Honorable Mention, Bandelier/Lavrin Book Award in Colonial Latin
America, Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies (RMCLAS),
2019 Honorable Mention, The Alfred B. Thomas Book Award,
Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS), 2019
Scholars have written reams on the conquest of Mexico, from the
grand designs of kings, viceroys, conquistadors, and inquisitors to
the myriad ways that indigenous peoples contested imperial
authority. But the actual work of establishing the Spanish empire
in Mexico fell to a host of local agents-magistrates, bureaucrats,
parish priests, ranchers, miners, sugar producers, and many
others-who knew little and cared less about the goals of their
superiors in Mexico City and Madrid. Through a case study of the
province of Michoacan in western Mexico, Promiscuous Power focuses
on the prosaic agents of colonialism to offer a paradigm-shifting
view of the complexities of making empire at the ground level.
Presenting rowdy, raunchy, and violent life histories from the
archives, Martin Austin Nesvig reveals that the local colonizers of
Michoacan were primarily motivated by personal gain, emboldened by
the lack of oversight from the upper echelons of power, and
thoroughly committed to their own corporate memberships. His
findings challenge some of the most deeply held views of the
Spanish colonization of Mexico, including the Black Legend, which
asserts that the royal state and the institutional church colluded
to produce a powerful Catholicism that crushed heterodoxy, punished
cultural difference, and ruined indigenous worlds. Instead, Nesvig
finds that Michoacan-typical of many frontier provinces of the
empire-became a region of refuge from imperial and juridical
control and formal Catholicism, where the ordinary rules of law,
jurisprudence, and royal oversight collapsed in the entropy of
decentralized rule.
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