The book is divided into two parts. Part One concerns the period from the Spanish Conquest of 1521 to the Revolution of 1910. The authors depict the main features of the estate system that existed both before and after the Spanish Conquest, the nature of stratification on the haciendas that dominated the countryside for roughly four centuries, and the importance of race and ethnicity in both the estate system and the class structures that accompanied and followed it. Part Two portrays the class structure of the post-revolutionary period (1920 onward), emphasizing the demise of the landed aristocracy, the formation of new upper and middle classes, the explosive growth of the urban lower classes, and the final phase of the Indian-mestizo transition in the countryside.
Hugo G. Nutini is University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. He has authored and edited numerous articles and books, including The Mexican Aristocracy: An Expressive Ethnography, 1910–2000 and Social Stratification and Mobility in Central Veracruz.
Barry L. Isaac is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cincinnati. With Nutini, he is the coauthor of Los Pueblos de Habla Nahuatl and was also the series editor of Research in Economic Anthropology from 1983 until 2000.