Beginning with Hernando Cortés’s capture of Aztec Tenochtitlan in 1521, legions of “Indian conquistadors” from Mexico joined Spanish military campaigns throughout Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century. Scholarship appearing in the last decade has revealed the awesome scope of this participation—involving hundreds of thousands of Indian allies—and cast critical light on their motivations and experiences. Nevertheless this work has remained restricted to central Mexico and areas south, while the region known as the Greater Southwest, encompassing northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, has been largely ignored. This dissertation traces the movements of Indians from central Mexico, especially Nahuas, into this region during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and charts their experiences as diasporic peoples under colonialism using sources they wrote in their own language (Nahuatl). Their activities as laborers, soldiers, settlers, and agents of acculturation largely enabled colonial expansion in the region. However their exploits are too frequently cast as contributions to an overarching Spanish colonial project. This dissertation seeks to uncover underlying indigenous agendas and reveal what colonial service meant for native participants. Nahuatl sources demonstrate that activities typically portrayed as contributions to Spanish colonial causes reflected indigenous attempts to wrest land, privileges, and rights to self-governance from the colonial regime. Overall the project urges us to reconsider the extent to which colonial expansion into the early U.S.-Mexico borderlands was European. It also asks whether we have, by relying on European sources to write histories of nation-states, elided native peoples from key American stories and distorted the history of a transnational region vitally important to both Mexico and the United States today.
Subject (authority = RUETD)
Topic
History
Subject (authority = LCSH)
Topic
Indians of Mexico--Migrations
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = RULIB)
ETD
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
School of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = local)
rucore10001600001
Identifier
ETD_9318
Identifier (type = doi)
doi:10.7282/t3-gdz8-pp03
PhysicalDescription
Form (authority = gmd)
electronic resource
InternetMediaType
application/pdf
InternetMediaType
text/xml
Extent
1 online resource (314 pages) : illustrations
Note (type = degree)
Ph.D.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references
Note (type = statement of responsibility)
by Travis Jeffres
Subject (authority = lcsh/lcnaf)
Geographic
Southwestern States
Subject (authority = lcsh/lcnaf)
Geographic
Mexico
Location
PhysicalLocation (authority = marcorg); (displayLabel = Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.