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Urban Indians reveals the untold story of how ethnically diverse native peoples from western and central Mexico, drawn by wages and freedom from draft labor and tribute requirements, created indigenous communities, towns, institutions, organizations, and municipal identities in Zacatecas, colonial Mexico’s most important silver-mining town, from its founding in 1546 to just before the start of independence movements in 1810. Silver mining was the motor of the Spanish Empire’s transoceanic and transcontinental economies, making mining towns among the most important cities in Spanish America. Historians of mining have generally focused on miners, production, global markets, or indigenous men in their roles as temporary or coerced workers. Urban Indians shifts the focus from indigenous peoples as laborers to settlers and municipal residents (vecinos). By redirecting its gaze from the mines to the city, Urban Indians enlarges the social footprint of New Spain’s silver-mining district, revealing the men, women, children, and families who shaped both indigenous communities and the greater city. While previous studies have stressed dramatic cultural transformation and rapid miscegenation among urban native peoples, Urban Indians argues that native peoples exploited the urban milieu to create multiple statuses and identities that allowed them to develop indigenous identities, practices, and associations, even as they embraced Spanish-style civic life. In reconsidering traditional paradigms about ethnicity and identity among the urban Indian population, the book raises larger questions about the nature of ethnicity and mestizaje in the Mexican north.
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