Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain, and Puebla, Mexico, 1560-1620 (review)

The fundamental predicament of Transatlantic Ties is that the author planned to write one book and ended up writing another. The original research design was ambitious-to trace a migratory flow of almost 1,000 Briocenses, approximately one-fourth of the inhabitants of the Spanish town of Brihuega, who immigrated to Puebla, Mexico, between the 1560s and the 1620s. Identification of such a cohort promised an exciting research payoff, permitting direct comparison between the economic operations, social connections, religious activities, and political influence of Briocenses in the peninsula and in the Americas. For scholars of Latin America, analysis with such a transatlantic scope is rare. Altman's previous Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley, 1989) was a pioneer of the genre.

What went wrong? One answer is that Brihuega's notary archives could not be found, depriving the author of "key primary records" fundamental for any comparative assessment (5). Hence, the author could not directly trace the peninsular pursuits of the immigrants-the scope of their involvement in textile operations, bakeries, wine selling, and transport; or their personal activities as revealed in dowries and wills-and the continuation, expansion, or alteration of such personal patterns in the Americas. Although the author's use of other Spanish archives and Inquisition records to locate general data on Briocenses and place them within "the context of Castile and the Empire" filled some gaps, direct comparison was necessarily limited (5).

When general contrasts between Spain and the Americas could be made, they were revealing. Briocenses moved from a small Spanish town where they were active political participants to one where they were largely excluded, given the domination of the Pueblo city council (cabildo) by descendants of early and wealthier arrivals. Their familiarity with small, family-based textile operations-the lure that attracted the Brihuega migratory flow from a local industry in crisis to the nascent textile enterprises of Puebla-was transformed; Briocenses became business managers and owners of larger colonial textile workshops (obrajes). Briocenses with dozens of oxen and hundreds of sheep in Spain owned hundreds of oxen and thousands of sheep in the Americas. They moved back and forth across the Atlantic returning to Spain for a visit or to stay, apparently not conceiving the distance between Brihuega and Puebla to be particularly forbidding. Briocenses acted in typical immigrant fashion, sending for peninsular relatives and helping them to get settled; they intermarried with fellow Briocenses; and they kept in amazingly close touch with family, kin, and friends in both Spain and in the Americas when they chose to do so. Such shared knowledge created powerful communications networks, as accused bigamist Diego de Anzures-explored in a case study-was to discover.

Although the author had better luck studying the Brihuega immigrant cohort in the Americas, the group strangely floats without context within the Puebla milieu, robbing some conclusions of authority. Fundamental data for socioeconomic analysis-for example, the population of Puebla, or the scope of economic activities of others in the city-is lacking. Even when the author concludes, probably correctly, that Briocenses were fundamental to Puebla's development as a center of the colonial textile industry, the text provides only anecdotal examples, failing to substantiate that they composed the "majority" of obraje owners (52). Again, though Briocenses may well have played a "major role" in transforming the Puebla barrio of San Francisco into a commercial zone, reference to a few property transactions fails to convince (79).

Mostly written in a clear style, some infelicitous touches make for tough reading. Discussions of connections between Briocenses sometimes read like genealogical tables. Sometimes English translations of quotations are followed by unnecessary parentheses containing the original Spanish text, deadening sentence ºow, and other times, Spanish phrases appear in mid-sentence without translation. A basic bibliography neglects a rich Mexican and comparative literature-for example, given the discussion of bigamy, Richard Boyer, Lives...