Mexican Soundings brings together nine essays by a group of international scholars who met during a two-day conference in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, to honour David Brading. Their publication affords students and professional historians alike a series of thoughtful research discussion pieces that follow the contours of David Brading's principal thematic interests. Organised in two parts, the first part focuses on David Brading's career, beginning with his own beautifully reflective essay, ‘A Recusant Abroad’, and contributions from two of his close friends and colleagues: Enrique Florescano, ‘David Brading: A Likeness’, and Eric Van Young, ‘Brading's Century’. Florescano offers the reader some thoughtful remembrances of experiences he had shared with his British colleague, and Van Young's essay offers a comprehensive assessment of Mexican historiography for the pivotal century of 1750–1850, highlighting Brading's contributions to the state-of-the-art scholarship for this period.
Florescano pays tribute to Brading's thorough research for quantitative analysis of mining, agricultural production, land tenure and historical demography as well as textual analysis of chronicles, political treatises and myths (p. 39). This short cameo piece encapsulates the principal contributions of each of David Brading's major works. Eric Van Young develops Florescano's line of thinking into a fully crafted historiographical framework for Brading's career. Van Young brings important reflections to bear on the state of knowledge for Bourbon Mexico and the transition to the early republic, centred on the ways in which David Brading's scholarship has shaped the field, and offers a number of trenchant observations concerning the receptivity of successive generations of readers to the foundational debates in Latin American history and social sciences, setting the sign posts for new avenues of research.
David Brading's hallmark publications are as follows: Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (1971), Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío: León, 1700–1860 (1978), The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (1985), The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal state, 1492–1867 (1991), and Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (2001). Brading's formidable scholarly oeuvre transcends two important intellectual boundaries in ways that have revolutionised the benchmarks for Mexican history among both Anglophone and Hispanophone scholars. First, his seminal contributions to economic history concerning labour and credit for the colonial mining industry of New Spain and the complexity of land tenure that shaped the Mexican countryside were followed by his monumental works on the intellectual foundations of Spanish imperialism and creole patriotism, to be crowned by his abiding interest in religion with Mexican Phoenix. Secondly, Brading's published work undertakes the challenge of the longue durée, crossing the divide between colonial and national periods for political and social history.
Six research articles comprise Part II of Mexican Soundings, chosen to highlight the themes that have marked David Brading's career. Their temporal span extends from the late seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, focused on religion, political culture and Mexican national identity. Susan Deans-Smith's superbly researched article on ‘Painters and the Politics of Guild Reform’ explains in engaging terms the passionate (and highly politicised) struggle of successful artists to protect their professional status in early colonial Mexico. Viewing artists as social actors, Deans-Smith underscores the tension between their involvement with artesanal guilds and their self-identity as practitioners of a ‘noble and illustrious art’. Deans-Smith's contribution integrates the economic, political and aesthetic dimensions of artistic production in colonial New Spain, through her command of the secondary literature and her own archival research.
Ellen Gunnarsdóttir's essay on ‘Popular Religion in Baroque Mexico’ weaves the life history of one individual, the beata Francisca de los Ángeles, and the larger story of Franciscan evangelism rooted in the Colegio de Propaganda Fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro. This chapter centres on the highly charged spiritual relationship between Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús, the Guardian of the Querétaro convent, and his disciple Francisca, headmistress of the Beaterio de Santa Rosa de Viterbo established in the same city. The place – Querétaro, the gateway to New Spain's northern frontiers for mining precious metals and souls – and the theme are consonant with two of David Brading's abiding research interests. Gunnarsdóttir links her work to the intellectual, aesthetic and religious dimensions of the Baroque in New Spain through this dual biography. While she acknowledges the importance of the missionary field for the ‘wild, northern frontier’, her essay does not cover the peripatetic career of Margil de Jesús in both the southern and northern borderlands of New Spain nor the responses of indigenous peoples to his energetic efforts at evangelisation.
The following four essays focus on the political culture of Mexico after independence. Brian Hamnett presents an engaging portrait of Tomás Mejía, a figure who linked local and national politics and illustrated the dense network of clientelistic relationships behind the familiar categories of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ during the crucial period of 1840–1855. Mejía's cacicazgo was centred in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro, providing a regional context for the web of ethnic clashes in this transitional area of northern Mexico. The theme of political conservatism linked to religious loyalties is reiterated in a different regional and social setting in Marta Eugenia García Ugarte's ‘Church and State in Conflict: Bishop Labastida in Puebla, 1855–1856’, and her thumbnail sketch of the career of Pelagio Antonio Labastida y Dávalos, Bishop of Puebla in 1855 and Archbishop of Mexico in 1863, illustrates the main conflicts between the church hierarchy and the Mexican liberal state of La Reforma.
Guy P. C. Thomson's essay on ‘Memoirs and Memories of the European Intervention in the Sierra de Puebla, 1868–1991’, resonates with Hamnett's biography of Mejía, in that both chapters bring indigenous actors into the political drama of Mexican national formation. Thomson's contribution focuses not so much on the events of the French Intervention as on the claims of different indigenous towns to have spearheaded the defence of their lands and the patria against foreign invasion. Finally, Alan Knight's reflections on ‘Mexican National Identity’ problematise and historicise the concept of national identity. Knight distinguishes between subjective and objective renderings of national identity, warning against the ‘conceptual chimera’ of an objective national identity as an explanatory vehicle for historical outcomes. Knight's discussion of subjective national identity, resonating with Thomson's interpretation of historical memory, centres on space (Mexico's geographical contours), change-through-time (pivotal periods like the Revolution of 1910) and lived experience (history). As is fitting in this festschrift to David Brading, Knight singles out the Virgin of Guadalupe as a marker of mexicanidad, in counterpoint to the conflictive history of the revolutionary era, which provides a normative vision, but not an objective explanation, of national identity. Taken together, these essays present a wide range of topics, loosely woven together through the career of David Brading. Mexican Soundings provides an excellent reference for historiography and points of departure for creative discussions of historical themes and methods.
