This book contains 20 chapters that emerged from an academic conference on the Spanish presence in Puebla, held by the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in 1995. All the chapters present a broad panorama of a historical process that seems evident in the area of central Mexico. The subject of foreigners in Mexico has been the source of important research, but this research has been focused on describing the legislation and legal problems concerning immigration; the case studies that do exist have typically focused on the presence of foreigners in Mexico City. One of the most important contributions of this book is that it digs into a problem that has received little attention: the presence of foreigners in the Mexican countryside. Furthermore, it looks at a region of the countryside that is near the capital city, an area located along the most important transportation route in New Spain and that maintained this role during the republican period, therefore allowing us to discover new possibilities for keeping foreigners in its reach.The editors seek to touch on the entire time span of the presence of one group of foreigners — Spaniards — in the Puebla region, from the first settlers who came from far-away Brihuega up through the fiasco of the retention of exiles from the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s. This goal is important, because the contributions do succeed in covering this span, but it’s clear there are gaps. These are not the fault of the book, but rather prove that within the scholarship on foreigners in Puebla, there are gaps in the research on certain periods.Like all edited volumes, the topics and methodological approaches are varied. It is evident that research on the colonial period is concentrated primarily on individuals — in general, merchants and successful military personnel who are portrayed in terms of the power networks they established and the mobility they enjoyed, as much in the social sense as in the spatial one. This is demonstrated in the lives of Diego de Anzures and the conde de Orizaba. To this we can contrast the life of the family members of Luis Eraso and of the famous poet Gutierre de Cetina. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the studies pick up the topic of families or specific regional groups that came from Spain. These topics, and the way they are researched, are a clear demonstration of the recent approaches that have been used to study foreigners in Mexico. These approaches make it possible to propose new research perspectives: for example, to study the life of workers, peasants, and small-scale merchants who did not meet with great success, or teachers who were placed in educational institutions. The methodological proposals made in the book’s contributions could be used to approach such topics.From the first chapter to the last, we can see clearly the continuity across time of a process such as the presence of Spaniards in Mexico, but we can also see evidence of the difficulty in putting together an edited volume. That is, the contributions are uneven; some texts offer preliminary approaches to a topic and others are the result of extended research. Even though the editors attempted to unite the studies put forth, reading the entire collection gives a sense of unevenness.Reading this collection allows us to think about all the demands that life in the countryside must have presented to foreigners who arrived in a country such as Mexico in various points in its history. These are topics that have been little studied in Mexican historiography. Reading these studies reveals a great deal of complexity and also the limitations that exist within the study of foreigners in Mexico.