An Outpost of Colonialism

"An Outpost of Colonialism focuses on the Hispanic community in Mâerida, Yucatâan during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the later-middle era of Spanish colonial domination of a heavily Maya region. Unlike other regions of Mexico with rich resources of silver (or gold in South America, or sugar in the Caribbean), the main resource in the Yucatâan was Indigenous labor and land, which allowed wealth and power to accrue to the region's Spanish-descended elites. By focusing on a specific place and time, this book illuminates the process of class formation and social reproduction among this group, and traces the means by which patterns of descent, marriage, and inheritance allowed for the continued consolidation of power, as well as social mobility. Using the categories of status, political power, and wealth, and charting demographic change over time, historian Robert W. Patch demonstrates that the upper class was not an endogamous class descended from the conquistadors, but that newcomers moved in and moved up, and that society included an ethnically European middle class that shared in economic opportunities and in the exercise of political power, as well as a large class of poor Hispanic people. Using the case study of a region in which economic production relied nearly exclusively on Indigenous labor, Patch provides a framework for understanding of the nature of social networks, families, social classes, and Hispanic society in Latin America as a whole"-- Provided by publisher.

Robert W. Patch is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Riverside.