From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the foundations, 1560–1840 by Sean F. McEnroe, and: Imperialism and the Origins of Mexican Culture by Colin M. MacLachlan (review)

Although very different from each other, these two books are united in their study of the ways in which two widely different cultures and civilizations met and melded. Perhaps no better laboratory for this issue exists than the history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the amalgamation of civilizations that followed over the three hundred year colonial period from 1519 to 1821. Yet, while the literature on the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the ensuing mixing of cultures is vast, few scholars have suggested the mechanisms by which this blending of civilizations actually occurred, beyond the obvious fact that mestizaje, the mixing of the European and Indigenous peoples, produced a mixed culture. Of the two books considered here, the first actually does propose one of those mechanisms, the second does not.

The work by Sean F. McEnroe, while monographic, offers a very concrete example of the methods employed in the colonial era in the northeast of the country (primarily Nuevo León but to some extent also San Luis Potosí, Coahuila, Nuevo Santander) that brought about a remarkable merger of many ethnic cultures and which in turn lies at the heart of modern Mexican nationhood. McEnroe’s argument is that in the northern provinces Indians themselves, specifically the colonies of settlers moved north from Tlaxcala in central Mexico, served as the most important agents of colonization and acculturation, generating a plural citizenship and multiple forms of authority. This is a genuine innovation in the analysis of such immense historical processes.

Tlaxcala was the Native province which had joined Hernan Cortes and his men to participate in the destruction of the Aztec power in central Mexico in 1519 to 1521. As a result, Tlaxcala enjoyed a special status in the colonial empire as Spain guaranteed its nearly complete self-governance, exempted its people from many taxes, and recognized the Tlaxcalans as vassals of the Spanish king rather than as conquered subjects. Thus plural citizenship and multiple forms of authority lay at the heart of Tlaxcalan political accommodation within Spain’s imperial system. Tlaxcalan colonists were dispatched to the unsettled northern territories, which both they and the Spaniards considered barbarian, inhabited by unincorporated and non-Christian Natives called Chichimecs in both Aztec and Spanish times. The northern frontier was often protected by Tlaxcalan militias based in the pueblos they founded.

In the northern settlements Indians served as the most important agents of colonization and acculturation. What mattered was not whether one was Indian, but what kind of Indian—settled or not, Christian Tlaxcalan or pagan Chichimec. Gradually, especially under the guidelines traced by Spanish Visitador of Nuevo León Francisco Barbadillo in 1714, those Chichimecs who had accepted Christianity and were settled in the Tlaxcalan pueblos were redefined as Indian militiamen, and as such, they were also defined as citizens. By the 1770s these militiamen had a developed sense of membership in a national system. During the struggle for Independence (1810–21) local militias became the source of political power throughout the far-flung regions of Mexico, including the north. After Independence the Constitution of 1824 defined municipalities as the base of the Mexican state as there emerged a common civic culture of independence and self-government. In short, colonial New Spain was a collection of constituent ethnic republics bound together with regional economies and militias, and the Tlaxcalan-Chichimec towns were a fully incorporated part of that. This civic culture existed under the colonial regime and further developed under the republic, and thus the modern Mexican nation was built on a political culture that emerged from the interethnic compacts of its colonial predecessor.

This is a dazzling answer to how the mixing of people and cultures resulted in the unique modern Mexican national identity. Unavoidably perhaps, it can only be sketched...