Sean F. McEnroe. From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico

A creative, original argument frames From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840 which, despite the geographical sweep of the title and the frequent labeling of the area as northern Mexico, focuses on the colonial and independence history of Nuevo León with some reference to today’s Tamaulipas and southern Texas. According to Sean F. McEnroe, a partial explanation for the origins of Mexican nationhood can be found in the history of the “Tlaxcalan model” that evolved in this northeastern region of New Spain. The sixteenth-century Spanish alliance with Tlaxcalan enemies of the Aztecs drew on the Roman imperial system and provided a template for Spain’s use of ethnic allies to conquer and control other indigenous groups. McEnroe’s extensive research on the northeast in civil and judicial archives of Nuevo León, Mexico, and Spain reveals how and why this model was particularly effective in New Spain’s northeast where it created a hybrid political system that led to a shared imagination of belonging to a larger polity. This was no easy task in a region where largely nomadic Indians, denominated collectively as Chichimecs (“barbarians,” “pagans”), predominated and resisted Spanish incorporation in piecemeal fashion throughout the period under study.

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