Building the King's Highway

Book excerpt: Focusing on the camino real linking Mexico City and the port of Veracruz, Castleman has written a social history of road construction laborers in late Bourbon Mexico. He has drawn on employment and census records to study a major shift in methods used by the Spanish colonial regime to mobilize the supply of unskilled labor - and concomitant changes in the identities those laborers asserted for themselves. By linking census and employment records, he uncovers a host of social indicators such as marriage preference, family structure, and differences over time in how the caste system was used to classify people according to ancestry. His work provides a valuable new perspective on people's lives as it advances our understanding of labor in late colonial Latin America.