7.1: Prices of shirts with an indicated origin
- References
About the author
Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría is Professor in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs, co-editor of The Menial Art of Cooking, and author of The Archaeology and History of Colonial Central Mexico.
Summary
How to Make a New Spain presents an unprecedented view of the material worlds of Mexico City in the sixteenth century, drawing from a combination of sources and methodologies. It presents the author's original analysis of over 11,000 items in the probate inventories of thirty-nine Spanish colonizers. It also synthesizes information from archaeological excavations of Spanish houses at the center of Mexico City.
The book begins with a critique of theories of materiality, in which scholars emphasize the agency of things at the expense of an investigation of social relationships. Rodríguez-Alegría argues that now that scholars have shown that the descendants of the Mexica (often known as the Aztecs) maintained social and political power in the colonial period, we should reexamine how Indigenous people, colonizers, and Black people together created the material and social worlds of colonial Mexico. The book assimilates information on architecture, money, clothing, furniture, pottery, slaves, livestock, and tools to provide a new vision of daily life in colonial Mexico City. It shows that colonialism was based on the recognition of people of similar classes across ethnic boundaries, and on the forging of relationships with powerful Indigenous people. Even colonizers who sought to display distinction from Indigenous people with their material culture depended on Indigenous products and technology to achieve that distinction. The complex history of materiality and power that emerges from this book compels us to reimagine colonial Mexico and the people who created it.
Additional text
An innovative archaeological and historical study that examines how sixteenth-century colonizers attempted to re-create the material culture of Spain in the titular colony... Indeed, this pioneering work is certain to make any scholar of early colonial Latin America, whatever their specific discipline, hope for yet more studies of this kind.
