These three articles, originally presented as papers at the 1992 American Historical Association meetings, represent a new direction in Mexican legal history. Whereas most legal histories have concentrated on a textual analysis of the law, these articles go beyond the laws to explore how they were implemented (as in Charles Cutter's and Michael Scardaville's pieces) and how they were made (as in Linda Arnold's piece). To do so the authors supplement printed sources with rich and previously neglected materials from local court proceedings, police logs, and supreme court archives. Taken together, the articles present a fascinating picture of how the Mexican legal system worked in practice, be it through the provincial courts of New Mexico, the lower courts of Mexico City, or the Supreme Court visitas of prisons.

Despite its fundamental importance, Spanish colonial law, derecho indiano, has remained something of a mystery to modern scholars. Perhaps the great chronological and ideological distance between us and the antiguo régimen plays a role. We often listen more sympathetically to those who espouse political ideas similar to our own, and we make assumptions based on the institutions with which we are familiar. As a result, modern historians often have joined with nineteenth-century patriots and foreign observers in denouncing the colonial legal system. Judicial administration is still depicted as ponderous, tyrannical, arbitrary, and corrupt. Clearly, many scholars have failed to appreciate the essential qualities of derecho indiano. A more careful scrutiny of the historical record reveals an intricate legal system that proved to be adaptable to the peculiar needs of the diverse regions of empire. Local modification of Hispanic law–derecho vulgar–was an important element of this flexibility and constituted a legitimate expression of local self-governance.

Mexicans during the early national era actively grappled with identifying, clarifying, and defining core republican political values, principles, and doctrines. Throughout the first federal republic (1824-1835), the central republic (1835-1846), the second federal republic (1846-1853), and into the years of the Revolution of Ayutla (1853-1855) and the Wars for Reform (1858-1861), defining and protecting individual rights, delimiting the rights and prerogatives of corporations and their members, and limiting the power of the state became the fundamental challenges Mexicans confronted as they endeavored to create a republican political society and their own republican political culture. As in many, if perhaps not all, countries in transition from a corporate model to a republican model, the issues polarized public opinion; and militant elements procured arms and pursued civil war, not just once but several times. Simultaneously, el pueblo mexicano actively clamored for justice. Because of that clamoring, jurists, litigants, legislators, and executives all came to recognize that colonial jurisprudence was no substitute for new and innovative republican jurisprudence. The men on the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice persistently counselled politicians that extant jurisprudence contained their competence and impeded them from administering justice when individuals, corporations, and local and national government officials sought protection from perceived wrongs. Significantly, in seeking protection from perceived wrongs, in seeking justice, el pueblo mexicano initiated defining those values, principles, and doctrines that ultimately could unify the society and mystify and mythicize the meaning of the nation.

The relative absence of riots in colonial Mexico City is an intriguing phenomenon which has attracted the recent attention of scholars interested in questions of social stability and conflict. While the Mexican countryside experienced over 130 rebellions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the cities by comparison remained calm. The most cogent explanation of urban lower class passivity during the late colonial period has been formulated by Eric Van Young, who suggests that a number of short- and long-term social and economic forces converged to keep the cities, most notably Mexico City, relatively quiet during the wars for independence. Among those he noted were the existence of urban social service and food-distribution institutions, the presence of security forces, an atomized and fluid social order, the lack of traditional communal rights to defend, and weak organizational means to focus discontent.

Recent years have seen a significant increase in the use of history by social scientists. It is less and less common that studies in anthropology, sociology, and political science evaluate variables without attention to their antecedents. There still survive, however, concepts and theories built originally on synchronic assumptions. One of these theories, ladinization, has been the subject of considerable contention.

“Ladinization” derives from “Ladino,” a term used in Guatemala and adjacent areas of Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras to refer to the non-Indian natives of those countries. I am not sure when “ladinization” entered the social science vocabulary, but it may have been with the work of North American anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s. It described what observers thought of as a process whereby Indians were becoming Ladinos or more Ladino-like. The term was not favored by Guatemalan Ladinos, who generally spoke of “civilizing” the Indians, by which they meant that Indian customs should be discarded in favor of Ladino. In espousing this theme, Guatemalan indigenistas of the “generation of the 20s” often blurred the relation of race to culture; some argued that Indians were capable of being “civilized,” others that such changes could only be secured by introducing Europeans to interbreeding.