Instructors of Latin American history often face probing questions from inquisitive students regarding routines of life in colonial Latin America. What clothes did Latin Americans wear in the viceregal era? What foods did they eat? Where did their tools of everyday life come from? In his thoroughly researched monograph, Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría addresses these questions and many more.
This book serves as an exemplary work of ethnohistory, employing both archaeological findings and records of deceased early colonizers’ possessions to compose a comprehensive view of the material life of the Spanish inhabitants of New Spain. Rodríguez-Alegría draws heavily on probate records of early settlers held in the Casa de Contratación section of the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. Paired with archaeological findings from the heart of Mexico City, primarily from the Programa de Arqueología Urbana of the Museo del Templo Mayor, Rodríguez-Alegría adds a materialist perspective on the transition of the ceremonial precinct of Aztec Tenochtitlan to viceregal Mexico City's center. Building on studies by Barbara Mundy, Frances Berdan, and James Lockhart, among others, the author offers readers a comprehensive examination of the everyday lives of sixteenth-century inhabitants Mexico City.
Rodríguez-Alegría frames his monograph around the question of how the Indigenous inhabitants of central Mexico influenced the daily material existence of the Spaniards who occupied the heartland of Mexico. Most compellingly, he demonstrates how the Mexica who survived the conquest influenced the currency, buildings, ceramics, and diets of the Spaniards of New Spain. Chapters on coinage, construction, and pottery and foods are especially original in demonstrating the persistence of indigenous influence on currency, construction methods, and ceramics.
Chapter 1, covering the currency of New Spain, notes the persistence of cacao as a means of exchange across ethnic lines alongside Spanish pesos. The Indigenous Mexicans even influenced metal coinage's implementation in New Spain. Tepuzque was a common coin with a high copper content derived from the Nahuatl word tepuztli, or copper. Rodríguez-Alegría's archaeological expertise shines through in chapter 2, which highlights how Tenochtitlan's urban grid shaped the plan of Mexico City and how Spaniards relied on Indigenous urban planners, masons, and carpenters to build homes on a marshy lakebed, unfamiliar terrain for the recent arrivals. Despite the adoption of some Spanish architectural techniques and styles such as arches and interior patios, the labor, materials, methods, and adaptations for construction on an earthquake-prone, swampy city, such as the use of pilings and andesite slab construction, came from the Aztecs. Chapter 4, covering kitchenware and food, draws on Rodríguez-Alegría's expertise in ceramics, the focus of his 2002 Ph.D. dissertation. This chapter shows that Spanish colonizers possessed a mix of Indigenous ceramics and imports from Europe and Asia regardless of income level. Their diets likewise included imported goods such as olive oil and vinegar as well as Mesoamerican staples such as chocolate, corn, chiles, and tomatoes.
The final chapter draws broader conclusions regarding wealth and consumption from the data. Rodríguez-Alegría challenges long held assertions regarding the connection between well-to-do colonizers and a penchant for imports, pointing out that one's financial standing did not necessarily lead to a higher percentage of one's possessions coming from abroad. Notably, Spaniards did not reject indigenous goods.
Despite the book's firm grounding in extensive archival research and archaeological analysis, a few claims seem speculative, including the assertion that “[t]here were two cases in which the term Doña appears, making it likely that the person was Indigenous” (48). Even though the extensive secondary research bolsters the book's relevance and arguments, situating the author's contentions within recent scholarship, the extensive reviews of relevant studies at the beginning of each chapter make the book less apt for undergraduate readers in survey courses. Overall, however, this monograph achieves its aim of presenting sixteenth-century New Spain's quotidian material life in sharp relief and impressive depth. This book should be read by all scholars and graduate students interested in materiality, urban Latin America, or colonial New Spain.
