Modern local history in Spanish American historiography

This article considers the role of modern local history on the Anglophone Spanish American scholarship (1492‐1825). Modern local history developed in the mid‐twentieth century as a type of historical inquiry focused on the study of specific peoples, institutions, or processes in a defined locality. This essay identifies the topics, methodologies, and sources, employed by scholars of Spanish America, highlighting some recent examples from the viceroyalty of New Spain, specifically contemporary Mexico and Guatemala. It analyzes the appeal of this approach to ethnohistorians, scholars of indigenous peoples, as a means to reveal indigenous responses to colonial rule obscured by other approaches. It argues that modern local histories of Spanish America are a particularly important genre of the field because they complement the current movement towards global and transnational studies as they illustrate the local variations on the ground that support or complicate regional, viceregal, and transatlantic trends.