Perspectives on Late Colonial Mexican Cultural History

Ilustrando La Nueva España: Texto e Imagen En El Periquillo Sarniento De Fernández De Lizardi. By Beatriz Alba-Koch. (Cáceres, Spain: Universidad de Extremadura, 1999. Pp. 190. N.p.)

¡Viva Mexico! ¡Viva La Independencia!: Celebrations Of September 15. Edited by William H. Beezley and David E. Lorey. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001. Pp. 261. $60.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.)

Imagining Identity In New Spain: Race, Lineage, And The Colonial Body In Portraiture And Casta Paintings. By Magali Carrera. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2003. Pp. 188. $34.95 cloth.)

Magistrates Of The Sacred: Priests And Parishioners In Eighteenth-Century Mexico. By William B. Taylor. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. 868. $85 cloth, $39.95 paper.)

The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, And The Mexican Struggle For Independence, 1810-1821. By Eric Van Young. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. 702. $75.00 cloth.)

Propriety And Permissiveness In Bourbon Mexico. By Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999. Pp. 280. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Lizardi And The Birth Of The Novel In Spanish America. By Nancy Vogeley. (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2001. Pp. 342. $59.95 cloth.)

Mexican historiography of the Bourbon era has been enriched with the publication of a number of recent studies showing the interplay of politics and culture at both the elite and popular levels. As might be expected, most build on an existing body of work, but there now is a fruitful cross-fertilization of new ideas and approaches in history, art history, and literary studies. Interdisciplinary work in eighteenth- century studies in general has flourished, and these Mexican examples are noteworthy not only for area specialists but also for scholars with comparative interests. In these recent works, roles of the Mexican urban popular classes and rural campesinos in daily life, as well as the traditional emphasis on elites, come into focus. The Bourbon era was marked by significant shifts in crown policy in the political and economic spheres, but the impact on the cultural sphere has not received as much attention. These works by scholars in history, art history, and literature ask new questions and challenge old paradigms by examining the origins and processes of late colonial-era cultural change. These authors largely take independence as the endpoint of their study, but virtually all are cognizant that many fundamental aspects of colonial society and culture were not transformed with the political break from Spain.

A delightful volume is Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán's Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico, which explicitly deals with late colonial popular culture in Mexico City. He examines the shifting cultural mores and the crown's attempt to reverse what it saw as the decline of propriety and the rise of permissiveness. This work is a translation of the original work published in Mexico in 1987 that has had considerable influence on recent Latin American cultural historians.¹ His work can be read as a history of the crown's persecution of urban popular culture, since he draws on documentation of official crown attempts to control urban plebeians. However, Viqueira Albán's careful reading of some archival sources and his reinterpretation of published material illuminates intertwined processes that produced popular culture. He does not merely focus on the crown's increasingly aggressive actions to regulate or suppress it; rather he addresses a wide ranging subject matter, including attempts to rein in donjuanismo (womanizing) whose prize conquests were nuns to the decline of bullfights, to the use of theater as a tool of reform to the suppression of Carnival. Each chapter is a slice of popular culture giving insight into social hierarchies and differing social and cultural values of Mexico City elites and the plebe. These echo some themes seen in Irving Leonard's work (1959) on seventeenth- century Mexico published more than forty years ago, that is, popular...