Enrique Rodriguez-Alegria Display, Production, and Power in colonial Mexico This Minority Research and Training Post-Doctoral Fellowship project examines the roles of production, exchange, and display of material culture in the transformation of ideologies and power in colonial Mexico. By using archaeological and historical data, the researcher will compare the use and production of both pottery and cloth in sixteenth-century Mexico City and Xaltocan, an indigenous community in the Basin of Mexico. In this comparative study he will examine the role of imports and traditional Aztec crafts in strategies of display in a rural community and an urban center, and show how production of pottery and cloth changed in the early colonial period. By placing the data on craft production and display in a wider social, cultural, and historical context, the researcher will then address issues of the relationship between craft production, consumption, display, and the formation of ideologies that supported class stratification in colonial Mexico. The project will begin in Mexico, in the summer of 2003. He will excavate in Xaltocan to study colonial ceramics in the site and compare them with ceramics from Mexico City. During this phase of the project he will work with Elizabeth Brumfiel. He will then go to the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he will compare a subsample of 250 ceramic sherds from Xaltocan with the collections from Mexico at the Museum. At Ann Arbor, the PI will work under the supervision of Jeffrey Parsons, his NSF post-doctoral fellowship sponsoring scientist, who will help identify the appropriate collections for comparison between Late Aztec and Early Colonial ceramics and will guide the PI's research on these ceramics to obtain the data necessary to understand changes in production. The researcher will also send the subsample of 250 ceramic sherds for chemical characterization to study the ceramics. provenience. Finally, he will go to Spain to study cloth use and production in Mexico with historical documents at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. In Spain he will work under the supervision of Jose Hernandez Palomo, who will help him identify the appropriate documents and plan how to obtain the information needed for this phase of the project. This study will be of broad impact to studies of cultural change in colonial situations. It will provide a model that resolves some of the quandaries that have plagued archaeological studies of "acculturation" by focusing on how actors used material culture in their strategies for transforming power in the colonial period. Furthermore, this project will impact theories of ideology and power by focusing on production and consumption in a period in which status and social classes were in unprecedented flux, as were ideologies and their material aspects. Through this study, The research will show that ideologies were manipulated, expressed, and even embodied through mundane objects of daily life, and in the activities in which these objects were made and used.
