This book offers a dense political history of the early decades of viceregal government in New Spain, focusing on the tenures of the first two viceroys, Antonio de Mendoza (1535–50) and Luis de Velasco (1550–64). Drawing on a host of published and archival documents (including letters from Mendoza to Velasco during the viceregal succession), the author tries to understand how the authority of viceregal government was implemented, contested, and legitimated, as well as how it ultimately came to be accepted by the local Spanish and native elites. Influenced by the court-studies tradition in historiography, López-Portillo finds the answer not in the imposition of Spanish institutional political structures or cultural rituals imported from Europe, but in the viceroys’ political dexterity on the ground in binding both Spanish and indigenous elites to their fortunes through shrewd strategic alliances and dependencies in a patronage system that partially built on preconquest political traditions derived from both Mesoamerica and Europe. New Spain was not a colony of Spain, the author argues, but rather a subempire with Mexico City at its center—a subempire that was an integral part of the Habsburg composite monarchy. The role that the native elites hereby played in this subempire must be further understood not in terms of accommodation or resistance to foreign domination but in terms of the agency they wielded within the political structure of viceregal New Spain.

The book is organized into three parts: “New Spain's Original Sin,” which treats the crisis of political legitimacy in the years following the fall of Tenochtitlan; “Courtly Government,” which deals with the implementation of the viceroyalty and the establishment of two distinct republics of Spaniards and Indians; and “Another Jerusalem,” which treats the emergence of political ideals and structures in New Spain distinct from those in Europe. The book also includes two appendixes presenting information about viceregal grants to indigenous lords, documents relating to the everyday life at the viceregal court, and viceregal treasury records, as well as a glossary of monetary terms, weights, and measures.

Chapter 1 provides a discussion of the similarities and differences between Mesoamerican and Spanish political traditions, ideals of nobility, lordship, service, and tribute before the fall of Tenochtitlán to Hernando Cortés in 1521. Chapter 2 treats the chaotic period of political crisis following the conquest, which was, López-Portillo suggests, more akin to a protracted Mesoamerican civil war (what he calls New Spain's “Original Sin”), with native polities having readily aligned themselves with the few hundred Spaniards in order to gain advantage in long-standing political rivalries. The political situation that emerged from these myriad alliances, the Cortesian Settlement, was founded on the mutual interests of usurpers or thieves but lacked legitimacy; it quickly unraveled in multiple rebellions during the disastrous period of the first (1528–30) and second (1531–35) Audiencia (the royal law court), especially under the presidency of Nuño de Guzmán. The one exception to this general crisis of authority was the great influence wielded by mendicant orders, especially the Franciscans, in indigenous polities, whose leaders quickly learned to use their close alliances with the friars for their own protection and political advantage.

Chapters 3–6, the core of the argument, investigate how Mendoza and Velasco secured their standing vis-à-vis the monarchy in Castile, on the one hand, and the local indigenous and Spanish elites, on the other, through a distribution of patronage, the mediation of disputes, and by guaranteeing that negotiated agreements were upheld. Chapters 7 and 8, as well as the epilogue, offer an analysis of the sui generis character of the political language of legitimacy that emerged in New Spain, which came to be organized on the basis of internal arrangements guaranteed by the viceroys and justified by the political culture that accompanied them.

It is a pity that the book is marred by a plethora of editorial problems that range from grammatical and typographic mistakes to syntactic constructions that are virtually unreadable. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that this book makes an important contribution to the political history of early viceregal New Spain that must be reckoned with in future colonial Latin American scholarship.