Colonial Latin America Research Articles

Entangled Sainthood: Imperial Canonisations and the Invention of Saints in Colonial Latin America

This article examines the impact of canonisation trials on the promotion of new saints across the Spanish Empire. Focusing on New Spain and Peru, it demonstrates that the physical arrival of copies and summaries of a canonisation trial or hagiographies of a saintly candidate supported by the Spanish crown in Colonial America served as a catalyst for revitalising pre-existing devotions and even inspiring the creation of new ones. By examining the start of the canonisations of Fray Sebastián de Aparicio in Puebla (Mexico) and Toribio of Mogrovejo in Lima (Peru), the work provides an introduction to an often neglected phenomenon: the entanglement between religious, political and cultural forces in the formation of Latin American sainthood, mainly in four ways: causality, opposition, dialecticism and affiliation. *

Center and Periphery in the Early Modern Spanish Empire: An Art-Historical Perspective on Colonial Latin America

ABSTRACT Art history’s center-periphery paradigm holds metropolitan centers as the originators of artistic models that the periphery copies. Accordingly, European artworks were the primary models for colonial Latin America’s artists who dutifully copied them. Scholarship that accounts for complex artistic negotiations characteristic of colonial societies complicates the long-held view of colonial Latin America as a replicative artistic periphery to Europe. It recognizes mutually constitutive relationships between different groups and artistic practices in the Spanish imperial order. This article highlights select examples of cross-cultural artistic interactions in colonial Mexico and argues that they often operated outside the European/Renaissance preoccupation with artistic originality/innovation as it is characterized in the artist biography genre of early modern Europe. Significantly, Christian global designs were the justification for Spanish power in the Americas, and colonial religious art has often been used to measure the success of that order. Accounting for the strategic copresence of European and Indigenous cosmologies and aesthetics in colonial visual culture is crucial to developing a more rounded and critical understanding of the Christian colonial order in Latin America. It also offers one alternative to the binary and largely unidirectional center-periphery model by highlighting the multidirectional flow of ideas, beliefs, and forms.

“Spanish” Casta Paintings in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Casta painting, the distinctive Hispanic genre that depicts biracial families, has been well studied by scholars for what it reveals about colonial Latin America. We study its reception in nineteenth-century Britain, which is where some of the earliest known examples of these paintings first appear in the historical record. As we show, they were consistently ascribed to early modern Spanish artists such as Velázquez. Taking seriously such misattributions reveals what nineteenth-century Britons understood by Spanish art and helps recover the period eye that made them plausible. Misattributions are not mere mistakes to be corrected but important subjects in their own right.

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.

Review: Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America, edited by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt

Review: <i>Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America</i>, edited by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt

Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt (review)

Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt (review)

Jaque Hidalgo, Javiera, and Miguel Valerio, eds. Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices

Jaque Hidalgo, Javiera, and Miguel Valerio, eds. Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices

Imagining Indigenous Consent and Indigenous Right to Resist in Colonial Latin America

This text examines Portuguese and Spanish documentation to show that Iberians invoked a variety of ways by which the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas could consent to their presence and domination. According to these sources, indigenous consent could be explicit or implicit, and it could be free or coerced, with each one of these situations giving rise to a distinct assessment of indigenous right to resist. By observing developments both in the colonies and in Europe, and by surveying both legal doctrine and practice, this article asks: how did Iberians structure and use consent, and what could it do for them? Why and how did they insist on consent when there was little to no possibility to refuse? This article is part of the special theme section on Consenting to Early Modern Empires, guest-edited by Sonia Tycko.

Remedios for Relationships: Social Precarity and Amatory Therapeutics in the Early Circum-Caribbean

This study argues that practices sometimes referred to as “love magic” operated instead as relational therapeutics in colonial Latin America. Focusing on women's roles in Spanish Caribbean port cities from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth century, I analyze a range of relationship remedios (or cures) ranging from divination and prayers to spells and potions by interrogating early modern Spanish Inquisition records from Mexico and Cartagena de Indias. Far from simple reflections of religious deviance, these trials show women searching within their relational networks for practical remedies to cure structural and personal problems in their sexual partnerships. Some remedies were clearly offered on a basis more transactional than therapeutic, a reflection of the inequality, violence, and trauma of life in the colonial Caribbean. People in the region drew on a range of amatory therapeutics to relieve emotional pain, soothe everyday tensions over power, and cope with economic precarity.

Race, Sex, and Segregation in Colonial Latin America by Olimpia Rosenthal (review)

Race, Sex, and Segregation in Colonial Latin America by Olimpia Rosenthal (review)

Savannah Esquivel. Review of "Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America" by Rosario I. Granados.

Savannah Esquivel. Review of "Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America" by Rosario I. Granados.

:Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World

:<i>Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World</i>

:Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices

:<i>Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices</i>

A History of Colonial Latin America from First Encounters to Independence by Susan Elizabeth Ramírez (review)

A History of Colonial Latin America from First Encounters to Independence by Susan Elizabeth Ramírez (review)

“Redesigning the Past”: Interview with Marcelo D’Salete

ABSTRACT In this interview, Miguel Valerio (a scholar of Afrodiasporic culture in colonial Latin America and early modern Iberia) engages in a conversation with Marcelo D’Salete, a well-known graphic novelist whose works center on the experiences of Black people in Brazil. The range of topics they discuss include Palmares, the seventeenth-century maroon community that is at the center of D’Salete’s Angola Janga (2017); the history, future, and present of Black struggles in Brazil; the ability of comics and other art forms to re-desenhar (meaning both “redraw” and “redesign”) the past; Afro-pessimism and the central role of slavery in the formation of modernity; and the importance of Black joy.

Review: Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America, edited by Rosario I. Granados

Review: <i>Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America</i>, edited by Rosario I. Granados

Hidalgo, Javiera Jaque and Miguel A. Valerio, eds. Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices

Hidalgo, Javiera Jaque and Miguel A. Valerio, eds. Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices

Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices

Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices

At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America

At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America

Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World, written by Stuart McManusThe Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe, written by Giuseppe Marcocci

Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World, written by Stuart McManusThe Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe, written by Giuseppe Marcocci