How to make a new Spain

• Verfasst von: Rodríguez-Alegría, Enrique [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: How to make a new Spain
• Titelzusatz: the material worlds of colonial Mexico City
• Verf.angabe: Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría
• Verlagsort: New York, NY, United States of America
• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• E-Jahr: 2023
• Jahr: [2023]
• Umfang: xvi, 323 Seiten, 8 ungezählte Seiten
• Illustrationen: Illustrationen, Diagramme, Karten
• Fussnoten: Includes bibliographical references and index
• ISBN: 978-0-19-768229-6
• ISBN: 978-0-19-768231-9
• DOI: doi:10.1093/oso/9780197682296.001.0001
• Schlagwörter: (s)Mexiko-Stadt / (s)Kolonialismus / (s)Ethnologie / (s)Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Sprache: eng
• Bibliogr. Hinweis: Erscheint auch als : Online-Ausgabe: Rodríguez-Alegría, Enrique: How to make a new Spain. - 1. - New York : Oxford University Press, [2023]
• Sach-SW: Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sach-SW: Archaeology by period / region
• Sach-SW: Archäologie einer Periode / Region
• Sach-SW: Colonialism & imperialism
• Sach-SW: HISTORY / Latin America / General
• Sach-SW: History of the Americas
• Sach-SW: Kolonialismus und Imperialismus
• Sach-SW: POL047000
• Geograph. SW: Mexico
• Geograph. SW: Mexiko
• K10plus-PPN: 1830701452

Abstract

"As we enter the material worlds of Spanish colonizers, we should get to know a little bit about the colonizers themselves. In this chapter, I characterize the economic standing of colonizers, focusing on their wealth and the kinds of things on which they spent or invested their money. To address issues of wealth, it will be necessary to study the kinds of coin and other media of exchange that were in use in sixteenth-century Mexico City. The people compiling the probate inventories that form the basis of this study measured and recorded the value of each item in material terms: the amount of gold that would be necessary to purchase a person's belongings. They translated each decedent's net worth into coin in official documents, with the intent of communicating and sending the value of the decedent's belongings to his or her family in Spain. Calculating the value of a decedent's belongings as gold also helped the church and the Spanish crown collect some revenue from a person's estate, through donations to the church and taxes to the king."

Abstract

""How to Make a New Spain" presents an unprecedented view of the material worlds of Mexico City in the sixteenth century, drawing from a combination of sources and methodologies. It presents the author's original analysis of over 11,000 items in the probate inventories of thirty-nine Spanish colonizers. It also synthesizes information from archaeological excavations of Spanish houses at the center of Mexico City. The book begins with a critique of theories of materiality, in which scholars emphasize the agency of things at the expense of an investigation of social relationships. Rodriguez-Alegria argues that now that scholars have shown that the descendants of the Mexica (often known as the Aztecs) maintained social and political power in the colonial period, we should reexamine how Indigenous people, colonizers, and Black people together created the material and social worlds of colonialMexico. The book assimilates information on architecture, money, clothing, furniture, pottery, slaves, livestock, and tools to provide a new vision of daily life in colonial Mexico City. It shows that colonialism was based on the recognition of people of similar classes across ethnic boundaries, and on the forgingof relationships with powerful Indigenous people. Even colonizers who sought to display distinction from Indigenous people with their material culture depended on Indigenous products and technology to achieve that distinction. The complex history of materiality and power that emerges from this book compels us to reimagine colonial Mexico and the people who created it."