<i>Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810</i> by Dana Velasco Murillo

Velasco Murillo offers an important contribution to our understanding of the indigenous labor migrations toward the mines of Spanish America. Mining was one of the central pillars of this colonial political economy. At its apogee in the late eighteenth century, the sector encompassed hundreds of mining districts, many of which were thriving towns and even cities. From Mexico to the Andes, these urban populations were primarily composed of indigenous peoples. Almost all of them arrived from elsewhere. The big mining cities of northern Mexico—Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, and, the subject of this book, Zacatecas—were established in thinly populated zones. The hundreds, and then thousands of workers who would populate them came up from Central Mexico. They were mainly Nahuatl-speaking Mexica, Tolucans and Tlaxcalans, or Purepecha- speaking Tarascans. Velasco Murillo shows that in 1754, they counted for very close to half of Zacatecas’s population.Documenting the structures and conditions of work in the mines of Spanish America has produced some of the key contributions to the historiography. These have been read through the lens of dependency theory or social history. More recently historians of colonial Latin America have directed their attentions to the social and gendered histories contained in the mining cities of the continent, most particularly for the Andean silver city of Potosí.Velasco Murillo’s main concern, however, is the community produced by indigenous labor migrants—the Indios of Zacatecas. More precisely, as she shows, this was a community of communities, counting thousands of Nahuas, Tarascos, and others living in the indigenous barrios or quarters of the city. They were largely self-governing entities, ruled by their own elected councils. They were multilingual and culturally diverse, bringing together peoples from a range of indigenous nations all living and working in close relation with one another as well as with Iberians, Afro-Mexicans, and mestizos. What she reveals here is a complex and fascinating society, one that was, with local variations, representative of many Spanish American mining districts.It is surprising that this kind of attention has been so late in coming. Perhaps the main reason for this was a long-standing commonplace about the cultural effect of Spanish American cities. It held that cities were spaces of occidentalization, places where incoming indigenous migrants quickly lost their languages, practices, and identities. They became “Indios Ladinos,” and then not even that. An urban Indian, wrote one distinguished ethnographer, was an oxymoron.It is precisely this view that Velasco Murillo and an emerging scholarship is proving wrong. Moving into the cities, she writes, “did not convert a native person into a Spaniard or make them any less of an Indian. In other words, you could be ‘urban’ and an ‘Indian’” (156). Her book shows how. It is divided into seven well-structured chapters that, along with the strong index, produce a nice text. The prose is consistently clear and mainly expository, interspersed with nicely crafted narrative passages to introduce key themes. The book covers a long time span, following the indigenous communities of Zacatecas through formation (1540s–1600s), consolidation (1600s–1750s), and slow erosion (1770s–1810s). The chronological progression provides the central line that allows Velasco Murillo to shift her emphasis across a range of themes. These are immigration and settlement; the establishment and functioning of indigenous cofradias (Catholic sodalities) and cabildos (councils); labor; kinship, and intergroup relations; language; spatial arrangement; and material culture and symbolic practices. All in all, it is a comprehensive portrait.The book is based on extensive archival research conducted for and after Velasco Murillo’s dissertation. She has thoroughly scoured the archives to review all the possible documents relating to Zacatecas’s indigenous population. This includes wills; property suits; parish and cofradia records; civil, criminal, and inquisitorial trials; and notarial documents and petitions. This richness transfers directly into the text, where Velasco Murillo’s rich empirical description provides a real view into the lives of these communities. For broader patterns, the author has compiled literally hundreds of marriage petitions, each of which contains key data on provenance, settlement, gender, and ethnonational identity.Velasco Murillo’s findings will be of great interest to Latin Americanists and to historians interested in a comparative view of the sociality of labor migrations (the book, for instance, calls to mind certain parallels with the experience of miners of twentieth- century South Africa). She reveals just how closely kinship and work were linked. People arrived in the mines and smelter-works as families. Both men and women in and around the mining complex worked as miners, ore sorters, cottage smelters, cooks, bakers, and farmers. The variety and extent of women’s work is finely detailed, and Velasco Murillo shows how vital it was to keeping families going through the hard times when mining work ebbed (these down-cycles were regular—four periods of circa thirty-five years over the period of study). Taking us inside the life of the cofradia and the cabildo, two of Iberia’s central institutions of local spiritual and temporal government, here appropriated by Zacatecas’s indigenous citizens, she describes the workings of these local democratic institutions, their mobilization in defense of community rights, and their role in symbolically announcing their respective communities through emblems, feasts, and processions.Velasco Murillo’s careful reconstitution of the range of acts, relations, and settings that constituted these neighborhoods demonstrates how indigenous peoples could be both Indian and urban—in Zacatecas as well as many other Spanish American cities. The Indios of Zacatecas were one of the new indigenous peoples to emerge within the colonial context, peoples that scholars have only recently begun to appreciate. Velasco Murillo’s book is as rich and as thorough a study of the urban indigenous experience as one could hope for.

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