Recent Work on Early Western Mexico and the Revival of the Black Legend

Ricardo León Alanís, Los orígenes del clero y la iglesia en Michoacán, 1525-1640 (Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo; Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1997).

Alberto Carrillo Cázares, Vasco de Quiroga: La pasión por el derecho (Zamora; Morelia: El Colegio de Michoacán; Aquidiócesis de Morelia; Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2003).

Bernardino Verástique, Michoacán and Eden: Vasco de Quiroga and the Evangelization of Western Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).

item James Krippner-Martínez, Rereading the Conquest: Power, Politics, and the History of Early Colonial Michoacán, 1521-1565 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

Social history of Mexico of the last decade has been characterized to a large extent by its shift, in essence, to cultural history. Indeed, the genres are difficult to distinguish given their similar aims and methodologies. Given the "cultural turn" witnessed both in the profession as a whole and the field of Mexico and Latin America, one might be hard pressed to say whether or not social history exists as a discrete field or whether it has been subsumed within its intellectual progeny, cultural history.

At the center of the sometimes vitriolic debate on the social/cultural history divide is the arrival of the influence of a French and European cultural history within the broader field of Mexican and Latin American social history. This turn is characterized by a move away from quantification and narrative and toward histories of mentalities, subalterns, and popular movements. In many ways there was a kind of bifurcation of social history in the field of Latin America. On the one hand those who claimed an inheritance from the "new cultural history" moved toward a discussion of power and ideology as multi-focal and contested (drawing on Foucault and Gramsci), on studies of non-elites and their reaction to state projects, and to a focus on marginalized groups within society, especially within the rubrics of gender/sexuality and "subaltern studies." On the other hand, social historians who cut their teeth on quantifiable data cried foul at this turn, claiming that the culturalists have turned the historical method into a bully pulpit for their own politics, for using data selectively to support their own claims, and for ignoring hard evidence in favor of theory.

The move to this cultural social history is marked in recent scholarship on early Mexico and in the case I present here, in Michoacán, in western Mexico. The sharp divide between theory and practice is also highlighted in a comparison between recent scholarship on Michoacán from Mexico and from North America. Indeed, one of the very central issues of the debate on the cultural turn has been on the direction of research itself. Mexican scholars, especially those of the colonial period, have tended to be much less influenced by or interested in theoretical models. Rather, as a group Mexican scholars have tended to focus heavily on their archival findings with relatively little use of anthropological, political, or critical theory. On the other hand, North American practitioners of colonial Mexican history have tended to draw on wide theoretical models to buttress their archival findings, which are occasionally less substantive than their Mexican counterparts. A second important issue comes into play in the overall historiography: there is very little scholarly interplay between Mexican and North American practitioners.

There are basic structural reasons for these divergences. Mexican historians experience a much more archivally-driven education as professional historians. The Mexican educational system introduces archival research to undergraduate students who complete a licenciate—a degree for which there exists no North American counterpart. To achieve a licentiate (something that typically lasts 6 years), a student must compose a thesis based on archival research and in length around...