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Historia y sociedad:
ensayos del seminario de historia colonial de Michoacán
Colonial Period
Historia y sociedad: ensayos del seminario de historia colonial de Michoacán. Edited by Carlos Paredes Martínez. Encuentros, no. 3. Morelia, Michoacán: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas de la Universidad Michoacano de San Nicolás de Hidalgo; Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Socíal, 1997. Photographs. Tables. Maps. Notes. 393 pp. Paper. This fine collection of essays demonstrates the quality of historical research currently being produced in many of Mexico's regional universities. The work provides a thorough introduction to the social and cultural history of colonial Michoacán, ably summarizing and at points moving beyond previous scholarship. The volume evaluates and refines many issues, such as cycles of epidemic and demographic decline, the influence of new market forces and the blending of indigenous and Spanish technologies and forms of labor organization, and agrarian violence and rural revolt. Welcome additions include discussions of cultural history--especially focused on religious institutions at elite and popular levels--and a distinct pattern of sixteenth-century church architecture in Michoacán.
The volume, edited and introduced by Carlos Paredes Martínez, consists of ten essays divided into three sections: population and economics; agrarian conflicts and politics; and art and society. The first two essays, by Sergio Navarrete Pellicer, discuss sixteenth-century Tarascan population demography and agricultural technology. These [End Page 179] essays emphasize regional and geographic variations and show that the impact of the population movement to Pátzcuaro initiated during the era of Vasco de Quiroga and epidemic disease in Uruapan was relatively minor. Both essays provide basic though essential information, but they fail to engage in key areas of debate, such as the dispute between the demographers Borah, Cook, and Rosenblatt.
These essays are followed by Paredes Martínez's fine study of the emergence/transformation of regional market forces. His article begins by studying indigenous patterns of exchange built on the exploitation of various ecological niches and concludes with an interesting discussion of seventeenth-century attempts to regulate the repartimiento de mercancías. Section 1 concludes with América Molina de Vilar's investigation of church/state efforts to respond to the agricultural crisis of 1785-86. Section 2 builds on the social-historical foundations sketched out in Section 1 by investigating specific examples of agrarian conflict and politics. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez demonstrates the complicated balance between armed revolt and legal challenges over land issues that provided a framework for political life in the community of Santiago Necotlán Undameo. The concluding essay in this section, by Juvenal Jaramilla Magaña and Carlos Juárez Nieto, traces the impact of the late colonial Bourbon reforms on civil and ecclesiastical administrations.
Section 3 focuses on cultural history. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Michoacán was a region dominated by the church. Thus, the discussions of art and society all consider issues related to colonial Catholicism. Wakako Yokoyama provides a fascinating study of sixteenth-century Franciscan church architecture, emphasizing the portals of a series of churches constructed in indigenous communities during the sixteenth century. Yokoyama's article is followed by Moises Guzmán Pérez, who builds on the pioneering work of William Taylor by exploring the history of Guadalupan devotion in Michoacán based on baptismal registers. Celia Islas Jiménez examines the daily workings of cofradías (religious "brotherhoods") that mediated ritual observances and festivals in the region of Tlalpujahua. The volume ends with an article by Marta Terán on Bourbon efforts to regulate the exuberance of popular religiosity, especially the cycle of fiestas in Michoacán's small pueblos.
In Mexico, one of the primary tasks confronting historians is the recovery of regional history in the context of the political, economic, and scholarly dominance of the central valley. This volume succeeds admirably in that purpose, providing several current and original articles on Michoacán's colonial history. In...
Historia y sociedad: ensayos del seminario de historia colonial de Michoacan (review)
