Colonial Community Life

Abstract

Abstract Between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries Spanish colonial life was undergirded by a general theory, not always realized in practice, that social and political order would come from imposed categories of identity and community. Spanish colonizers’ ideas about community formation in Mexico were expressed in the two-republic system, ideas about purity of blood, and the caste system. These imperial ideas were put into practice in many ways: through formally created Catholic communities such as female convents and confraternities and through informal communities such as those formed by African-descent people, crypto-Jews, and previously enslaved people known as maroons. Ideas about race, gender, and class, as well as factors such as occupation, neighborhood, membership in religious groups, and family ties all shaped these formal and informal communal groupings which at times supported viceregal objectives of maintaining order and at other times weakened viceregal rule.