The twelve essays in this book date from 1969 to 1999, and highlight the progression of seminal historian James Lockhart's work from Social History to New Philology.

Several of the essays date to Lockhart's early career, such as "Encomienda and Hacienda" and "The Social History of Early Latin America," the latter of which Lockhart wrote in 1972 to use in educational activity graduate level historiography of the conquest. Other chapters are distillations of material from Lockhart's books. Chapters nine-12 are published here for the first fourth dimension, offer fresh insights into Lockhart'south theory and methodology, which is interdisciplinary in nature but owes much to history and linguistics.

Throughout the book, Lockhart emphasizes the importance of convergence of Spanish and indigenous ideas and cultures. Where in that location was the greatest convergence between cultures, people proved the most receptive to acculturation. Lockhart writes, "In all of these matters, the basic determinants are the fit of European and indigenous culture and the contact betwixt the two populations" (331). Lockhart makes the indicate that reception was not entirely i-sided; indigenous culture lent Latin American culture much of its distinctive flavor.

The essay on "Double Mistaken Identity" illustrates the way that convergence and accommodation worked. Considering of the congruence between Mesoamerican and Iberian cultural forms, each group institute much that seemed familiar in the other. Lockhart explains, "At the heart of the interaction was a process I phone call Double Mistaken Identity, in which each side of the cultural substitution presumes that a given form or concept is operation in the way familiar inside its own tradition and is unaware of or unimpressed by the other side'southward interpretation" (99). For example, Lockhart considers the office of witnesses to official documents. Spanish exercise dictated that three men witness a document's actuality. The Nahuas readily adopted the Spanish juridical grade, but retained their own significant. They preferred multiple witnesses of both genders who "not just attested to … formal legality … but actually assented to the justice of the proceeding" (109), infusing the custom with Nahua ideas about police.

Much of the book deals with Lockhart's intense study of Nahua linguistics. He discusses three stages of Nahua language and cultural acquisition, which he discerned from patterns in Nahuatl documents. Stage i, from Contact to c. 1540, is characterized by little cultural change; Stage two, c. 1540 to 1650, involves the massive loan of nouns to Nahuatl from Spanish; and Stage 3 finally witnesses big-scale bilingualism (209). Cultural developments seem to parallel those of linguistic communication, and the sequence occurs, with some variation, across regions.

Information technology is crucial to understand that, in all of this, Lockhart sees both ethnic and Spanish actors responding rationally and pragmatically to the situations they confronted. For instance, sedentary versus migratory peoples logically reacted differently to the Spanish presence because information technology affected them differently. There was much more convergence between sedentary ethnic groups and the Spanish, and their way of life would not alter abruptly under Spanish rule. Migratory groups, even so, organized their order very differently and were able to launch surprise attacks on the Spanish precisely because they were not tied to a single identify. Likewise, the Spanish chose to found a presence among sedentary peoples who lived in proximity to rich mineral deposits. The second most powerful group in a region tended to marry with the Spanish (like the Tlaxcalans against Tenochtitlán), considering that was the best strategy for maintaining their independence. Every bit Lockhart explains, "virtually groups and most members of those groups were merely thinking of the greatest good and largest quotient of independence they could attain within the situation as they had ever known information technology, non of resistance to an outsider" (308).