ABSTRACT In this essay, I interrogate a handful of rare village records to probe more deeply the participation of rural Native women in conflicts over inheritance in the central Andes during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I focus on the wielding of written land titles, such as wills, certified lists of fields, fragments of land inspections, and writs of protection and possession, by these women as they claimed control over plots, homes, tracts, groves, and other household and extended-family assets within the commons. Their cases suggest that, rather than undermining women’s rights to dispose of property, titling and the establishment of municipal courts and the expansion of the legal possibilities for claiming land within this jurisdiction created new opportunities for some of them to defend and enact those rights. More importantly, their cases strongly suggest that gender relations were as much constitutive of kinship, community, and ownership relations as they were mediated by them, warning us of the risks of isolating gendered forms of expressing power (and the inheritance practices that they could underscore) from other power relations operating at the village level.

ABSTRACT In 1739, the viceroy and archbishop of New Spain accused an enfermero (male nurse) of strangling a patient on his deathbed at a hospital in Mexico City. The crime was not an isolated incident, but the culminating indictment in a seething report on the alleged abuses committed by members of the Order of San Hipólito, one of four nursing or hospital orders (órdenes hospitalarias) active in New Spain. This article uses the viceroy-archbishop’s report, and the reform movement it provoked, as a window into the history of religious nursing within New Spain’s hospitals during a moment of alarming decline and in the face of numerous obstacles, including chronic underfunding, shifting Church-state relations, and internal feuding. It introduces the hospital orders, religious brothers who took vows to hospitality (hospitalidad), as critical if overlooked actors in the history of medical care in the Spanish colony. It argues for viewing the crisis in hospital care as a crisis of religious values as the ideal of hospital nursing eroded as these orders found themselves embroiled in scandals and accused of widespread spiritual laxity.

ABSTRACT This article follows the historical trajectory of the indios de la compañía, a group of Indigenous auxiliaries who performed labor for the Jesuit Order in Chiloé between 1626 and 1767, as a way of exploring place-specific forms of colonial social identity and Indigenous community formation in a borderlands region. The Jesuits held usufruct rights over Indigenous tributaries in Chiloé during 150 years through a series of arrangements that involved the Order, local encomenderos and justices, colonial administrators, and the Real Audiencia of Santiago which, put together, developed a legal custom that underpinned communal viability. This article argues the indios de la compañía constituted an alternative path towards Indigenous community formation in Chiloé, one that was not organized around the local encomienda regime. The absence of particular ethnonyms in this study’s archival base beyond the generic indio/yndio suggests this group’s social identity was not structured around ethnic affiliation, but rather around the specialized forms of labor they performed and the mutual ties of dependence they generated with the Jesuits.

ABSTRACT Fernán González de Eslava’s fifth Coloquio espiritual y sacramental is a Christian allegorical drama from New Spain of the 1570s. It concerns Spanish attempts to ‘pacify’ the Gran Chichimeca, a contested desert frontier to the north of the Valley of Mexico. The antagonist of this play is a Chichimeca warrior, who challenges military and missionary attempts to conquer and convert. González de Eslava’s allegory vilifies this nomadic native warrior, casting him as the very figure of sin. This piece portrays a fierce Indigenous alterity in order to justify Spanish incursions into native lands and promote a Christianizing agenda. Remarkably, the playwright portrays Chichimeca territory with reference to a major foundational narrative of central Mexican peoples. He invokes the storied trajectory of ancestral migrants who departed from legendary sites of origin in the north, and journeyed southward into the Mexican Basin, where they settled. However, the allegorical drama reconfigures this southward path, and in the place of a central Mexican foundational narrative, González de Eslava asserts a Christian narrative and symbolic system.

ABSTRACT The standard teleological reading of Pedro Murillo Velarde’s map of the Philippines (1734) as the origin of scientific, national maps of the Philippines fails to situate the map in its proper historical context. Several itineraries manifest themselves on the map, such as Murillo’s global Xaverian pilgrimage, his personal travels to different islands of the archipelago, and the circulation of cartographic knowledge through missionary, colonial, and indigenous communities. Contrary to stereotypes of Murillo as a sedentary cartographer, he traveled extensively through the archipelago, particularly Mindanao, and his itineraries are visible on his map. In addition to being an object of spiritual meditation, Murillo’s map speaks to imperial contexts as part of a larger narrative of conquest that emerged from the circulation of the geographic knowledge of Spanish officials and indigenous informants. Through this case study, I show how circulations and itineraries can be used to interpret the creation and content of colonial maps.

ABSTRACT This article re-visits the matter of the much debated identity of the author of the Discurso en loor de la poesía (1608). Inspired by the anonymous writer’s introduction as an heroica dama and señora principal de este reino, it is generally accepted that the Discurso is the work of an eminent Peruvian woman who has entered scholarly tradition under the pseudonym ‘Clarinda.’ The article suggests that there are grounds, both methodological and literary, to contest this identification. Instead, it seeks to reinscribe the Discurso en loor de la poesía into the context of the volume in which it originally appeared—Diego Mexía de Fernangil’s Primera parte del Parnaso Antártico—and to interpret it as part of Mexía’s broader literary project, which is an Ovidian one. Reassessing the Discurso through the lens of Ovid—more specifically, his Heroides—permits a new Heroidean reading which ultimately intuits Mexía himself behind the pen. The article further contends that the Discurso’s formal status as a work of poetics corroborates this interpretation. What emerges is not a diminishment of the work of the so-called señora but rather an amplification of the poem’s dynamic potential, setting the stage for future work on this rich but misunderstood text.

ABSTRACT To understand the manuscript creation process practiced by Indigenous intellectuals in the Americas this essay examines the work of the Nahua scholars who, along with Bernardino de Sahagún, created the Florentine Codex (1575–1577). Now fundamental to studies of the Codex is an evaluation of its three ‘texts’: the Nahuatl-language alphabetic text, the Spanish-language annotations including loose translations, and its bountiful images. Two sources served as iterative kinds of drafts for the Codex project: the Primeros memoriales (1558–1561) and the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco (1561–1566). Each of the manuscripts contains its own three texts, thus they are threefold, that enable an examination of nine separate but interrelated source texts. In considering the differences among the cumulative nine texts, this article uncovers new insights into an unstudied process of negotiation between the Nahua scholars, the elders whom they consulted, and their Spanish colleagues. As sites of mediation among colonial actors, the threefold manuscripts manifest on their folios the competing interests and agendas that shaped the production of knowledge in New Spain.