Readers of Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría’s earlier The Archaeology and History of Colonial Central Mexico (Cambridge, 2016) will reencounter familiar themes in this recent book. In both, he looks at the interactions between Spanish colonizers who first arrived into Mexico in 1519 and the city’s long-term Mexica (or Aztec) residents; in both, his goal is to use material culture to meter social interactions and identity construction. A constant throughline in all of Rodríguez-Alegría’s work is his careful parsing of data, his assiduous comparisons between different kinds of data sets (probate inventories, urban archaeology), and his interest in the limits of data, be they historical or archaeological, as revealed by their ability to answer some questions about the lives of the city’s residents but not others. 

In seven body chapters, Rodríguez-Alegría addresses the following questions about the material worlds of urban-dwelling Spanish colonizers across the sixteenth century in Mexico: What did they use as coin, and how did they make it? What kind of architectural spaces did they construct (or have constructed for them) to live in? What kind of furnishings did they use? What vessels did they use to eat? How did they dress? What kind of property did they own, in the form of tools, livestock, and slaves? Did they opt for imported or locally made goods? Shaping these questions, and providing answers to them, is a data set derived from thirty-nine probate inventories, currently in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the repository for much of the official documentation coming from Spain’s overseas empire. For the historian, probate inventories are a rich source to understand material circumstances of their subjects. Compiled when a Spanish-born resident of Mexico City died without direct heirs, they list the decedent’s property and its appraised value. At times, auction records also exist, so assessed value can be cross-checked against sale price. The inventories are exhaustive, listing possessions ranging from silver saltcellars (rare) to worn-out hose (common). Parsing probate inventories allows Rodríguez-Alegría to catalog and analyze the possessions of these Spanish colonists, two of them women. To supplement what he finds in the documents, Rodríguez-Alegría draws on the work of archaeologists of colonial Mexico City, carefully sifting through their data to build out his conclusions. What emerges is a rich picture of these thirty-nine men and women and their interactions with the material worlds around them, as told through the objects that they left behind. 

Given the world-shaping consequences of the clash of cultures that was staged between Europeans and Amerindians in Mexico City, which is the backdrop against which Rodríguez-Alegría’s book unfolds, one might wonder why it is only now, some five hundred years after the calamitous arrival of Hernán Cortés and his motley band of soldiers to the city, that the material worlds of the colonizers are being exposed. Two historiographic waves are to blame. First, colonial-era histories encased the early colonizers in the gleaming fantasy of the heroic adventurer, drawing on, in no small measure, the self-mythologizing of the conquistadors themselves. Secondly, when Mexico consolidated a national identity across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its pre-colonial and pre-hispanic past came to play an outsize role in the national imaginary, perhaps more than in any other American nation. It is the Aztecs who were, and continue to be, front and center in Mexican histories. An Aztec symbol graces the national flag, Aztec artworks appear on banknotes, and the narrative of the valiant resistance of Aztec warriors during the wars of conquest appears in school textbooks. As a result, within Mexico, archaeological projects of the pre-hispanic period (before 1520) receive more national and international funding, and new finds make headlines. In contrast, archaeology of the colonial period (that is, post-1520) is an orphaned affair, and often happens hastily, as part of mandated salvage operations before the construction of new urban buildings. When (and if) published, the results are scattered. Rodríguez-Alegría is among a growing band of archaeologists who have devoted themselves to original archaeology of the colonial period and reassessed the remains of earlier salvage projects. In this book, he brings his firsthand knowledge to bear, along with a deep familiarity with the often scattered and recondite publications of work done by others. The result is the most holistic, and data-driven, picture of the urban lifeways of early Spanish colonists to date. 

Countering one of the most prevalent historiographic fictions of the rico indiano, that is, that Spaniards who came to the colonies ended up better off than their Iberian-dwelling counterparts, Rodríguez-Alegría establishes that the Spaniards in his sample were not uniformly wealthy. Indeed, some were quite poor, as metered by their worn-out hose and tattered shirts. As he writes, their “variety of fortunes serves as a reminder of the variety of experiences of the colonizers” (260). He also exposes some contradictions: while these colonists lived in houses whose material and facture was close to those of their indigenous neighbors, they wore Spanish-style clothes and opted for Spanish-style furniture. Rodríguez-Alegría concludes, looking to Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about taste, that Spanish residents used these as markers of their distinction from their Indigenous neighbors. At the same time, as Rodríguez-Alegría perceptively notes, “they often depended on Indigenous people” (257) to satisfy their need for distinction, as Indigenous makers were quick to cater to this new market for Spanish-style goods. His analysis of the inventories also reveals that these colonists harbored no prejudice against Indigenous goods tout court, in fact, the notaries who drew up the inventories would occasionally praise their quality. Over the course of the century, Spanish colonists in the sample tended to acquire more imported goods, probably because they were more available, rather than more valued by default. 

Throughout the book, Rodríguez-Alegría underscores the symbolic value of material culture in the unfolding struggles over social power in the particularly fluid world of the colonial capital of Mexico City. Here, lowly-born Spaniards could pass themselves off as hidalgos: who was to know if one was a “son of someone” (hidalgo being the contracted form of hijo de algo)? Crypto-Jews also got a pass in a city obsessed with the threat of Martin Luther’s reach. Such contests also involved Spanish colonists and Indigenous elites, whose relationships have been of central concern to Rodríguez-Alegría. He concludes an analysis of furniture with this perceptive observation, “Furniture was not just a part of strategies marking difference between ethnic groups. It was also a part of strategies of forging alliances between powerful groups across ethnic lines” (252, emphasis mine). 

While Rodríguez-Alegría flirts with some of the newer literature on the entanglement of humans and their material worlds, he is reluctant to countenance that objects might exert some agency of their own. His caution is not unjustified, given that “agency,” which reigned as king of the schoolyard fifteen years ago, has been thoroughly roughed up, and now sits, bloodied and diminished, on a hard corner bench. Rodríguez-Alegría wants no part of this scrap. His position is clear from the beginning of the book: “my goal is not to examine the agency of things or to define agency at all, but rather to find out how people created, traded, used, exchanged, or otherwise related to things and other people in colonial Mexico City” (9). For this reader, though, I wondered if there would be an added value to take seriously Ian Hodder’s contention in his book Entanglement (Wiley, 2012) that “the social world of humans and the material world of things are entangled together by dependences and dependencies that create potentials, further investments and entrapments” (89). Could the linked concepts of entanglement and agency add another dimension to the argument that material goods were often vehicles to mark distinction? Consider the entanglements of the curule chair, one of the important pieces of furniture in the colonial world. Originating in the battle encampments of the Romans, this folding seat was carried into New Spain on the ships that brought Hernán Cortés. Cortés seems to have made a point of using it in parleys with Indigenous leaders, as curule chairs appear pictured on indigenous manuscripts that depict such meetings. Certainly, political one-upmanship was at play: the elevated chair distinguished Cortés from his Indigenous counterparts, as they, at least initially, sat on low box-like seats made of woven reed. And these elites in turn were setting themselves above commoners, who were accustomed to squatting on the ground. Rodríguez-Alegría sees, not incorrectly, the “symbolic potential of furniture,” in such episodes (252). But isn’t it also possible the chair as a material fact, rather than just a symbol, and its physical entanglement with the human body, could have had a role in choices about its use? I invite you, dear reader, to leave your present position and squat on your haunches for five minutes, as if living in a world innocent of the long-legged chair. Feel the ache that descends on your body, as your gluteus muscles and quadriceps cry out, and your lower back begs you to stop, before dismissing the idea that the chair has no agency. Could Spaniards have opted for certain furnishings not just because they were status-weighted, but because generations of chair use had rendered their bodies unfit to sit in any other manner? 

Rodríguez-Alegría carries out his description of the data, and subsequent analysis, in prose that is clear and unadorned. He is careful to walk the reader though all the steps that he took in moving toward his conclusions, and he is quite frank about the occasions when his data fail to lead him to any conclusion at all. Through this strategy, he invites the reader to think alongside him. I can imagine that any one of his highly accessible chapters would be useful in an undergraduate or graduate seminar as an object lesson in reasoning through a data set. And I also could see this book as inspiring other scholars who seek to carry out research across very different data sets.

As with all good books, Rodríguez-Alegría’s book points to questions that demand answers; as with even better books, his offers methods to answer them. Given that Mexico City may have had some 12,000 Spaniards by the 1560s, thirty-nine inventories from 1532–90 is quite a small sample. And since probate inventories are central node, there’s an inherent skewing of the sample toward those Spaniards who died without local heirs (the reason their estates ended up in probate), and who at the time of death possessed “estates,” albeit minimal ones. Did their relative lack of local roots make them outliers among their cohort of colonists? Would this lack have impacted their choices of consumption and associated symbolic needs? And could the materiality of material culture, along with its symbolic value, have played its own role in the construction of a new colonial society in the sixteenth century, one whose legacy has shaped the modern world? 

Barbara E. Mundy

Barbara E. Mundy is Robertson Chair in Latin American Art History at Tulane University.