Bøger i American University Studies, Series 9: History serien

This book tells the story of Tampico, and how it became Mexico's major port city between 1876 and 1924. This was achieved by local businessmen through the intelligent maneuvering of politics at the local, regional and national levels. However, these men were strongly supported by all the social groups in the city who held capitalism in high esteem since the foundation of the port in 1823. It describes the city's development under Porfirio Díaz and the Revolution, and how it became the world's first international oil port and the fifth largest city of Mexico.

This book, based on new research in the Spanish archives, is the first full-length account of the activities of the linajudos, genealogists whose occupation was to scrutinize ancestries and to extort money from candidates for offices and honors who, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, had to prove that they were not of converso (that is, Jewish) descent. In Seville many of the patrician families that dominated the transatlantic trade and governed the city in this period had intermarried with the conversos or were themselves of similar origin. This book views the linajudo phenomenon as part of the wider problem of the assimilation of the conversos into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish society.