Laurent Corbeil's examination of indigenous community formation in San Luis Potosí vitally broadens our understanding of how identity and societal structure emerged at that site between 1591 and 1630. In considering two generations of San Luis Potosí’s multiethnic indigenous community, Corbeil eschews the Spanish/indigenous binary frequently used to characterize colonial-era indigenous contact societies and contests the role of ethnic identity in the organization of the city's predominantly migrant indigenous population. Through the analysis of demographic and historical documentation, Corbeil concludes that “if origin and cultural background facilitated relationships, it was not necessarily the primary marker of identity, nor was it the most important factor in structuring the indigenous society of San Luis Potosí” (191–92). Instead, Corbeil asserts that “indigenous people increasingly identified themselves, understood their social status, and affiliated with specific groups on the grounds of their specific occupations, skills, wealth, relationships with coworkers, sex and living location” (73).
Corbeil builds on critical conversations about non-native identity in colonial Mexico that explore complexity, metamorphosis, and fluidity, including the idea of interdigitation, in which individuals maintained traditional ethnic ways while simultaneously living in close interconnectedness with other groups. This mode of analysis is effective in defining San Luis Potosí, whose evolving native population defies simple categorization, as Corbeil demonstrates, because of the ongoing movements of people into and within its bounds. A mining town bordering on the Gran Chichimeca region (the “urban frontier” of the title), the area was originally populated by the Guachichil tribe, a Chichimec subgroup. In 1591, the Spanish recruited Tlaxcalans to San Luis Potosí for their labor and also as agents of colonialism; this group was granted land and other special permissions, and they established the community of Tlaxcalilla, explored at length in Chapter 6. Finally, Corbeil explains how other indigenous groups, including Nahuas, Otomís, and Tarascans, arrived to San Luis Potosí in collectives, as well as individually.
Corbeil articulates the dynamic among these groups by reading Church records and micro-histories (archived legal incidents), not for their specific content but rather to look within them for “norms, cultural premises, values, living patterns, and behavior” (16), as well as references to places and political and economic relationships to shed light on social mechanisms. Corbeil convincingly proposes intriguing new paradigms for how indigenous communities in San Luis Potosí conceived of themselves during this very motile era by extrapolating from these records information about migration patterns, self- and group-identification, labor practices and labor categories, and Church and other organizational affiliations. As the chapters unfold these characteristics, they showcase Corbeil's skill in reading between the lines of the archival record to suss out specific and revealing data.
Chapter 1 defines the origins and histories of the various indigenous groups that settled in San Luis Potosí, their relationships to each other, and evidence of multilingualism in native languages within the population, which Corbeil attributes to the actions of the indigenous population rather than to Spanish influence (41). Chapter 2 takes up migrations to San Luis Potosí, considering both collective migrations (Tlaxcalans) and individual migrations to show “the diverse incentives and objectives of migrations, the nature of the migrants, roads taken, durations of the moments, and encounters among native cultures” (47). In Chapter 3, the focus shifts to the establishment of indigenous settlements within San Luis Potosí (which Corbeil argues were sometimes initiated by the local populations and afterwards sanctioned by Spanish authorities), and the types and places of indigenous labor, which centered on metal refinery, livestock cultivation, and domestic work.
Chapter 4 weaves the previous chapters together to explain social networks and kinship development, showing that ethnicity and cultural affiliation were not the sole (or perhaps even primary) determining factors in the establishment of relationships. Chapter 5 looks at the relationships between indigenous communities, reading the legal record and considering the role of public drinking in this negotiation. The final chapter delves into the legal actions of Tlaxcalilla, articulating how individuals from different ethnic groups “found themselves becoming ‘Tlaxcalans,’ that is, people inhabiting Tlaxcalilla and endorsing the Tlaxcalan memory” (164). With an appendix, demographic charts, and other supplementary materials, Corbeil presents a robust quantitative basis for insightful qualitative observations.
Through this study, Corbeil creates a richly textured and granular view of indigenous society in San Luis Potosí at the turn of the seventeenth century. Through the assiduous pursuit of ethnographic and linguistic detail in the historical record, Corbeil paints the emergence of indigenous identity and community, not with a broad and predetermined brush but rather with nuance, subtlety, and recognizing indigenous self-determination.
