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8 - Social organization and social change in colonial Spanish America

from PART TWO - ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES: SPANISH AMERICA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

James Lockhart
Affiliation:
University of California at Los Angeles
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Summary

Less than two decades ago the topic that we now often call the ‘social history’ of early Spanish America, the study of its ‘social structure’ or ‘social organization’, was just beginning to be explored; a single thoughtful article was able to bring together nearly everything useful that was then known, most of it drawn from formal, self-conscious statements of contemporaries in laws, tracts, political manifestos, or official reports. Since then a whole current of scholarship within the field of early Spanish American history has concentrated on precisely the opposite kind of social phenomena, informal patterns of thought and behaviour which were rarely given overt expression-some, indeed, may have been beneath the level of consciousness. Such work has been highly specific, tied to a certain time and place, giving detailed accounts of individual lives and individual families, businesses, or other local organizations in different periods and different regions. The cases were sometimes chosen for their representation of general types and processes, but the typological aspect often remained implicit.

The time has now come for a provisional synthesis. The emphasis will be on processes and principles, although individual life stories and individual situations have ultimately provided the raw material. It may be felt by some that the colour — the humanity — is missing, that the regional variety has been attenuated, or that aspects of the chronology have been neglected. The first part of this chapter deliberately sets out to examine general patterns of social organization in a somewhat atemporal fashion.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1984

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References

Altman, Ida and Lockhart, James (eds.), Provinces of early Mexico: variants of Spanish American regional evolution (Los Angeles, 1976).
Balmori, Diana and Oppenheimer, Robert, ‘Family clusters: generational nucleation in nineteenth-century Argentina and Chile’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 21 (1979).Google Scholar
Brading, D. A. and Wu, Celia, ‘Population growth and crisis: León, 1720–1860’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 5 (1973)Google Scholar
Bronner, FredPeruvian encomenderos in 1630: elíte circulation and consolidation’, HAHR, 57 (1977).Google Scholar
Chance, John K. Race and class in colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, 1978).
Karttunen, Frances and Lockhart, James, ‘La estructura de la poesía náhuatl vista por sus variantes’, Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl, 14 (1980)Google Scholar
Karttunen, Frances and Lockhart, James, Nahuatl in the middle years: language contact phenomena in texts of the colonial period, University of California Publications in Linguistics 85 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976).
León, Antonio García Pajapan: un dialecto mexicano del Golfo (Mexico, 1976).
Love, Edgar F.Marriage patterns of persons of African descent in a colonial Mexico City parish’, HAHR, 51 (1971)Google Scholar
Mañé, J. Ignacio RubioGente de España en la ciudad de México, año de 1689’, Boletín del Archīvo General de la Nación, 7 (1966).Google Scholar
McAlister, Lyle N.Social structure and social change in New Spain’, Hispanic American Historical Review [HAHR], 43 (1963).Google Scholar
McAndrew, John The open-air churches of sixteenth-century Mexico (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).
Mörner, Magnus Race mixture in the history of Latin America (Boston, 1967).
Powell, Philip Wayne Soldiers, Indians and silver: the northward advance of New Spain, 1550–1600 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1952).

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