Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico. JUAN PEDRO VIQUEIRA ALBÁN: translated by Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Sergio Rivera Ayala. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999.

Resumen

How did Mexican popular culture change during the Bourbon rule of Spain and its overseas empire? The accepted wisdom echoed the writings of multiple Enlightened authors who decried a breakdown in morals and a perversion of customs, in other words, what contemporaries saw as a "decline of propriety." In this path-breaking study, Juan Pedro Viqueira argues that rather than any decline or degeneration, what most marked Mexican culture from the middle of the eighteenth century on, through the Independence War, was a wide-ranging cultural shift. In essence, according to Viqueira, the Spanish state moved from being a guardian of tradition in the seventeenth century to a promoter of modernization in the eighteenth. The beginnings of this about-face are traced to the 1692 Mexico City riots, seen by Viqueira as the moment in which government authorities first became aware of the danger of subversion and began to view the masses as potential enemies.