8 - Social organization and social change in colonial Spanish America

Summary

Less than two decades ago the topic that we now often call the ‘social history’ of early Spanish America, the study of its ‘social structure’ or ‘social organization’, was just beginning to be explored; a single thoughtful article was able to bring together nearly everything useful that was then known, most of it drawn from formal, self-conscious statements of contemporaries in laws, tracts, political manifestos, or official reports. Since then a whole current of scholarship within the field of early Spanish American history has concentrated on precisely the opposite kind of social phenomena, informal patterns of thought and behaviour which were rarely given overt expression-some, indeed, may have been beneath the level of consciousness. Such work has been highly specific, tied to a certain time and place, giving detailed accounts of individual lives and individual families, businesses, or other local organizations in different periods and different regions. The cases were sometimes chosen for their representation of general types and processes, but the typological aspect often remained implicit.

The time has now come for a provisional synthesis. The emphasis will be on processes and principles, although individual life stories and individual situations have ultimately provided the raw material. It may be felt by some that the colour — the humanity — is missing, that the regional variety has been attenuated, or that aspects of the chronology have been neglected. The first part of this chapter deliberately sets out to examine general patterns of social organization in a somewhat atemporal fashion.