A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas. University of New Mexico, 2020
A Troubled Marriage describes the lives of native leaders whose resilience and creativity allowed... more A Troubled Marriage describes the lives of native leaders whose resilience and creativity allowed them to survive and prosper in the traumatic era of European conquest and colonial rule. They served as soldiers, scholars, artists, artisans, and missionaries within early transatlantic empires and later nation-states. These Indian and mestizo men and women wove together cultures, shaping the new traditions and institutions of the colonial Americas. In a comparative study that spans more than three centuries and much of the Western Hemisphere, McEnroe challenges common assumptions about the relationships among victors, vanquished, and their shared progeny.
AboutFrom Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560 1840
Book
From Colony to... more AboutFrom Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560 1840 Book From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560 1840 was merged with this page In an age of revolution, Mexico's creole leaders held aloft the Virgin of Guadalupe and brandished an Aztec eagle perched upon a European tricolor. Their new constitution proclaimed the Mexican Nation is forever free and independent. Yet the genealogy of this new nation is not easy to trace. Colonial Mexico was a patchwork state whose new-world vassals served the crown, extended the empire's frontiers, and lived out their civic lives in parallel Spanish and Indian republics. Theirs was a world of complex intercultural alliances, interlocking corporate structures, and shared spiritual and temporal ambitions. Sean F. McEnroe describes this history at the greatest and smallest geographical scales, reconsidering what it meant to be an Indian vassal, nobleman, soldier, or citizen over three centuries in northeastern Mexico. He argues that the Mexican municipality, state, and citizen were not so much the sudden creations of a revolutionary age as the progeny of a mature multiethnic empire."
The Second Oregon Volunteers played an important role in the Spanish-American and Philippine Wars... more The Second Oregon Volunteers played an important role in the Spanish-American and Philippine Wars from the summer of 1898 to the spring of 1899. They were among the first U.S. soldiers to land in the Philippines; they occupied and guarded the city of Manila when the war against Aguinaldo’s Philippine nationalists commenced, and they served in the interior during the campaigns of early 1899. There is considerable evidence that these Oregon soldiers took part in the same sorts of war atrocities described in the Congressional hearings of 1902. Their private accounts of the war provide use with valuable insight into the soldier’s vision of the war, of their own actions, and of their visions of the enemy. Their writings suggest that they understood their Filipino enemies through the lens of American race relations. They patterned their vision of Filipinos on their conception of other non-white peoples of the United States. In so doing, Oregon soldiers were able to engaging in wartime practices that would have been considered barbaric if carried out against European adversaries.
The actions and attitudes of the Oregon soldiers do not stand out as anomalous in the history of the war. They are interesting precisely because they appear so representative. Their conduct in the war was no different than that of other state volunteer or U.S. regular regiments. The Oregon Volunteers were ordinary citizens who served only briefly as soldiers in the midst of the normal civic and professional lives. Their attitudes on the war, on race, and on America’s mission in the world are consistent with those expressed by their fellow Oregonians at home, their leaders in the federal government, and many of the most influential writers of the day.
This article describes warfare and diplomacy between colonial and non-colonial peoples on the nor... more This article describes warfare and diplomacy between colonial and non-colonial peoples on the northeastern frontier of New Spain in the eighteenth century. The essay considers the relationship of Spanish and Nahua colonists to indigenous populations in the north. It argues that shared assumptions about military hierarchy transcended cultural boundaries permitting diplomatic exchange and political integration. Drawing on archival military and missionary records, the article illustrates the process by which European and indigenous political units were first rendered mutually intelligible, later connected by alliance, and finally integrated through joint settlement and corporate governance. Fundamental to these processes was the communication and synthesis of cultural schemata expressing the correspondence of military commands to each party’s historical memory and social geography. The article offers a partial explanation for the development of Tlaxcalan-Chichimec pueblos, and a general set of principles for understanding intercultural diplomacy in frontier environments.
A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas. University of New Mexico, 2020
A Troubled Marriage describes the lives of native leaders whose resilience and creativity allowed... more A Troubled Marriage describes the lives of native leaders whose resilience and creativity allowed them to survive and prosper in the traumatic era of European conquest and colonial rule. They served as soldiers, scholars, artists, artisans, and missionaries within early transatlantic empires and later nation-states. These Indian and mestizo men and women wove together cultures, shaping the new traditions and institutions of the colonial Americas. In a comparative study that spans more than three centuries and much of the Western Hemisphere, McEnroe challenges common assumptions about the relationships among victors, vanquished, and their shared progeny.
AboutFrom Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560 1840
Book
From Colony to... more AboutFrom Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560 1840 Book From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560 1840 was merged with this page In an age of revolution, Mexico's creole leaders held aloft the Virgin of Guadalupe and brandished an Aztec eagle perched upon a European tricolor. Their new constitution proclaimed the Mexican Nation is forever free and independent. Yet the genealogy of this new nation is not easy to trace. Colonial Mexico was a patchwork state whose new-world vassals served the crown, extended the empire's frontiers, and lived out their civic lives in parallel Spanish and Indian republics. Theirs was a world of complex intercultural alliances, interlocking corporate structures, and shared spiritual and temporal ambitions. Sean F. McEnroe describes this history at the greatest and smallest geographical scales, reconsidering what it meant to be an Indian vassal, nobleman, soldier, or citizen over three centuries in northeastern Mexico. He argues that the Mexican municipality, state, and citizen were not so much the sudden creations of a revolutionary age as the progeny of a mature multiethnic empire."
The Second Oregon Volunteers played an important role in the Spanish-American and Philippine Wars... more The Second Oregon Volunteers played an important role in the Spanish-American and Philippine Wars from the summer of 1898 to the spring of 1899. They were among the first U.S. soldiers to land in the Philippines; they occupied and guarded the city of Manila when the war against Aguinaldo’s Philippine nationalists commenced, and they served in the interior during the campaigns of early 1899. There is considerable evidence that these Oregon soldiers took part in the same sorts of war atrocities described in the Congressional hearings of 1902. Their private accounts of the war provide use with valuable insight into the soldier’s vision of the war, of their own actions, and of their visions of the enemy. Their writings suggest that they understood their Filipino enemies through the lens of American race relations. They patterned their vision of Filipinos on their conception of other non-white peoples of the United States. In so doing, Oregon soldiers were able to engaging in wartime practices that would have been considered barbaric if carried out against European adversaries.
The actions and attitudes of the Oregon soldiers do not stand out as anomalous in the history of the war. They are interesting precisely because they appear so representative. Their conduct in the war was no different than that of other state volunteer or U.S. regular regiments. The Oregon Volunteers were ordinary citizens who served only briefly as soldiers in the midst of the normal civic and professional lives. Their attitudes on the war, on race, and on America’s mission in the world are consistent with those expressed by their fellow Oregonians at home, their leaders in the federal government, and many of the most influential writers of the day.
This article describes warfare and diplomacy between colonial and non-colonial peoples on the nor... more This article describes warfare and diplomacy between colonial and non-colonial peoples on the northeastern frontier of New Spain in the eighteenth century. The essay considers the relationship of Spanish and Nahua colonists to indigenous populations in the north. It argues that shared assumptions about military hierarchy transcended cultural boundaries permitting diplomatic exchange and political integration. Drawing on archival military and missionary records, the article illustrates the process by which European and indigenous political units were first rendered mutually intelligible, later connected by alliance, and finally integrated through joint settlement and corporate governance. Fundamental to these processes was the communication and synthesis of cultural schemata expressing the correspondence of military commands to each party’s historical memory and social geography. The article offers a partial explanation for the development of Tlaxcalan-Chichimec pueblos, and a general set of principles for understanding intercultural diplomacy in frontier environments.
Many frontier areas of Spanish America were originally settled, not as provinces in the modern se... more Many frontier areas of Spanish America were originally settled, not as provinces in the modern sense, but rather as kingdoms unified under the Habsburg crown. Bourbon era administrative reforms superimposed new structures of provincial administration over this pre-existing compact of imperial union. Both notions of government persisted in tension with each other, reemerging most strikingly in the conflicts between nineteenth-century Federalists and Centralists. The difficulty of reconciling these two notions of governance was one of the greatest obstacles to the creation of a stabile polity in the years following independence from Spain. This paper considers local aspects of state-formation in Mexico’s frontier states of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Nueva Vizcaya. It argues that local and regional military systems, which incorporated Indian and non-Indian communities, were central to nineteenth-century state formation at the regional and national level. Local and regional military systems defined the power of borderlands communities in negotiations over the structure of the emerging Mexican state. These organizations created the basic conditions necessary for a range of possible outcomes: regional participation in a unitary state, semi-sovereign rule within a federal state, or full sovereignty as a secessionist state.
Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America teaches imaginative and distinctive approaches to t... more Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America teaches imaginative and distinctive approaches to the practice of history through a series of essays on colonial Latin America. It demonstrates ways of making sense of the past through approaches that aggregate more than they dissect and suggest more than they conclude. Sidestepping more conventional approaches that divide content by subject, source, or historiographical “turn,” the editors seek to take readers beyond these divisions and deep into the process of historical interpretation. The essays in this volume focus on what questions to ask, what sources can reveal, what stories historians can tell, and how a single source can be interpreted in many ways.
The global reach of the Spanish and Portuguese empires prompted a remarkable flourishing of the c... more The global reach of the Spanish and Portuguese empires prompted a remarkable flourishing of the classical rhetorical tradition in various parts of the early modern world. Empire of Eloquence is the first study to examine this tradition as part of a wider global renaissance in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, with a particular focus on the Iberian world. Spanning the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the book argues that the classical rhetorical tradition contributed to the ideological coherence and equilibrium of this early modern Iberian world, providing important occasions for persuasion, legitimation and eventual (and perhaps inevitable) confrontation. Drawing on archival collections in thirteen countries, Stuart M. McManus places these developments in the context of civic, religious and institutional rituals attended by the multi-ethnic population of the Iberian world and beyond, and shows how they influenced public speaking in non-European languages, such as Ko...
An abstract of the thesis of Sean F. McEnroe for the Master of Arts in History presented October ... more An abstract of the thesis of Sean F. McEnroe for the Master of Arts in History presented October 31, 2001. Title: Oregon Soldiers and the Portland Press in the Philippine Wars of 1898 and 1899: How Oregonians Defined the Race of Filipinos and the Mission of
This article describes warfare and diplomacy between colonial and non-colonial peoples on the nor... more This article describes warfare and diplomacy between colonial and non-colonial peoples on the northeastern frontier of New Spain in the eighteenth century. It considers the relationship of Spanish and Nahua colonists to indigenous populations in the north. It argues that shared assumptions about military hierarchy transcended cultural boundaries, permitting diplomatic exchange and political integration. Drawing on archival military and missionary records, the article illustrates the process by which European and indigenous political units were first rendered mutually intelligible, later connected by alliance, and finally integrated through joint settlement and corporate governance. Fundamental to these processes were the communication and synthesis of cultural schemata expressing the correspondence of military commands to each party's historical memory and social geography. This article offers a partial explanation for the development of Tlaxcalan-Chichimec pueblos and a general...
The [Oxford] Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World, 2019
This chapter examines Spanish-indigenous co-colonization projects in northern Mexico and Central ... more This chapter examines Spanish-indigenous co-colonization projects in northern Mexico and Central America. From the early sixteenth century, Nahuas, Otomis, Zapotecs, and Mixtecs helped to extend the Spanish colonial system south into Maya lands, and north into the Gran Chichimeca. The parallel history of these widely separated frontiers was shaped by early colonial compacts that linked the Indian settlers’ political status to their military service. Late imperial administrative reforms often affected both frontiers simultaneously, especially when new models of taxation, military service, or labor organization threatened older understandings of settler privilege. The communities most successful in defending their status were those whose continuing military service remained vital to the empire. In northern New Spain, Nahua settlers remained key contributors to regional defense long after their Central American counterparts. Consequently, their settler privileges lasted longer and had ...
International Journal of Latin American Religions, 2023
Rethinking Zapotec Time is an enormous accomplishment [that] will become an important element of ... more Rethinking Zapotec Time is an enormous accomplishment [that] will become an important element of graduate education, and a building block for new research ... David Tavárez, a formidable historian and linguist of colonial-era Zapotec and Nahuatl, brings us a book that is informed by two decades of work [which] contributes to ongoing discussions about the interaction of missionary Catholicism with traditional indigenous beliefs.
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From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560 1840 was merged with this page
In an age of revolution, Mexico's creole leaders held aloft the Virgin of Guadalupe and brandished an Aztec eagle perched upon a European tricolor. Their new constitution proclaimed the Mexican Nation is forever free and independent. Yet the genealogy of this new nation is not easy to trace. Colonial Mexico was a patchwork state whose new-world vassals served the crown, extended the empire's frontiers, and lived out their civic lives in parallel Spanish and Indian republics. Theirs was a world of complex intercultural alliances, interlocking corporate structures, and shared spiritual and temporal ambitions. Sean F. McEnroe describes this history at the greatest and smallest geographical scales, reconsidering what it meant to be an Indian vassal, nobleman, soldier, or citizen over three centuries in northeastern Mexico. He argues that the Mexican municipality, state, and citizen were not so much the sudden creations of a revolutionary age as the progeny of a mature multiethnic empire."
The actions and attitudes of the Oregon soldiers do not stand out as anomalous in the history of the war. They are interesting precisely because they appear so representative. Their conduct in the war was no different than that of other state volunteer or U.S. regular regiments. The Oregon Volunteers were ordinary citizens who served only briefly as soldiers in the midst of the normal civic and professional lives. Their attitudes on the war, on race, and on America’s mission in the world are consistent with those expressed by their fellow Oregonians at home, their leaders in the federal government, and many of the most influential writers of the day.
Book
From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560 1840 was merged with this page
In an age of revolution, Mexico's creole leaders held aloft the Virgin of Guadalupe and brandished an Aztec eagle perched upon a European tricolor. Their new constitution proclaimed the Mexican Nation is forever free and independent. Yet the genealogy of this new nation is not easy to trace. Colonial Mexico was a patchwork state whose new-world vassals served the crown, extended the empire's frontiers, and lived out their civic lives in parallel Spanish and Indian republics. Theirs was a world of complex intercultural alliances, interlocking corporate structures, and shared spiritual and temporal ambitions. Sean F. McEnroe describes this history at the greatest and smallest geographical scales, reconsidering what it meant to be an Indian vassal, nobleman, soldier, or citizen over three centuries in northeastern Mexico. He argues that the Mexican municipality, state, and citizen were not so much the sudden creations of a revolutionary age as the progeny of a mature multiethnic empire."
The actions and attitudes of the Oregon soldiers do not stand out as anomalous in the history of the war. They are interesting precisely because they appear so representative. Their conduct in the war was no different than that of other state volunteer or U.S. regular regiments. The Oregon Volunteers were ordinary citizens who served only briefly as soldiers in the midst of the normal civic and professional lives. Their attitudes on the war, on race, and on America’s mission in the world are consistent with those expressed by their fellow Oregonians at home, their leaders in the federal government, and many of the most influential writers of the day.