Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810 by Dana Velasco Murillo (review)

This social history turns inward and downward—away from an earlier macrohistorical genre of scholarship concerned with imperial horizons and structural problems (such as long-term boom/bust cycles in silver production; capital, technology, and labor-supply problems; coercive labor regimes; regional markets and outlying rural development; mining’s impact on New Spain’s long economic waves; silver currency and trans-Atlantic trade; the opening of the northern frontier, etc.). Instead, it takes a close, almost ethnographic, look at Zacatecas’ sprawling population of indigenous migrants, who, during the course of three centuries, transformed this frontier mining town into a vibrant multiracial city. Murillo is not much interested in engaging, much less fundamentally challenging, the contentious debates that once animated that older mining historiography of Mexico and Peru. Indeed, she shifts the analytical focus away from silver mining and Indian mine labor altogether. This approach is jarring at first, since, as she writes in her introduction, “studies of native people and silver mining are [still] few,” and since the oppressive regimes and rhythms of mine work were tightly interwoven into the social fabric of indigenous Zacatecas. Instead, Murillo refers readers to the classic studies on Zacatecas silver mining, shifting the book’s primary focus “from indigenous peoples as laborers to native peoples as settlers and vecinos [neighbors]” (4).

The book’s principal contribution is its “much-needed ethno-historical perspective” (4). More specifically, Murillo traces across time the active role that Indians played in the rise of local civic institutions and self-governing pueblos, which helped to define, and sustain, the ethnic status and identities of “urban Indians” within this colonial mining city. She accomplishes this goal by focusing on three interlocking themes. First, she examines Zacatecas’ multiethnic urban origins in the early chapters. Rather than look at the Spanish silver rush, she traces the massive influx of diverse indigenous peoples, from a wide geographical radius, who carved their own spatial and institutional niches within this racially fluid, boomtown.

Second, the book maps sociocultural trends in Indian mobility and identity. On a conceptual level, Murillo argues that historians have misconstrued Spanish America’s geographical and caste-like binary of indio/vecino. These categories actually came to be mutually constitutive, converging in both formal and informal ways to shape the relationship of indigenous residents to local civil society and the pueblos in which they lived. Through painstaking archival work, Murillo gathered nuggets from the minutia of Spanish municipal, notarial, and legal records to trace the rise of a parallel urban universe of Indian self-governance and civil society, revolving around distinctly indigenous town councils, religious and lay brotherhoods, and municipal towns. Such was the infrastructure of urban “Indian-ness”—the tangible grassroots organizations in which the migrant masses cohered in civil-religious rituals and organizations, recovered a sense of local community, and raised a new generation of indigenous leaders.

Third, and more problematically, the book wrestles with that old chestnut of ethnohistorical scholarship and debate regarding Indian agency and adaptation in colonial Mexico and the Andes—namely, how to reconcile the ineluctable historical dynamics of cultural dislocation, destruction, and change with clear evidence of indigenous strategies of cultural survival, resistance, and defense. As an interdisciplinary craft, ethnohistory has long maligned reductive linear narratives of Indian acculturation. Murillo uses her introduction to identify a few of the culprits, defining her book as a counter-narrative seeking to uncover the “continuity and vitality of indigenous culture” and to interrogate the local peculiarities of the larger transcultural phenomenon of “ethnogenesis” (11). On this level, the book’s novelty lies not so much in the interpretive argument per se as in the specificity of the context. The boomtown of Zacatecas would seem to be the perfect historical setting in which Indian-ness would have become “diluted” by the unruly forces of urban migration, wage work and labor strife, monied capitalism, consumer markets and black markets, and a rogue popular culture. Yet, Murillo deftly...