Walking to the northern mines: Mesoamerican migration in New Spain

Abstract

The end of the sixteenth century witnessed large movements of indigenous populations from the Mesoamerican center of New Spain to the northern imperial borderlands that were opening up to mining industries. The literature often portrays this migration as a simple phenomenon, as a movement from one point to another, and as a recreation of home communities in a foreign land in the form of ethnically segregated communities of laborers. Mapping migrations renders another view of these movements, one that is much more complex, and that illustrates multicultural spaces and reveals multiethnic communities. This chapter will explore how encounters and adaptation influenced the creation of new indigenous identities in the mining town of San Luis Potosí at the turn of the seventeenth century.