| Résumé: | Yraeta arrived in New Spain in the mid-eighteenth century as a 12-year-old Guipuzcoan immigrant. After working for some time in Manila, he went back to Mexico City, where he married and worked with his father-in-law, a businessman with commercial relations in the Philippines. They later became partners and this spurred Yraeta's own commercial career, which strengthened during the second half of the eighteenth centruy, when New Spain ejoyed extraordinary circumstances: population growth, silver production and cmomercial realtions with Cadiz, Manila, Guatemala, Havanna, Caracas, Guayaquil and Lima. Yraeta was quialified, responsible, successful and deply Catholic, and found his way into the commercial oligarchy of the Spanish colony's capital. If he was the archetypical late-colonial Spanish bourgeois is yet to be seen-
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