How to Make a New Spain

Abstract

How to Make a New Spain presents an unprecedented view of the material worlds of Mexico City in the sixteenth century based on an original analysis of the probate inventories of thirty-nine Spanish colonizers, and on the excavations by the Programa de Arqueología Urbana. It begins with a critique of theories of materiality that call for scholars to emphasize the agency of things and to set aside their emphasis on society. Rodríguez-Alegría argues that now that scholars have discovered the active roles that Indigenous people played in colonial societies, it is no time to set aside our interest in how people use the material world to shape their social lives. This study takes Indigenous power seriously to reexamine how Indigenous people, colonizers, and Black people created the material and social worlds of colonial Mexico. Chapters focus on money and wealth, architecture and urban planning, furniture, pottery and food, clothing, tools, slaves, and livestock. Different chapters show how people diluted gold in coins and used slips of paper to create wealth. Colonizers adopted Indigenous technologies to create their own items of display, and they also used their own material culture to try to seek distinction from Indigenous people, but simultaneously to negotiate with Indigenous lords. Indigenous people often made some of the most admired items owned by colonizers. People’s social strategies, and not their wealth, shaped patterns of consumption. This history of materiality and power compels us to reimagine colonial Mexico and the people who created it materially and socially.