Brave New Spain: "Entangled" Creole and Colonial Histories in an Irishman’s Plot for Mexican Independence, 1642

This paper presents a microhistory of the transatlantic ideas and encounters that came together in a unique proposal for political sovereignty in mid seventeenth-century New Spain. Written by a thirty-one year old Irish exile named William Lamport [hereafter “Don Guillén Lombardo,” his more popular hispanicized name], the independence proclamation announced a new reign in Mexico, declaring Lombardo ‘King of New Spain.' His decree laid out a revolutionary plan: with the help of a racially-integrated militia he would abolish slavery, end the repartimiento of forced indigenous labor, and establish a limited monarchy in Mexico based on popular mandate and parliamentary consultation. Finally, Don Guillén declared New Spain open to free trade with Spain's European enemies and China. By breaking sovereign ties to Spain, he proclaimed, Mexico would take its place among the most powerful nations on earth. Building on inquisitorial trial evidence and Don Guillén's unpublished texts, I examine this plot as a nexus between Mexican and Atlantic histories in a moment when rebellions spread across colonies and metropoles throughout the world. I trace Don Guillén's interactions with the varied and contradictory aspirations for autonomy and emancipation that Mexican Creoles, indigenous, and Afro-Mexican slaves in Mexico City harbored. With its proposed reconciliation of Creole, indigenous, and African groups on a new sovereign soil, the story of Don Guillén's plot lays bare both the promises and limitations of the demands for autonomy that circulated in all social sectors in Mexico, and across the Atlantic world, in the mid-seventeenth century.