Popular disturbances can assume a wide variety of forms which account for the efforts of sociologists, psychologists, and historians to formulate crowd-classification systems. The classification and description of a popular disturbance, however, is not an end in itself, but is useful primarily as a tool to allow the historian to peer more closely at the society suffering conflict. The study of popular disturbances yields historical information on two levels: information about the disturbance itself; and, much more significantly, information about the social, political, and economic relationships evident among sectors of the population at the time of the disturbance. This paper, based principally on archival records only recently brought to light, proposes to examine the mining revolt of August 1766 in Real del Monte of New Spain on these two levels.