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After Moctezuma: Indigenous Politics and Self-Government in Mexico City, 1524–1730

Amazon.com Price:  $43.99 (as of 03/05/2019 05:06 PST- Details)

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Description

The Spanish invasion of Mexico in 1519 left the capital city, Tenochtitlan, in ruins. Conquistador Hernán Cortés, following the city’s give up in 1521, established a governing body to organize its reconstruction. Cortés was once careful to appoint native people to govern who had held positions of authority before his arrival, establishing a pattern that endured for centuries. William F. Connell’s After Moctezuma: Indigenous Politics and Self-Government in Mexico City, 1524–1730 reveals how native self-government in former Tenochtitlan evolved Over the years as the city and its population changed.

Drawing on extensive research in Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación, Connell shows how the hereditary political system of the Mexica was once converted into a central authority by elected town councilmen, patterned after the Spanish cabildo, or municipal council. In the process, the Spanish relied upon existing Mexica administrative entities—the native ethnic state, or altepetl of Mexico Tenochtitlan, became the parcialidad of San Juan Tenochtitlan, for example—preserving indigenous ideas of government within an imposed Spanish structure. Over the years, the electoral system undermined the preconquest elite and introduced new native political players, facilitating social change. By the early eighteenth century, a process that had begun in the 1500s with the demise of Moctezuma and the royal line of Tenochtitlan had resulted in a politically independent indigenous cabildo.

After Moctezuma is the first systematic study of the indigenous political structures at the heart of New Spain. With careful attention to relations among colonial officials and indigenous power brokers, Connell shows that the ongoing contest for regulate of indigenous government in Mexico City made imaginable a new more or less political system neither wholly indigenous nor entirely Spanish. In the long run, he offers insight into the political voice Tenochtitlan’s indigenous people gained with the ability to make a choice their own leaders—exercising power that endured through the end of the colonial period and beyond.

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