Rodríguez has devoted more the thirty years of his academic life to studying the concluding history of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and the early years of independent Mexico. The book under review is the English translation of a study in two volumes published originally as Nosotros somos ahora los verdaderos españoles (Mexico City, 2009). The new edition eliminates material that the author did not consider essential for an English-speaking audience but incorporates research that he performed after the publication of the first version.
Rodríguez is the staunchest supporter of a controversial thesis regarding Mexico’s independence movement—namely, that the emancipation process of New Spain consisted of two revolutions, “The Cádiz Revolution” (Chapter 5) and “A Fragmented Insurgency” (Chapter 6). In principle, without ignoring the connections between them, this notion is acceptable; the problem, however, is the way in which Rodríguez presents and contrasts both processes. He defines the Cádiz Revolution...