From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico
Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840

This book offers a new interpretation of Indian government, citizenship and military service in the Spanish Empire.

Sean F. McEnroe (Author)

9781107690714, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 May 2014

264 pages, 13 b/w illus. 3 maps
23.4 x 15.6 x 1.5 cm, 0.41 kg

'Sean McEnroe's book looks at the Tlaxcalan Indians in northeastern Mexico during the colonial period, chiefly in what is today the state of Nuevo León and its extensions through a highly porous frontier into the province of Texas. The work contributes substantially to our knowledge of how the political incorporation of indigenous peoples took place in this zone of endemic warfare, and how the armed (Indian) citizen came to be the foundation of civil society by the time New Spain became the Mexican republic in the early nineteenth century.' Eric van Young, Bulletin of Spanish Studies

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], History of the Americas [HBJK], General & world history [HBG], History [HB]