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 Michoacán 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 Michoacán 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 Michoacán-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.

Formato	Tapa suave
Número de Páginas	272
Lenguaje	Inglés
Editorial	University of Texas Press
Fecha de Publicación	2021-02-23
Dimensiones	9.0" x 6.0" x 0.61" pulgadas
Letra Grande	No
Con Ilustraciones	Si
Temas	América Latina, Mexicano

Nesvig, Martin Austin

Martin Austin Nesvig is a professor of history at the University of Miami. He is the author of Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico and editor of three volumes on religion in Mexico, including Religious Culture in Modern Mexico and Forgotten Franciscans: Writings from an Inquisitional Theorist, a Heretic, and an Inquisitional Deputy.