Contac with the half-breeds, mulattos and Spaniards who invaded the countryside caused Christianity to undergo a further evolution in the 18th century.

A common culture now took shape which mixed all kinds of beliefs and practices, foreshadowing the popular cultures of modern Mexico, in which the indegenous heritage gradually sissolved.

Yet it was in the towns that true change ocurred, especially in the capital of New Spain. Here, from the 16th century onwards, the Indians became familiar with the Spanish tongue and also underwent the experience of all kinds of biological, social and cultural interbreeding.

They learned to move between two worlds, that of the Spanish masters in whose service they obtained posts, and that of a community where the constraints sometimes became unbearable.

Many of them were bilingual, ladinos or españolados (that is, Hispanicized), to use the contemporary terms, and knew how to use their origins to advantage, or to benefit from assimilation and anonymity. By the 17th century neither their clothing nor their haircuts seemed to give them any distinction from the Spanish population any longer.

Like a magnet the city attracted The Indians from the villages, either because they were over-exploited or because they had resolved to break their community ties. This was a fascination that dated back a long time when one recalls the nomads who prowled around the Toltec cities centuries before, in order to glean some fragments of civilization.

In each parish, the priest generally had three sacramental registers: one for the whites, another for the Indians, and the third for those of mixed blood. More or less official classifications had been established that distinguished up to sixteen categories of mixed blood depending on the respective proportions of European, Indian or black blood. Legally superior to the half-breeds, the Indians often held a lower social position when the half-breed (foreman, employee or servant) was invested with his master’s authority. Later, the terms Indian and half-breed began to designate social categories rather than notions, which did not prevent marriages uniting couples belonging to two different ethnic groups.

In cities the Indians very soon assimilated the negative aspects of ‘culture’ brought by the Spaniards. The most spectacular expression was drunkenness or, rather, alcoholism which struck a great part of the indigenous population.

The public houses or peluquerías were the setting for shoddy scenes: it was here that husbands squandered the meagre household income, women passed out and miscarried, bloody brawls broke out and sordid prostitutions was carried on. In 1784 the capital had more than 600 pulquerías, each of which could easily contain a hundred customers inside or nearby. It is also true to say that it was in the pulquerías, away from the parish and community, that the Indians learned about half-breed society, and co-existence and complicity with blacks, mulattos and all those of mixed blood. Although the taverns housed the depths of delinquency, corruption and clandestine love affairs, they were also places for living life to the full and for relaxing. These pulquerías were alternatives to a rigid society that sought to assing everyone a fixed place depending on their race wealth, and in many ways were the crucible from which the popular cultures and the ‘poverty cultures’ of modern Mexico were arise.

By the second half of the 16th century, a reduced, uprooted and mobile population was discovering in the silver mines the pressures of salaried work in more or less permanent and specialized teams.

In one generation these workers went through stages of acculturation that it took others several centuries to achieve.

Like the mines, forced labour in those prison-like workshops known as obrajes wore people out in body and soul by tearing them away from their family circle and delivering them to an unfamiliar, frenzied and dead-end way of life. For other Indians, however, craftsmanship, selling foodstuffs, and employment ar servants offered less painful avenues that allowed them to melt into the half-breed world and escape destitution.