Summary: Using the frontier region of Colotlan in western New Spain as a case study, this thesis reconstructs late colonial social networks and relates individual and communal expressions of loyalty to broader patterns of allegiance and subversion throughout the Americas. The Colotlan case shows how indigenous identity took shape throughout the colonial period, as Spain's indigenous Tlaxcalan allies constructed an "indio fronterizo " status for themselves and their ethnically-diverse descendants. These communities superimposed a conquest model for understanding identity and social relations onto earlier traditions of indigenous resistance, and employed both of these cultural forms in their subsequent interaction with Spanish officials and vecinos from neighboring districts. Narratives of specific episodes of social unrest and conflict show how authority in the Colotlan region never ceased to be contested, almost always took on ethnic undertones, and needed both external and internal underpinning in order to be sustained. In the face of late colonial reform and hardening conceptions of race, competing factions drew upon different cultural sources to bolster their claims to authority and status. The 1810 insurrection in the Colotlan region grew out of strong roots in the frontier's indigenous past, which then grafted into the larger "Hidalgo Revolt" through alignment with creole commanders with viceroyalty-wide connections. Still, a considerable gulf existed between the aims of the vast majority of the rebels and the higher-level creole elite leadership. During this period, the status and privileges the fronterizos had sought to recover and protect continued to fade into the past, unable to survive either the late colonial reforms of the Spanish regime or creole conceptions of race and property in the formation of a new nation-state. The picture of late colonial and independence-era social relations that emerges helps explain the persistence of colonial social patterns well into the nineteenth-century and the national period, while also identifying the roots of post-colonial social unrest and popular conservatism.