By: Thunyarath Munyukong

The age of conquest, the most famous single period of Mexican and of all Spanish American colonial history has steadily declined from its once paramount position.

The conquest of Mexico is still understood to be the prototype and most important of all American conquests.

The post-conquest sixteenth century is the period to which students have characteristically turned when it became evident to them that the conquests had been sufficiently examined.

Ricard scrupulously avoided the military conquest, presented a history of missionary labor as if it were the antithesis of the history of conquest, and yet ultimately saw the whole as a kind of conquest after all.

It is in researches on the history of the colonial Indians and on colonial relations between Indians and Spaniards that the generation since World War II has made perhaps its largest and most conspicuous contribution, and when one thinks back to the conditions of the 1940s the reason for its doing so seem quite clear.

The Black and White Legends appeared as massive competing abstractions, as if the issue between them could be resolved only by finding out what actually took place in Spanish-Indian relations.

In the period after World War II studies of the colonial Indian came to be assigned to the field called ethno history, a field whose coming of age may be dated approximately by its inclusion as a separate section (under the broad designation Anthropology) in the Handbook of Latin American Studies (1960).