The Material Worlds of 16th-Century Colonial Mexico City

FAIN: FA-232662-16

Enrique R. Rodriguez-Alegria
University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX 78712-0100)

The writing of a book on the material culture of 16th-century Mexico City.

The proposed project reevaluates the social and cultural strategies of Spanish colonizers in Mexico City, in light of recent studies that have shown that indigenous people maintained much power in the colonial period. It focuses on more than 11,000 belongings of 39 Spanish colonizers found in probate inventories, and on artifacts and architecture excavated in Spanish houses in Mexico City. The study includes analysis of how the city transformed, the use of indigenous and Spanish technologies, clothing, food, and how the material aspects of daily life were part of political and social strategies for obtaining power. The main theoretical contribution will be a vision of colonialism not just as an act of ethnic separatism, but also a process of interethnic recognition, alliance formation, and conflict. In this case, class differences were not entirely the same as ethnic difference, and in many occasions, class differences guided the strategies of colonizers more than ethnic differences.

Associated Products

“Indigenous Engineering and Aesthetics in Colonial Mexico City.” Lecture presented at the Archaeological Research Facility, University of California, Berkeley. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Indigenous Engineering and Aesthetics in Colonial Mexico City.” Lecture presented at the Archaeological Research Facility, University of California, Berkeley.
Author: Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría
Abstract: Archaeological excavations in the heart of Mexico City can help understand how indigenous people created and transformed both public and private spaces in the city before and after the Spanish conquest of 1521. Scholars have remarked that historical narratives left by Spanish colonizers describe Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, as a feature of the landscape rather than a feat of indigenous engineering. Scholarship on architecture and urban change after the conquest has in turn focused extensively on the actions of colonizers in destroying the previous city and building new, more European buildings. Archaeological data from Mexico City show that many pre-conquest engineering techniques were used to build the colonial city, allowing us to see the role of indigenous engineering, architecture, and technology in building the capital of New Spain. Archaeological data also show that indigenous builders created the earliest houses for Spanish colonizers with their traditional, indigenous aesthetics.
Date: 10/26/2017
Conference Name: Archaeological Research Facility, University of California, Berkeley.

“Indigenous Construction in Colonial Houses in Mexico City.” Lecture presented at the Archaeological Research Center, University of California, Santa Cruz. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Indigenous Construction in Colonial Houses in Mexico City.” Lecture presented at the Archaeological Research Center, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Author: Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría
Abstract: Archaeological excavations in the heart of Mexico City can help understand how indigenous people created and transformed both public and private spaces in the city before and after the Spanish conquest of 1521. Scholars have remarked that historical narratives left by Spanish colonizers describe Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, as a feature of the landscape rather than a feat of indigenous engineering. Scholarship on architecture and urban change after the conquest has in turn focused extensively on the actions of colonizers in destroying the previous city and building new, more European buildings. Archaeological data from Mexico City show that many pre-conquest engineering techniques were used to build the colonial city, allowing us to see the role of indigenous engineering, architecture, and technology in building the capital of New Spain. Archaeological data also show that indigenous builders created the earliest houses for Spanish colonizers with their traditional, indigenous aesthetics.
Date: 10/27/2017
Conference Name: Lecture presented at the Archaeological Research Center, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Coins and Empire in Sixteenth-century Mexico. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Coins and Empire in Sixteenth-century Mexico.
Author: Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría
Abstract: Scholars have asked how empires solidify power when colonizers, the agents of empire-building, often have diverse goals and backgrounds and their actions do not necessarily support the goals of the empire. Two answers to this question have received attention: that empires promote ideologies that support cohesion among colonizers, and that coercion and violence can promote the expansion of empires. I propose a third answer, in which colonizers create varied material forms that may challenge the goals of empire, but later appeal to the king for regulation and control over the material world. To illustrate this case, I use the example of coins among Spanish colonizers in Mexico City. Colonizers invented and used a variety of coins, in part by diluting gold into different alloys to make up for the scarcity of gold that they found in the colonies. Thus, they challenged imperial authority by creating new ways of measuring value and wealth (in this case, by creating more wealth with diluted gold). But when they found that their new coins created problems of conversion and exchange, they appealed to the crown requesting regulations over the minting, value, and use of different coins, thereby strengthening imperial authority.
Date: 4/13/2018
Conference Name: Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

How to Make a New Spain: The Material Worlds of Colonial Mexico City (Book)
Title: How to Make a New Spain: The Material Worlds of Colonial Mexico City
Author: Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría
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 39 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 the social. 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 debt and 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.
Year: 2023
Publisher: Oxford
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 0197682294
Copy sent to NEH?: No

The Indigenous Side of Spanish Colonial Display (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Indigenous Side of Spanish Colonial Display
Author: Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría
Abstract: This presentation examines the use of Indigenous technologies in building the houses and making the clothes of Spanish colonizers in colonial Mexico City.
Date: 4/9/2022
Conference Name: Tenochtitlan: Imperial Ideologies on Display, a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks

Building Houses in Colonial Mexico City: the Spanish Adoption of Indigenous Technologies (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Building Houses in Colonial Mexico City: the Spanish Adoption of Indigenous Technologies
Abstract: This lecture examines the use of Indigenous technologies to build Spanish houses in Mexico City and what it means for broader theories of technological change and colonialism.
Author: Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría
Date: 03/16/2022
Location: Penn Museum, Philadelphia

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