Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico : Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century

This book is a richly detailed examination of social interaction in the city of Chihuahua, a major silver mining center of colonial Mexico. Founded at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the city attracted people from all over New Spain, all summoned "by the voices of the mines of Chihuahua." These included aspiring miners and merchants, mestizo and mulato workers and drifters, Tarahumara Indians indigenous to the area, Yaquis from Sonora, and Apaches from New Mexico. Several hundred Spaniards, principally from Northern Spain, also arrived, hoping to make their fortunes in the New World. This book is a richly detailed examination of social interaction in the city of Chihuahua, a major silver mining center of colonial Mexico. Founded at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the city attracted people from all over New Spain, all summoned "by the voices of the mines of Chihuahua." The author shows how abstract relationships of class, political subordination, ethnicity, and gender took concrete form in the daily life of the diverse people of Chihuahua. Reviews "Martin's well-written social history . . . is modest in length, but it is packed with insights and observations that will be useful both to scholars interested in other Mexican regions and to those who study early modern social relations in other settings. . . . Immensely informative and interesting . . . this rich volume will undoubtedly be influential for years to come." --American Historical Review "Extremely readable and impressively researched . . . this is an ambitious and deeply analytical study. . . . Among the work's many virtues are the clarity and unpretentiousness of its style, its insightfulness (without over-theorizing), and its sensitivity to its sources." --Latin American Studies "Martin has given us a fine study of an eighteenth-century Mexican mining town. It is a work of painstaking scholarship, soft-spoken but with hard theoretical edges, written with clarity, economy, and grace." --Canadian Journal of History