Colonial Guatemala Research Articles

Parent-Child Incest and the Culture of Marriage in Colonial Guatemala

AbstractUtilizing criminal records from the secular courts, this article examines incidents of sexual relations between parents and their biological children or stepchildren—both of which were considered incestuous under Spanish law—to explore how marriage and the marital relationship could motivate or rationalize episodes of parent-child incest in colonial Guatemala. Examination of parent-child incest through this lens shows how sons and daughters could become entangled in the sexual and emotional lives of their parents, providing a more nuanced view of the lived experience of kinship in colonial Latin America. It also demonstrates how incestuous offenders and their peers could allude to the culture of marriage and the state of the conjugal bond to both subtly and explicitly diminish the incestuous aspects of a sexual encounter, rendering it more culturally intelligible in the process.

“In the Name of the (God)Father”: Baptismal Naming in Early Colonial Guatemala

AbstractThis article examines baptismal naming in sixteenth-century Guatemala in the context of Indigenous adaptation to the sociopolitical upheavals of Spanish-led invasion, forced resettlement, and the imposition of Catholicism. As part of the institution of baptism—the first Catholic sacrament and one that missionaries implemented soon after their arrival in the Spanish Americas—Indigenous baptizees received a European name, as well as spiritual kin in the form of godparents. The distribution of baptismal names in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Santiago Atitlán, a predominantly Tz'utujil Maya community in highland Guatemala, suggests that Indigenous christening marked a break with precolonial onomastic practice. Instead of continuing the Indigenous tradition of naming children according to their birthdate, Maya adults in the Santiago Atitlán area developed new naming strategies that simultaneously located their children in the Spanish administrative sphere and reconstituted local social networks in the wake of colonial disruptions. Furthermore, the influence of godparents on name selection both expressed and reinforced godparenthood's rising significance as the most socially salient Catholic institution in colonial Indigenous society and one that remains vibrant into the present.

A Hidden Plague: Violence and Public Health in Colonial Guatemala City

How do colonial scribal practices and archival practices shape our understanding of the past? Logbooks from the San Juan de Dios Hospital in colonial Guatemala showcase both the potential and the constraints of scribal interventions. A Hidden Plague examines the logbooks alongside contemporary criminal cases to demonstrate how individual scribes chose to conceal or reveal information in their official writings. This method challenges the contention by past scholarship that epidemic disease was the greatest health threat to women in the city of Guatemala. While epidemics did indeed affect women, reading the logbooks in new ways reveals the presence of a hidden epidemic: domestic violence.

Women and Crime in Late Colonial Guatemala - The Woman on the Windowsill: A Tale of Mystery in Several Parts. By Sylvia Sellers-García. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 281. Notes. Illustration Credits. Index. $32.50 cloth.

Women and Crime in Late Colonial Guatemala - The Woman on the Windowsill: A Tale of Mystery in Several Parts. By Sylvia Sellers-García. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 281. Notes. Illustration Credits. Index. $32.50 cloth. - Volume 79 Issue 1

La práctica matemática en la Guatemala colonial del siglo XVIII

En este artículo discuto elementos de la práctica matemática en la Guatemala colonial del siglo XVIII. La discusión de dicha práctica gira en particular alrededor del libro de matemáticas más antiguo que existe publicado en el período colonial en América Central: la Arithmetica practica del padre Juan José de Padilla, publicado en 1732. En la primera parte del artículo, describo brevemente mi encuentro con el libro de Padilla y los problemas contextuales que encontré para ofrecer una edición facsímil del mismo. En la segunda parte, defino la aproximación historiográfica que utilizo. Argumento que investigar acerca de las prácticas matemáticas históricas es indagar acerca de las matemáticas tal como fueron imaginadas, pensadas y utilizadas dentro de un cierto contexto histórico cultural. También es indagar sobre las maneras en que las matemáticas, los matemáticos, los libros de matemáticas y otros artefactos encajan y responden ideológicamente a las estructuras económicas, políticas y educativas de su tiempo.

Substance and Seduction: Ingested Commodities in Early Modern Mesoamerica

This edited volume breaks new ground in critical food studies by exploring the allure that Africans, Indians, and Europeans held for ingested commodities such as alcohol, chocolate, peyote, sugar, and tobacco in Mesoamerica. The ability of these commodities to seduce peoples across racial and socioeconomic lines grants them a level of agency in their own right. Using consumption as an analytical tool helps the volume’s contributors illuminate the social meaning embedded within sensorial experiences. The book’s six chapters are grouped thematically into two sections, with the first foregrounding seduction and the second emphasizing substance.In the first section, Martin Nesvig considers how the meaning ascribed to hallucinogens such as peyote, teonanacatl, and ololiuqui changed over time, eventually leading to “a process of creolization” in the way that they were consumed in mainstream society (28). Although ritual specialists originally used hallucinogens to divine, heal, and interpret the cosmos, their consumption expanded to mixed-race peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, creating a hybrid Mexican custom. Stacey Schwartzkopf examines the production and ingestion of mead, wine, chicha, and aguardiente de caña among Maya peoples in colonial Guatemala. Schwartzkopf notes that the Maya resisted attempts to centralize alcohol production and that many Maya preferred sugar-based drinks over Spanish wine (60). Despite the fact that much of colonial society drank, colonial elites’ anxieties surrounding racial mixing prompted them to vigorously control the licensing of alcohol (67). Kathryn E. Sampeck and Jonathan Thayn investigate cacao usage in Central America and Mexico, tracking recipes to see how tastes traveled across the Atlantic and evaluating the palates of Mesoamericans and French, British, and Anglo-American colonists. Using GIS modeling, Sampeck and Thayn show that Maya and southern Nahua peoples shared similar preferences for cacao recipes and that most of Europe used British recipes as a base for their chocolate cuisine (89).In the second section, Joel W. Palka surveys tobacco cultivation and trade among the indomitable Lacandon Maya peoples in the late nineteenth century. Palka traces the social and economic changes that occurred due to the continued demand for the crop, including polygamy, a practice that increased the number of hands available to help with production. Moreover, Palka highlights the transformations in Lacandon religion as increased contact with outsiders elevated Akyantho, the god of trade and foreigners, over other deities (121). Joan Bristol discerns how elites projected their anxieties about racial purity onto the production and consumption of pulque in colonial Mexico. Bristol draws parallels between a drink known as coyote—made of pulque, dark honey, and palo de timbre—and the ethnonym coyote, used to describe a person that was “three-quarters indigenous and one-quarter Spanish” (135). According to colonial officials, the mixed nature of coyote drinks and people made them both inferior. Guido Pezzarossi employs Michel Foucault’s biopolitics to show how authoritarian governments stripped Indians of their political standing as vassals in colonial Guatemala (150). Pezzarossi uses his findings from archeological and historical research to show how alcohol, cacao, and sugar regulation in Guatemala intersected with the colonial government’s purported concerns for the health of native populations. This book’s fine forward by Marcy Norton and afterword by Carla D. Martin maintain that historians can deepen their understanding of subaltern agency by examining the purposeful attainment of heightened sensory states through seductive commodities since their consumption frequently provoked responses from powerful officials. In short, the many insights that the contributors provide in this bold volume should stimulate debate and produce new avenues of research for scholars of Mesoamerican and Latin American history and food studies.

The Woman on the Windowsill: A Tale of Mystery in Several Parts. By Sylvia Sellers-Garcia (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2020) 281 pp. $32.50

Billed as a mystery, a macabre and “sensational” crime story, and “as a watershed moment…that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order” in Spanish Colonial America, this book offers much more than such hyped-up promises. It is more significant for its method than for its history (or even for its framework as an Agatha Christie–style whodunit.)At the turn of the nineteenth century, in newly established Guatemala City, mutilated body parts began appearing on the windowsills of prominent citizens. They came from bodies in the local cemetery attached to a religiously run hospital at the edge of town, and from a morgue adjacent to the hospital. The local authorities attempted to discover not only who was responsible but also why he (the local magistrates at the time, like Sellers-Garcia, make that gendered assumption) was morbidly obsessed with the breasts, vulvas, ears, and hands of women, crudely separated from the dead. What message was he attempting to deliver? Was it meant to be blasphemous and anti-clerical? Was it class-derived (the windowsills belonging to leading figures in the city)? Was it more subtle? Or was the perpetrator simply deranged?Sellers-Garcia cannot say. Hence, as a thriller, the book is a complete failure. It never solves the mystery, leaving us thoroughly teased—but not perplexed. There are no potential culprits, except possibly the snobbish physician who investigated the cases and had his dissecting studio on the grounds of the hospital, but Sellers-Garcia never contemplates the medical man’s potential culpability. Nor is she able (after so many decades) to pinpoint possible perpetrators by type or name.But what Sellers-Garcia does so well is to use the mutilated bodies as a springboard to investigate the critical place of honor, the importance of decorum and civility, shame, policing, differential justice, the ease of femicide, the prevalence of spousal abuse, patriarchy, and class and race relations in colonial Guatemala. The mysterious body parts and the local and clerical authorities’ attempt to deal with them and to unravel meaning suggest a society where poverty and inebriation were common, where deviance of many kinds threatened public order, and where tension between common folk and gentry was inescapable.Sellers-Garcia has written a good social history, depicting the role and pursuits of the underclass in Guatemalan society admirably and fully. Her final chapter, about policia and policing, is important for what it says about civility, stability, and order in Guatemala and elsewhere. The conclusions that she develops are telling for much of Spanish America during the long eighteenth century.Despite these major accomplishments, the value of Sellers-Garcia’s book lies not primarily in providing a readable social history or the outlines of an unsolved moment-in-time mystery. Rather, Sellers-Garcia’s great achievement is to show readers how the most percipient historians employ their considerable talents. In a manner that very few other historians have exemplified so deftly in print, she follows trails blazed centuries ago in the hard-to-decipher archives as she questions her sources and reflects on the deeper significance of the archival innards. She invites readers to join her as she tries to solve not the mere mystery of the bodies but the critical puzzle of colonial lives and colonial social underpinnings.Historians think this way—such is her intent to make plain—pursuing their sleuthing instincts by cross-examining the available sources even when those sources are scarce, unreadable, or irreconcilable. Thus, what is unusually significant about this book is how Sellers-Garcia unveils her methodological instruments to invite even casual readers to share her mulling of incidence and coincidence, revealed and hidden events, and conjunctions of circumstance—all to demonstrate the craftsmanship and agile thinking of successful historiography.One more virtue: Her book fulfills what Sachs and Demos call “Artful History”—a narrative that is a literary as well as a historical contribution.1

Epidemics, indigenous communities, and public health in the COVID-19 era: views from smallpox inoculation campaigns in colonial Guatemala

AbstractThis article explores the tensions between well-intentioned humanitarianism and coercive colonialism during smallpox outbreaks in eighteenth-century Guatemala, when the state extended inoculation programmes to its predominant, culturally diverse Maya communities. Evidence from anti-epidemic campaigns shows public debates broadly comparable to the current COVID-19 crisis: debates about the measurably higher mortality rates for indigenous people and other marginalized groups; debates about the extent of the state’s responsibility for the health of its peoples; and debates on whether or not coercion and violence should be used to ensure compliance with quarantines and public health campaigns. While inoculations provided medical assistance and material help to Maya communities, and resulted in demonstrably lower mortality rates from smallpox, at the same time they functioned as avenues for the expansion of colonial power to intervene in the daily lives of people in those communities, characterized by colonial actors as necessary for their own good, and for the broader public good.

All in a Day's Walk? The Gendered Geography of Native Migration in Colonial Chiapas and Guatemala

Abstract The census records of some Indian towns (pueblos de indios) in colonial Chiapas and Guatemala present a puzzle: remarkably uneven gender ratios. This article explores gendered migration as a possible explanation. Previous studies show that the labor markets of colonial Latin American cities attracted mainly female migrants, and this article hypothesizes that people were more likely to migrate if they could make the trip between dawn and dusk. I use Google Maps, as well as colonial writings, to estimate travel times between a sample of Indian pueblos and their closest colonial cities. I then analyze gender ratios in census records from those pueblos. The results suggest that Indian pueblos with large male majorities were generally within a day's walk of a colonial city. Presumably, the male majorities indicate high rates of female out-migration for work in the cities. The article's conclusion discusses impacts that gendered out-migration likely had on sending communities.

“Beyond” the Grid of Labor Control: Salvaged, Persisting, and Leaky Assemblages in Colonial Guatemala

Spanish colonial incursions into highland Guatemala encountered a vibrant assemblage of entangled people, places, plants, and things. Colonists sought to marshall this assemblage into various accumulation projects through strategies of colonial control that re-ordered the landscape and its settlements, enabling new forms of surveillance, tracking, subject making, and exploitation of Native communities and laborers. This “grid” of control proved effective in many regards, particularly due to the preservation of the extant assemblage of infrastructure, social relations, and relations of production encountered. Rather than fully disrupt it, colonists accommodated this assemblage and sought to salvage value from its persistence. However, an ambivalence emerged from this dependence on the refracted assemblage of highland Guatemala; an assemblage that remained outside of colonists full control and made the colonial grid a thoroughly leaky one as people and things became or remained entangled in ways that subverted the goals of colonial control and afforded the persistence of Native communities and relations through, between and beyond the violence of colonization.

Cacao and Violence: Consequences of Money in Colonial Guatemala

This article investigates the meeting of two monetized economies and how producing a “commodity money” nurtured forms of violence. This case presents an opportunity to rethink why economies monetize and how that relation fits into coercive, violent foundations of an emerging capitalist system. Money is important for understanding early capitalism, as Marx suggested that money is the first form of the appearance of capital. Money masks the social nature of labor, a fiction that not only creates conditions for capitalism, but is violent by wrenching the self from social bonds. Archaeological examples illustrate relationships of money with corporeal and social violence in the Izalcos region of colonial Guatemala, part of today’s western El Salvador. The early colonial market relied on exploiting inequalities as well as the predictability of native production. A stable currency based on cacao as small coin buffered the awkwardness and unpredictability of a volatile economy.

Ossified and Materialized Selves in Three Manuscripts of Colonial Guatemala: Connections with the Sacred Instrumentality of Bone

AbstractGuatemalan colonial-period documents have proven valuable for revealing Maya thinking about bone, especially how Mayas imbued bones with personal identity. At key moments in the narratives of three Guatemalan manuscripts, the Rabinal Achi, Xpantzay Cartulary, and Pop Wuj, Mayas materialized the self of important individuals through their bones, treating the bones at times like captives. By doing this, colonial-era Mayas were revealing their ideational linkages with Mayas from the Classic and Postclassic periods who practiced ancestor veneration using bones. In this network of practices, Classic-, Postclassic-, and colonial-era Mayas linked human bones to enduring personal forces and used bones to support claims of ancestry to specific people. This study explores this feature of Maya life, and then analyzes how Mayas of the last hundred years now value bone more for other, non-ancestral ritual utilities. They have shifted from treating certain bones as a materialization of self to viewing bones in terms of the practical potentialities the bones encase, employing a mode of engagement exemplified by Tz’utujiil Maya bonesetters who treat broken bones with sacralized bones and bone surrogates. This work examines how bone use has oscillated between these two modes, contrasting how Mayas of the Classic, Postclassic, and colonial periods treated certain bones as a materialization of self against how Mayas of more recent decades have come to emphasize the sacred instrumentality of bone and put it to active use.

Presidential Address: A Rainbow of Spanish Illusions: Research Frontiers in Colonial Guatemala

Abstract Compared still to what we know about Mexico and Peru, the historiography of colonial Guatemala, despite notable advances, continues to lag behind, registering minimally in the Latin American scholarly imagination. The field is surveyed by examining some of the issues that have intrigued the author over the course of his career. Personal reflections are offered of research activities that engage indigenous resistance to Spanish intrusion, demographic collapse in the wake of conquest, the link between disease outbreaks and Maya demise, and the role played by Pedro de Alvarado (1485–1541) in attaining imperial objectives. Scrutiny of the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, a sixteenth-century source the contents of which have been incisively reappraised, affords fuller appreciation of strategic Indian involvement in the act of subjugation. Alvarado, a key protagonist in the conquest of Mexico, also harbored ambitions to muscle in on the conquest of Peru, a little-known episode that awaits further investigation. The conqueror’s own life, like Central America itself, may indeed have been a rainbow of Spanish illusions, pots of gold dreamed of, lost and found at native expense.

“She Was What They Call a ‘Pepe’”: Kinship Practice and Incest Codes in Late Colonial Guatemala

Incest taboos have long been intriguing to anthropologists because they are apparently common to all human societies. The definition of incest in the Spanish American colonies was codified in law, but not all residents abided by such regulations. This article focuses on incestuous crime in late colonial Guatemala, a region that is underrepresented in incest literature. It shows how preoccupations with incest problematized aspects of kinship practice and discusses the ways colonial actors took advantage of kinship and incest during various crises in their lives. Overall, it demonstrates the power of incest codes to shape human interactions in colonial Guatemala.

Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500–1821. 4th ed. By W. George Lovell . Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015. Pp. xx, 295. Figures. Preface. Plates. Epilogue. Glossary. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $100.00 cloth; $34.95 paper.

Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500–1821. 4th ed. By W. George Lovell . Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015. Pp. xx, 295. Figures. Preface. Plates. Epilogue. Glossary. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. 34.95 paper. - Volume 74 Issue 3

Racing to the top: descent ideologies and why Ladinos never meant to be mestizos in colonial Guatemala

ABSTRACTThis paper asks what mestizaje as presently conceived could have meant in colonial Latin America before modern notions of race, nation, state, or culture. It explores the term ladino in contemporary Chiapas and Guatemala that refers to people of mixed descent who identify as ‘not Indian.’ More than a substitute for mestizo, ladino represents a descent ideology that stresses parentage over race in pursuit of relative advantage within a stratified, postconquest society. This descent ideology in turn derives from the ‘republics’ of Spaniards and Indians – and African slaves – in colonial Guatemala, and post-Reconquest Iberian ideals of ‘purity of blood’ based on, not race, but legitimate birth to a Christian family going back to before the Muslim conquest of Spain. The vagaries of genealogical reckoning inherent in descent ideologies help to rationalize why from the bottom up ‘mestizo’ identities came to depend as much on behavior as appearance, and from the top down, they provoked blanket phenotypic exclusions that eventually, but not primordially, found validation in biologized conceptions of race.

‘Strange Lands and Different Peoples’: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala - by Lovell, W. George and Lutz, Christopher H. with Karmer, Wendy and Swezey, William R.

‘Strange Lands and Different Peoples’: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala - by Lovell, W. George and Lutz, Christopher H. with Karmer, Wendy and Swezey, William R.

For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala by Martha Few

Reviewed by: For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala by Martha Few José Ramón Jouve Martín Martha Few. For All of Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015. x + 292 pp. Ill. $34.95 (978-0-8165-3187-5). In this well-researched study, Martha Few presents a detailed account of the responses to smallpox, typhus, and other epidemic illnesses in colonial Guatemala. Her analysis follows three main lines of argument. First, Few questions the assumption that knowledge, technologies, and experiences emanated from the center to the periphery and convincingly demonstrates the centrality of the recirculation of knowledge to the development of colonial medicine. Second, Few disputes the strict separation of indigenous and European medical practices in the Guatemalan context and sets out to demonstrate the presence of different Mesoamerican medical cultures, which coexisted in constant, although not necessarily harmonious, interaction. Finally, she argues that, despite the tendency toward greater rationalization and experimentation characteristic of the Enlightenment, the practice of colonial medicine in the eighteenth century cannot be understood without considering Christian and indigenous religious practices. [End Page 722] The book begins by tracing the earliest accounts of epidemic diseases in the region and their effect on colonial society and indigenous communities. It vividly describes the impact of these illnesses on the everyday lives of individuals, families, and communities. The historical narrative quickly moves from sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Guatemala, discussing the efforts made by colonial authorities to combat smallpox and typhus through a variety of medical, administrative, and ritual practices. These practices were shaped by what Few considers a humanitarian ideology that was nevertheless not free from a significant authoritarian and coercive component. Their efforts led to the introduction of smallpox inoculation in Guatemala in 1780, a task whose success can be attributed in large part to the work of the medical physician José Flores. In chapters 2, 4, and 5, Few carefully reconstructs the rural and urban contexts in which colonial medicine was practiced, underlining the importance of the Spanish Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition to the region. This expedition took advantage of the smallpox vaccine developed in 1796 by English physician Edward Jenner and became the first mass-scale vaccination project in history. The aforementioned Guatemalan physician José Flores, a striking example of the importance of the recirculation of knowledge in the Spanish Empire, was among those asked to assist in designing the campaign. Few analyzes the different strategies of inoculation that had taken place before the arrival of the expedition and the reactions of Maya communities to these inoculation and vaccination campaigns. She then turns her attention to the efforts to obtain cowpox fluid for vaccination, the vaccination campaigns of the early nineteenth century, and the “unprecedented wave of experiments with human smallpox, cowpox, and other pustular diseases conducted on humans and animals alike” (p. 166). Few diverts the reader’s attention from the book’s main focus on epidemiology in chapter 3, which is devoted to the practice of performing postmortem cesareans on pregnant women for the purpose of fetal baptism. Few argues that such a practice, common in Guatemala and in other parts of colonial Spanish America at the time, illustrates the importance of the intersection of medicine and religion in eighteenth-century Guatemala. While the information it contains is undoubtedly relevant to understanding the broader context of colonial epidemiological practices and how they were shaped by religious considerations, the transition between this chapter and those that precede and follow could perhaps have been better articulated. In sum, Few’s book is an excellent study that makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the practice of medicine in the Spanish Empire that will be especially valuable to those who are interested in the uneasy relationship between the various medical cultures present in colonial Guatemala in the eighteenth century and the circulation—and recirculation—of knowledge in the broader Atlantic world. [End Page 723] José Ramón Jouve Martín McGill University Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

Centering Animals in Latin American History

Centering Animals in Latin American History

“Strange Lands and Different Peoples”: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala

“Strange Lands and Different Peoples”: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala