A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City, 1519–1821

John F. López's excellent anthology on Mexico City's history is the third volume in Brill's Companions to the Americas series. It offers a broad selection of “state of the field” essays on a wide range of topics (p. 5). As editor, López has achieved a great deal of thematic unity across the volume, which emphasizes both the kaleidoscopic complexity of Mexico City's cultural heritage and the global dimensions of historical changes during the viceregal era, which turned the city into a cosmopolitan center.The book consists of an introduction and 19 chapters written by scholars based in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Their contributions span the entirety of the colonial or viceregal period (the editor uses the terms interchangeably). The chronological coverage is well distributed, with a slight emphasis on the eighteenth century. The sustained attention to the oft-neglected seventeenth century is to be welcomed, and one outstanding chapter, by Iván Escamilla González on the viceregal court's evolving culture, covers the entire period.A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City avoids offering a single, universal history of the city. Instead, the authors address wide-ranging subjects from several perspectives, some interdisciplinary—as with art history, literature, and the history of science—others in different historical subfields, among them cultural, economic, environmental, intellectual, political, and social history. The book is well organized. It is divided into five parts, on history and society, religious life, institutions, special themes, and the arts, respectively. There is a good deal of subject overlap across these five parts. Hence the part devoted to the arts also has much to tell us about institutions and religious life. A benefit of this organization is that the reader gains greater familiarity with various individuals, institutions, and historical issues as they crop up in different chapters.For the most part, the book's scholarly contributions synthesize our current knowledge of the past. Some are akin to reference essays, as with Antonio Rubial García's meticulous chronological account of the founding of Hapsburg-era religious institutions, Enrique González González's survey of viceregal education, and María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano's invaluable overview of credit mechanisms. Martha Lilia Tenorio provides a rich introduction to baroque poetry in Mexico. Insights from older, established areas of study such as these are supplemented by surveys of more recent scholarship, which can be found in Sonya Lipsett-Rivera's informative discussion of family and gender norms as well as Kelly Donahue-Wallace's analysis of print culture. Other chapters provide new insights from the authors’ latest research: Matthew Restall shows how the interplay between texts and images produced by early Spanish chroniclers distorted our understanding of Montezuma's Tenochtitlan. Frances L. Ramos explains that funerary honors for fallen soldiers served as means for viceroys to uphold absolutist rule through ceremonial practices. Alejandro Cañeque examines the political culture of Mexico City's cabildo as it contributed to the local veneration of saints. Paula S. De Vos uncovers conflicts over centralized and devolved power between the capital's medical establishment and provincial municipalities, which sought to preserve their local rights. The special themes section essentially deals with the changing ways in which people understood the physical world. Barbara E. Mundy and López separately provide pioneering work on mapping the natural and built environments, while Miruna Achim shows how the interplay between imperial and local scientific enterprises made Mexico City an important hub for innovation.The book's wealth of information allows readers to discern other themes beyond those identified by López. The primary importance of institutions in bringing historical change emerges as one such theme. Luis Fernando Granados argues that the identities of Mexico City's Indigenous residents were formed, in part, through membership in the república de indios and their status as tributaries. Confraternities served as vital organizations by which Afro-Mexicans fostered community cohesion and expressed their religious devotion, according to Joan C. Bristol. For Cristina Cruz González, meanwhile, confraternities were also important for commissioning and promoting fine arts. Artistic expression is also the subject of Amy C. Hamman and Stacie G. Widdifield's chapter on the first fine arts academy in the Americas, the Royal Academy of San Carlos. The metropolitan cathedral, with its staff of musicians, serves as the focal point for Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell's superb account of changing tastes in eighteenth-century music and literature.A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City is a substantial volume providing much valuable information and many new insights. It offers graduate students and scholars a wide-ranging appraisal of the state of the historical scholarship. Ethnohistorians might lament the relatively brief treatment of Indigenous peoples, and the sixteenth century might have received more attention. Even so, the book ably demonstrates that Mexico City emerged in the viceregal period as a cosmopolitan center in its own right and not merely as an adjunct to the imperial metropole. Indeed, the volume does justice to the richness of the history of North America's largest city.

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