How did Spain Colonize Mexico?

With the fall of the Aztecs, Mexico entered a new age of Spanish colonial dominance. Its society, religion, economy, and demographics would transform forever. The defeat of the Aztecs was far from the end of Spain's long quest to capture Mexico. Decades of warfare and settlement was needed to complete it. To do this, they needed a center of power, Mexico City. Founded upon the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish demolished many of the existing Aztec structures and in time filled in Lake Texcoco to create artificial land for the city. A similar pattern of turning existing native cities into Spanish colonial centers continued across most of Mexico. In 1535, these new settlements were reorganized into a new colonial administrative structure known as the Viceroyalty of New Spain, headquartered in Mexico City, with a single unified government ruling over them. The Spanish continued their conquest of Mexico after 1521. The Zapotecs and the Mixtecs of the Oaxaca Valley submitted quickly. The Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula proved far less easy to control. The difficult terrain, the fierce guerrilla resistance of the Maya, and a lack of gold or silver to motivate conquistadors meant that most of the Yucatan remained unconquered well into the 1540s and pockets of resistance lingered well into the 17th century. The most fierce resistance came in north-central Mexico, first from the Cascan, whose resistance to the Spanish during the Mixton War from 1540 to 1542 inflicted Spanish casualties comparable to the original conquest. After them, the Chichimeca became the most stubbornly resistant of the indigenous people. Between 1550 and 1590, the Chichimeca forced Spain to undertake its longest continual colonial war and, in the end, the Spanish were never able to crush them militarily. The war ended with a series of negotiated settlements that reduced Spanish troop and missionary presence in Chichimeca territory and built cooperative relations with the Chichimeca leaders. Ultimately, the Chichimeca settled and slowly assimilated to Spanish and Catholic culture anyway, but they did so on terms that were much more their own than some other native peoples were allowed. Controlling Mexico required the cooperation of surviving native elites. In the years after the conquests, many of the leading figures of pre-colonial Mexico society became the cooperative elites of the new colonial Mexican age. They were taught Spanish and their children were raised as Spanish-speaking Christians. In exchange, they kept their local power and got favorable treatment from the Spanish. Some of these Spanish-speaking indigenous peoples would pen the only surviving native accounts of the conquest, although they were heavily filtered through their new Spanish lens. For Spain, empire meant wealth and faith above all. Missionaries were quick on the heels of the conquerors, with many religious figures of the day believing that the opening of the missionary field in the The Franciscans were the first to arrive in Mexico starting in 1524, with the Dominicans arriving in 1536 and the Jesuits in 1572. While the orders differed on some particulars, there were some similarities in their attitudes. All believed the native religion was savage, but the Mexicans themselves were merely ignorant, almost childlike. The missionaries firmly believed that proper instruction in Christianity would build a respectable Christian society out of the natives. Missionaries focused first on the destruction of non-Christian influences, like temples and idols, and then on making new converts. For example, the Dominican missionary Diego de Landa, who worked among the Maya in the 1560s and 1570s, he oversaw the torture of around 4,000 Maya people and the deaths of around 170 for the crimes of idolatry and paganism, along with the total destruction of countless Maya books, which he condemned as pagan nonsense. The exact approach was often debated. Missionaries were constantly concerned that Mexicans were not truly understanding Christianity, and there was too much focus on the quantity of baptized Christians, rather than the quality of them. Much of the European understanding of Mexican languages, like Nahuatl, and of the Mexicans' early understanding of Spanish, came through missionaries, as they attempted to bring Christianity to the Mexicans in terms they'd be able to understand. Of course, all of this occurred in the context of massive Mexican population decline. In the decades after the conquest, native population steadily declined, from around 25 million in 1519 to less than 1 million by 1622. Still, natives significantly outnumbered the Spanish for a long time. By 1550, for example, Mexico City was still made up of about 90% native Mexicans. That number dwindled with the arrival of new Spanish settlers, African slaves, and the mestizo children of European and Mexican parents. While settlement and conversion were important parts of Spanish imperialism, the lust for gold and wealth were no less important in shaping colonial Mexico. The silver mines of the Zacatecas region, and later gold in the Sonora region, were the single most valuable areas of Mexico, and much Spanish effort was put into the extraction and shipment of these resources back to Europe. Although Peru would outstrip Mexico in the production of both valuable metals, Mexican gold and silver mines remained an invaluable source of wealth through the colonial period. The economic lifeblood of early colonial Mexico was the encomienda. The encomienda was essentially the right to the labor of natives that was awarded to Spanish conquistadors and settlers. Under the encomienda, natives were forced to labor for their Spanish masters in terms not far shy of chattel slavery. Most encomienda work was farming or plantation-related, on estates known as haciendas, but encomienda laborers could also be found working in the gold and silver mines in large numbers. The encomienda system was first used in Mexico by Cortes as a reward for his conquistadors. For the first few decades of Spanish rule, it was a vital but controversial economic institution. Most of the early Spanish colonial elite relied upon it, and it gave individual encomenderos significant local power. Critics of the encomienda system called it a cruel and unjust institution. No better than slavery. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas was among the fiercest critics of Spanish colonial methods, condemning the encomienda as a moral pestilence which daily consumes these people. And decrying the horrible treatment of native peoples. He still believed in Spain's imperial right to the new world. He simply wanted Spain's imperialism to be conducted more morally. Concerns about the ethics of the encomienda and the unrestrained power of the encomenderos led King Charles V to more tightly control them with the new laws of 1542. The encomienda system gradually died out over the second half of the 16th century and was replaced with a new repartimiento system. It was slightly fairer in that it rotated labor demands between native communities and offered at least a paltry wage. Ultimately, demographics would reshape the economy. As native populations declined, encomienda and repartimiento were less viable. African slaves began being imported in greater numbers, mostly by trading for them with the Portuguese or later the British. Hand in hand with this, the growth of the Spanish settler and mestizo populations increased the availability of paid labor. As the 17th century progressed, paid labor supplanted forced native labor in most areas of agriculture and mining, which allowed a growing working class of Spanish and mestizo farmers and citizens to find their place in Mexican colonial society. This society was defined largely by race. Peninsulares and Criollos sat at the top, followed by mestizos. Below them were the indigenous Mexicans, and at the bottom sat the African slaves. Power and wealth remained mostly in the hands of the Peninsulares and Criollos. By the mid-17th century, Mexico was a place of flourishing culture, with a growing artistic and architectural identity of its own. Grand new churches, like the Church of Santa Maria Tonantzintla in Puebla, demonstrated a new Baroque style, where European artists and religious influences blended with native handiwork to symbolize a new Mexican culture. Meanwhile, Mexican artists like Juana Inés de la Cruz, a nun, poet, and intellectual, contributed poems and literature to become founding figures of Mexico's own unique literary tradition. The rising Mexican identity coincided with the dwindling of the last independent native resistances too. The last independent Maya city at Nopetén, in modern-day Guatemala, fell in March 1697. Still, native resistance did not entirely vanish. Through the latter half of the 17th century, the Tarahumara in Chihuahua and the Pueblo in New Mexico denied the Spanish the comfortable territorial control they craved. Now with the wealth and culture of its own, and the indigenous communities sidelined or destroyed, Mexico had a growing sense of itself as a unique and distinct nation. Naturally, tension between this rising colonial society and its distant imperial master would emerge in time. By the late 17th and early 18th centuries, colonial elites were less dependent on Spanish power, and the colonial administrators increasingly served the interest of local elites over imperial leaders. Spain was not ignorant of this growing rift. The Bourbon Reforms of the mid-1700s, named for the Bourbon dynasty, who secured their power with the War of the Spanish Secession in 1715, attempted to reassert Spanish control. They took greater control of the taxes and coinage, modernized the military, and overhauled administration, signaling a new centralized age of Spanish control. Any obstacle to the crown's control were disposed of, such as the independently-minded Jesuits, who were expelled from Mexico and the rest of Spanish America in 1767, and their missions taken over by the crown. The problem with centralization, however, is that it makes the entire empire vulnerable if the center is weak, and that's exactly what happened. Constant warfare on the European continent in the wake of the French Revolution in 1789 drained Spain's resources, making Spain more dependent on Mexican riches than Mexico was upon Spanish protection. Royal treasury debt almost tripled between 1791 and 1815, as Spanish fell into an irrecoverable financial spiral that made controlling Mexico all but impossible. Mexico itself was plagued by contrasts, social unrest arising from wealth inequality, where beggars sat outside richly-funded churches, paid for by generous local elites. Agriculture was most people's livelihood, and it was insecure, with crop failures and unreliable prices causing havoc and despair for Mexican farmers in the late 1700s. There was also great unrest thanks to ongoing tension with France and Britain that created demand for an army to defend Mexico that Spain could simply not afford. The Shatterpoint arrived in 1808 with Napoleon's invasion of Spain, which toppled the ruling Bourbons, and left Mexico and the rest of Spanish America in a state of limbo. Mexico's vice-regal government refused to recognize the newly-installed French usurper, but the legitimate King Ferdinand VII was unable to exercise any real authority either. Mexico's imperial master effectively collapsed for several years, leaving Mexico to fend for itself. Decades of Spanish mismanagement and a growing sense of Mexican identity combined to seize the opportunity this imperial weakness presented. On September 16th, 1810, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Castilla gave a speech at Dolores, urging Mexico to throw off Spanish control and declare independence. He invoked Our Lady of Guadalupe, a uniquely Mexican vision of the Virgin Mary, as a rallying symbol for the fight. This was the spark that lit the fire of a revolutionary fight that would rage for the next decade. Hidalgo was captured and killed by the Mexican government the following year, but his message for independence was taken up by countless others. Another priest, Jose Maria Morelos, spearheaded a rebellion centered in southern Mexico. On November 6th, 1813, he led the Congress of Anahuac to declare Mexican independence and, a year later, drafted its first constitution. The Spanish refused to accept Morelos' declaration. With Ferdinand VII's restoration to the Spanish throne in 1814, he ordered fresh troops to Mexico, who defeated and captured Morelos, who was executed in December 1815. The torch of the revolution then passed to his second-in-command, Vincent Guerrero, who led the movement for the next five years. In 1820, however, policy changes in Spain towards a liberal, anti-clerical attitude turned conservative Mexicans against the Spanish crown. Agustín de Iturbide, commander of the Spanish crown's forces in Mexico and the man tasked with the ongoing fight against Guerrero and the Republicans, opened secret negotiations with him instead. The two men agreed to declare Mexican independence with protections for Catholicism, racial equality, and the elimination of the Spanish crown's power. Lacking the resources to raise a new army and lacking the support in Mexico to make such opposition worthwhile, Spanish authorities signed the Treaty of Cordoba on August 24th, 1821, marking the end of Spanish rule in Mexico and the birth of an independent Mexico. There were many challenges for this new nation to conquer, but for the first time in 300 years, Mexico would face those challenges on its own terms.