Colonial Latin America Research Articles

Quality Time

Editorial| December 18 2020 Quality Time Emily A. Engel Emily A. Engel Emily A. Engel is an independent scholar based in Southern California who has published on visual culture in early modern South America. She is the author of Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections (University of Texas Press, 2020). She edited A Companion to Early Modern Lima (Brill, 2019) and coedited Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches (Getty Publications, 2015). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2020) 2 (4): 4–13. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2020.2.4.4 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Emily A. Engel; Quality Time. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 18 December 2020; 2 (4): 4–13. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2020.2.4.4 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search Sometimes time moves like that, not straight but sideways, backward even, and like the owls, in silence, in broad and looping arcs.—Ben Ehrenreich1 The quality of time in Latin American and Latinx visual cultural expression became an ongoing fascination of mine as I researched and analyzed the history of South American political portraiture.2 When we consider artworks from their negotiated perspectives in time, the idea of the art object as whole, static, complete, and finished becomes fragmented. The renowned art historian of colonial Latin America George Kubler published The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (Yale University Press, 1962) as a temporal assessment of cultural production observed through the lens of continuity and rupture. My initial thoughts on the subject of time as related to the art of historical Latin America were originally inspired by my rereading of Kubler’s work—in particular, The Shape of... You do not currently have access to this content.

Evidences, Methodologies, Analysis, and the Joy of Historical Research: An Interview with Noble David Cook

Noble David Cook is a leading historian of the demographic and social history of the Andes and the Atlantic World. In this interview, he discusses the origins of his interest in the histories of Peru, the Andes, and the Iberian Atlantic; the methodological approaches that influenced his work; how he sees the evolution, present and future of the fields of demographic history and Colonial Latin America; the role of the archive in his career; his vital and intellectual links with the city of Sevilla; his collaborations with his wife Alexandra Parma Cook; his long history of engagement with Peruvian scholars; and his perspectives on the current COVID-19 crisis.

Unsettling the boundaries of Latin America: Rapa Nui and the refusal of Chilean settler colonialism

ABSTRACT Latin America is popularly imagined territorialized by continental Central and South America, extending to the Caribbean Islands; however, from the vantage of the Chilean government, Latin America expands thousands of miles into the Pacific Ocean within an area it legalizes as ‘the Chilean Sea’ (El Mar Chileno) given its control of ‘Easter Island’ (Isla de Pascua). Since 1888, despite persistent resistance by the Indigenous Polynesian Rapa Nui people, Chile has imposed colonial rule on the island through a variety of administrative strategies. This paper illuminates how state construction of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) around Rapa Nui can be understood as a biopolitical strategy of environmentality that strengthens Chilean settler colonialism in Rapa Nui. While settler colonialism has been rightly analyzed in terms of control of land, herein the ‘transit of Empire’ from Indigenous loci of enunciation appears to also articulate through the ocean. Despite the MPA, forces of Rapa Nui biopower mobilizing new Indigenous institutions and practices of self-determination are shown resilient in El Mar Chileno; the boundaries of settler colonial Latin America are unsettled.

R. Douglas Cope (1955–2019)

R. Douglas Cope, associate professor of history, passed away at Rhode Island Hospital on October 6, 2019, with his sisters at his side. He was 64 years old.Doug, as all knew him, was born on August 24, 1955, in Michigan. He received his BA in history from Oakland University (in Michigan) and his MA (in 1981) and PhD (in 1987) in Latin American history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he worked under the supervision of Steve Stern, Florencia Mallon, and Thomas Skidmore. Doug's graduate mentors and colleagues recall his brilliance and his almost impossible humility, a rare combination in the ego-driven world of academia. These qualities led Doug to guard his work zealously; his graduate mentors recall having to strategize as to how to get him to relinquish his chapter drafts in order that they might be read and evaluated.Ultimately, that writing took impressive form in Doug's book, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), which received an honorable mention for the 1995 Herbert E. Bolton Prize for the best book in Latin American history. The Limits of Racial Domination represents a pioneering contribution to scholarship on race and class relations in colonial Latin America. In contrast to previous work, which had stressed the hegemony of Spanish racial systems privileging whiteness, Doug captured, through painstaking archival research, the strategic and often-counterhegemonic negotiation of such categories by subaltern colonial subjects. This interest in the political, social, and cultural lives of nonelite actors carried over to Doug's new book project on the informal economy of eighteenth-century Mexico City, which was, at the time of his death, nearly complete. His research on this topic also produced several publications on petty commerce and notions of the public good in late colonial Mexico.After graduating from Wisconsin, Doug held teaching positions at the University of Oregon and the University of Miami before arriving to Brown University in 1988, where he joined his graduate mentor, Thomas Skidmore, on the History Department's faculty. At Brown, Doug oversaw the building of a Latin American studies program, both within and beyond the History Department, to which he dedicated significant energy over the course of his career. He served a five-year term as book review editor for the Hispanic American Historical Review from 1997 to 2002. He was also known as a beloved undergraduate teacher, whose courses on colonial Latin America, Mexico, the Mexican Revolution, the Atlantic world, Central America, indigenous history, ethnic and racial formations, and, most recently, pirates inspired a devoted—indeed, we might say zealous—following. Doug was an effortless storyteller who peppered lectures with unforgettable details that his former students can still conjure up at over a decade's remove. For this record of dedicated service to undergraduate teaching, Doug received the William G. McLoughlin Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Social Sciences in 1994. Doug also played a key role in the life of the History Department's graduate program and trained several generations of PhD students in colonial Latin American history.Doug was a thoughtful listener with a gentle but playful sense of humor. He loved baseball and often surprised with his au courant references to popular culture. He was also a devoted uncle to his nieces and nephews and a generous colleague to many at Brown and beyond. Doug is survived by his three loving sisters—Melissa Zantello, Marge Fagan, and Marikay Cope—along with his brothers-in-law and many nieces and nephews.Donations may be made to the R. Douglas Cope Memorial Undergraduate Fund, established by the Brown History Department in honor of Doug's commitment to addressing past and present class inequities. The award will recognize outstanding low-income and first-generation history concentrators. Checks should be made payable to the Brown University History Department (memo line: Cope Prize) and may be sent to Brown University, Department of History, c/o Cherrie Guerzon, Box N, 79 Brown Street, Providence, RI 02912.

Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531–1706

Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531–1706

Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668

This expansive history of the relationship between early modern globalization and Iberian empire began life as a translation and expansion of the author's 2004 study, Marte contra Minerva: El precio del imperio español, c. 1450–1600. Between then and now, it has blossomed into a new synthesis of the political economy of the Iberian world during its centuries of rapid expansion, geopolitical vigor, and eventual crisis that breaks out of traditional national and regional boundaries to place the histories of Spain, Portugal, and Europe in global context. Published in an exciting new series edited by two notable European scholars based in East Asia (Manuel Pérez García and Lúcio de Sousa), the book aims to take an approach to European history that is simultaneously internalist and externalist and to interrogate the relationship between war and society in the nascent Iberian world system. In so doing, the book seeks to underline the economic and social dynamism of the Iberian world, even in the face of measurable relative decline in the seventeenth century. Entirely absent are laments about unproductive family networks and dowdy ecclesiastical institutions that would be easily overtaken by efficient northern European competitors. Instead, the “paradoxical” conclusion arises that “it is obvious that the final effect of these (supposedly) inefficient institutions (inefficient, i.e. from the perspective of the new institutional economics) could very well be economic growth of a notable scale within the parameters of pre-industrial societies. . . . And this may be true not only for territories in Europe but also for the colonies” (p. xxv). While American silver encouraged credit in specie in Spain that allowed the nobility to mobilize for war in the sixteenth century, this fell short of the financial revolution that happened in Britain and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century (p. 187).Arranged chronologically and rich in maps and charts, the book continually draws links between economics, politics, and law. Rather than seeing state building and imperialism as discrete processes, the book explores the centralizing and unifying impact of royal courts and the continuities in local and indigenous laws and traditions in Iberia's monarchical corporate and composite states that crisscrossed the early modern world. For the author, such global state building was made possible by a pact between elites and central power within the context of war. This was in turn bolstered by arrangements of various sorts with other states both within and outside Europe, as the case of Hormuz demonstrates, which was given to the Portuguese by agreement with Safawid Persia to counter the Ottomans. Digging down through the layers of negotiated relationships, the book collapses the separation between public and private as well as secular and religious while frequently returning to the importance of family and friendships. While this multilayer system was dynamic, there were also continuities between reconquista and conquista and between Iberian state finances and Islamic patterns of taxation in this age of “state capitalism” (p. 90). Furthermore, the Iberian world system itself was far from sealed off from the rest of Europe and the world, with northern European cities benefiting directly and indirectly from Iberian expansion.While following in the footsteps of Charles Ralph Boxer, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Tamar Herzog, this book is unusual for a number of reasons. The range of historiography it engages is vast. It is hard to name a book that brings together so neatly such divergent traditions as the New Conquest History, new institutional economics, environmental history, and polycentric Iberian imperial history. In the case of the last of these, the author admits that Iberia's world empires were indeed “polycentric” (or, as he puts it, “multinuclear” or “nodal”), while noting that the Iberian empire was not particularly exceptional in this respect (p. 345). He does not, however, expand too much on which other examples he has in mind. Unusual among works of political economy, the book also interacts seriously with the historical work of notable twentieth-century economists, including John Maynard Keynes and the Nobel Prize–winning economist Douglass North. This said, from the perspective of those more rooted in the historiography of colonial Latin America, there are some puzzling remarks, such as when he seemingly rejects the idea that the indigenous population of the Americas might have also been consumers of goods imported from Europe (p. 293). Given the focus on economics, it is also odd that so little space is devoted to the history of Iberian slavery, which recent work has shown was hardly limited to the Atlantic world.Overall, however, the book provides an excellent graduate-level survey. While there is occasional repetition, as is unavoidable in a book of this length and scope, each chapter offers numerous important insights on a part of the Iberian world. Graduate students and scholars rewriting their lecture courses will profit from perusing this ambitious volume.

Caroline A. Williams (1962–2019)

Caroline Williams had a rare combination of intellectual ability and personal warmth. She was a gifted historian of colonial Latin America and the Atlantic world, with three acclaimed books and sev...

The dungeons of the Lima Inquisition: corruption, survival, and secret codes in colonial Peru

The history of corruption in colonial Latin America has recently received scholarly attention. According to Alfonso Quiroz, the presence of corruption involves a variety of transgressions such as f...

Second Scholasticism and Black Slavery1 (Continuation and End)

In order to systematically explore the normative treatment of black slavery by Second Scholastic thinkers, who usually place the problem within the broad discussion of moral conscience and, more narrowly, the nature and justice of trade and contracts, I propose two stations of research that may be helpful for future studies, especially concerning the study of Scholastic ideas in colonial Latin America. Beginning with the analysis of just titles for slavery and slavery trade proposed by Luis de Molina S.J. (1535–1600), I show how his accounts were critically reviewed by Diego de Avendaño S.J. (1594–1688), revealing basic features of Second Scholasticism’s normative thinking in Europe and the Americas. The normative knowledge provided by these two Scholastic intellectuals would be profoundly tested during the last decades of the 17th century, especially by authors who sharpened the systemic analysis and a rigorist moral assessment of every title of slavery and slaveholding, as well as the requirements of an ethics of restitution.

Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America

Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America

Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America: Synoptic Methods and Practices

Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America: Synoptic Methods and Practices

Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain by Zeb Tortorici

Reviewed by: Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain by Zeb Tortorici Evan C. Rothera Tortorici, Zeb. Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Zeb Tortorici, an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University, is an accomplished scholar of sexuality in colonial Latin America. Sins against Nature analyzes sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation in colonial New Spain. The book covers the period from 1535—the establishment of the viceroyalty of New Spain—to 1821—the culmination of the Mexican wars for independence against Spain. Tortorici bases his findings on 327 documents from the criminal courts and the Inquisition courts that he found in archives throughout the Americas. Some of the documents are quite extensive, while others are barely fragments. Ultimately, he "explores how bodies and their desires are textually recorded and archived (through the collaboration of witnesses, confessants, scribes, colonial bureaucrats, and archivists), and thus survive into our own day" (18). [End Page 167] Tortorici considers viscerality by opening with a case that featured a man having sex with a corpse. He argues that viscerality has "untapped potential for archival studies of early modern sexuality (and beyond)" (31) because it "plunges us deep into the guts of the colonial archive, and it does not let go" (45). Here readers can see two intertwined objectives: Tortorici is clearly interested in what the sins against nature tell us about the contours of life in colonial Latin America, but also about archives and archival practices. From the general discussion of viscerality, he moves to an analysis of sodomy. He first adopts a microhistorical approach and scrutinizes a 1604 case from Valladolid, Michoacán, in which six Purépecha men were tried, and four were executed, for sodomy. Among other points, and in contrast to many scholars, Tortorici argues that judges made no distinction between the active and passive partners in sodomy cases. Courts often sentenced the accused to be burned at the stake or garroted and then burned. The idea being that burning the body destroyed any trace of the act. However, as he notes, "the colonial archive documents, in explicit detail, and makes visible (and eligible) the delineations and silhouettes of nefarious desire, thereby committing them to historical memory" (81), an ironic result indeed. The following chapter, in contrast to the microhistorical approach in the previous one, takes a broader scope and analyzes 129 archival references to sodomy. Sodomy did not always elicit horror and Tortorici wants scholars to move beyond polarized categories of tolerance and repression. Just as evidence of sodomy frequently depended on people's perceptions of human bodies, animal bodies also "became legal forms of evidence" (126) in bestiality cases. Tortorici examines 144 archival references to bestiality and, unlike some scholars, does not see bestiality as marginal to the historical past. Rather, he contends that it was central to the functioning of colonialism in New Spain. Bestiality cases, he asserts, "provide historians with a surprising amount of information about the colonial past—everything from rural mores and environmental change to legal traditions" (134). Interestingly, the cases reveal that, as time passed, bestiality came to be seen as an increasingly illicit act, but the punishments grew less severe. Bestiality cases, like sodomy cases, featured bodies—in this case, animal rather than human—being burned to deaden the memory of the act. However, in both types of cases, the documents in the archives preserved the memories of the nefarious sins. The last two chapters return the discussion to humans. Chapter five examines forty-one Inquisition cases about priests who solicited sex from male and [End Page 168] female parishioners. These cases composed an "archives of neglect—that is, a repository of historical records (created and maintained by the Catholic Church and, more specifically, by the Holy Office of the Mexican Inquisition) that reveal the imbalance of power between priests and their denouncers" (165). The Catholic Church usually protected priests who were fluent in native languages, or gave them light punishments, and thus valued priests more than individual parishioners. The final chapter considers pollution (masturbation) and eroticized religiosity. Tortorici utilizes a small handful of cases...

Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States by Laura Limonic

Reviewed by: Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States by Laura Limonic Amalia Ran (bio) Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States. By Laura Limonic. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019. viii + 256 pp. Recent scholarship on immigration stresses the various, often contradictory, ways in which processes of social integration, acculturation, [End Page 466] linguistic barriers and economic challenges shape individual and collective identities. The history of Jewish immigration to the Americas is well documented, beginning with sporadic and unorganized settlements of individual Jews in colonial Latin America following the Spanish Inquisition. During the modern era, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Sephardic Jews from the declining Ottoman Empire arrived in growing waves of immigration due to socioeconomic and political unrest, as well as antisemitic persecutions in the Old World. Jewish immigrants were drawn to the United States by the principle of religious freedom inscribed in the US Constitution and by the hope of finding a tolerant society. From the 1960s onwards, new waves of Jewish immigration from the Southern Cone and Central America were drawn toward the northern neighbor on American shores. This historical context is at the core of Laura Limonic's research. Kugel and Frijoles: Latino Jews in the United States explores the different ways in which Jewish immigrants from Latin America (mostly from Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico) navigate the different ethnic and racial landscapes upon arriving in the US, where 39.5% of world Jewry currently resides. The book focuses on the processes of group construction within US society and the formation of a panethnic identity as Latino Jews. According to the author, this is an interesting case study, since Jewish immigrants from Latin America are not clearly identified in the US racial and ethnic classification system and instead are commonly viewed as white; i.e. as privileged newcomers who quickly acquire the status of insiders, unlike non-Jewish Latino immigrants. Limonic studies the in-between status of this group of immigrants: Although primarily classified as Jewish (i.e. white), in certain situations national identities overlap ethnic or religious identities as they correlate to fellow immigrants from their home countries. Moreover, a new panethnic identity emerges, as stated by the interviewees, as Latinos in the US, yet this social construct of Latin American identity is not embraced without conflict or doubt. Class, family status, prior social capital, and level of education are among the factors that determine their successful integration into the US and their affiliation with different groups. The book opens by reviewing the history of Jewish immigration to Latin America and the formation of ethnoreligious identity as a minority group within the wider Catholic society in Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela. The following chapter shifts to focus on the formation of the Jewish community in the United States as a "majority minority," a privileged group accepted by the mainstream despite its relatively small size in comparison to other racial and ethnic migratory groups (21). The author then shifts to examine the difficulties associated with defining a [End Page 467] Latino panethnic identity in the US as a post-migratory construct, which constitutes a secondary or tertiary identity for Latin American Jews. The analysis of the various circles of identification in which Latin American Jews affiliate with fellow Jews, Latinos or compatriots highlights the fluidity and ambiguity of such ethnic membership in the United States. Furthermore, as indicated in Chapter six, various institutional, informal, social and religious networks provide Latino Jews support and cater to different individual and collective needs. Institutions such as the Jewish Latin Center in New York or the various synagogues, Jewish schools and community centers in Aventura, Florida, emphasize the relevance of geographical proximity and of an identified tangible place to express these affiliations. This sociological research is based upon eighty-five in-depth interviews with Jewish immigrants from Latin America who settled in Southern Florida, New York and the Northeast, and California. It is based also on participant observations at Latino Jewish organizations and social events, conducted from 2010 to 2016, combined with quantitative data from the Pew Research Center's study on American Jews. By employing combined methodology, Limonic arrives at the following conclusions: Navigating...

Words & Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America

Words & Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America

Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima by Nancy E. Van Deusen

Reviewed by: Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima by Nancy E. Van Deusen Evan C. Rothera Van Deusen, Nancy E. Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Nancy E. van Deusen, currently a professor of history at Queen's University, has published extensively on the history of colonial Latin America. In particular, her The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús (2004) offered an accessible translation of the spiritual diary of the Afro-Peruvian donada Ursula de Jesús and extensive discussion of her world. In Embodying the Sacred, van Deusen analyzes women's spirituality and early modern Iberian Catholicism by examining "the variety and complexity of the individual and collective spiritual pathways taken by renowned and lesser-known women religious figures" in seventeenth-century Lima (1–2). Some of the women in this book have been written about at great length. Nevertheless, she offers many innovative ideas about both well-known and more obscure women. The trenchant analysis in this volume will fascinate readers and will stimulate additional study of the subject matter. Part I—"Material and Immaterial Embodiment"—begins with Isabel Flores de Oliva, or Santa Rosa de Lima. Rosa was "central to the education of a select group of protégées living in the viceregal capital" (25). The women around Rosa learned through imitatio morum—learning from and imitating a wise elder's behavior. Then, during diocesan and beatification hearings, they "rendered the sensorial experiences they had had with their beloved spiritual mother into visible narratives" (45). Early modern readers had a broad understanding of the nature of texts. In addition to creating narratives about Rosa, women also read both the biographies of pious women and the bodies of women in an altered state of consciousness called arrobamiento, or communicating with divine beings. Interestingly, "because mystical transport fell outside the range of conventional behavior," witnesses had to develop a new vocabulary to describe these experiences (61). The final chapter in Part I focused on Ángela de Carranza, who encouraged people to "find meaning in her body and thus own parts of it, while also objectifying, fetishizing, and fragmenting it" (73). People venerated bodily fragments of deceased saints, but Carranza, a living being, made herself into a reliquary. She distributed her nail clippings to grateful people. She bathed publicly and people collected her [End Page 368] bath water. People even fought over her urine and feces. Eventually the Inquisition became involved. After a six-year trial, they condemned her in a 1694 auto-da-fé to silence and enclosure for four years. Part II—"The Relational Self"—begins with a chapter that utilizes a prosopographical approach to analyze hundreds of donadas. A donada had either been donated by someone or donated herself to a monastery in order to engage in service to God and the community. van Deusen offers a nuanced depiction of donadas. Some slave women refused to become donadas, even if doing so meant gaining their freedom. Other women, both free and enslaved, cherished the thought of suffering to gain eternal glory. "These supposedly subjugated women," van Deusen asserts, "did not simply accept the world imposed on them, but neither did they always resist" (115). In the following chapter, van Deusen explores how María Jacinta Montoya, the widow of Nicolás de Ayllón, "understood quite well the politics of sanctity in colonial Lima" (120). She pursued many different goals, most notably promoting her husband's candidacy for sainthood. In addition to corresponding with people throughout Europe and the Americas in pursuit of her goal, María Jacinta portrayed herself as a Mary Magdalene figure saved from her sinful ways by her husband's goodness. Her bid to make Nicolás a saint ultimately failed. She denounced herself to the Inquisition, who maligned her character and exposed her scheming. However, after her death, some came to see her as a visionary blessed by God. The final chapter offers another fascinating case study focused on Josefa Portocarrero Laso de la Vega's epic struggle to choose a religious vocation. The daughter of Viceroy Melchor...

Second Scholasticism and Black Slavery

In order to systematically explore the normative treatment of Black slavery by Second Scholastic thinkers, usually placing the problem within the broad discussion of moral conscience and, more narrowly, the nature and justice of trade and contracts, I propose two stations of research that may be helpful for future studies, especially in what concerns the study of Scholastic ideas in colonial Latin America. Beginning with the analysisof just titles for slavery and slavery trade proposed by Luis de Molina S.J. (1535–1600), I show how his accounts were critically reviewed by Diego de Avendaño S.J. (1594–1688), revealing basic features of Second Scholastic normative thinking in Europe and the Americas. Normative knowledge provided by these two Scholastic intellectuals wouldbe deeply tested throughout the last decades of the 17th century, especially by authors who sharpened the systemic analysis and a rigorist moral assessment of every title of slavery and slaveholding, as well as the requirements of an ethics of restitution.

Objects and Agency: Science and Technology Studies, Latin American Studies, and Global Histories of Knowledge in the Early Modern World

Drawing from a combination of the author’s own research on Portugal’s empire and recent work across a range of disciplines, this essay discusses the growing dialogue between Latin American studies and science and technology studies (STS). It discusses key similarities and differences in the questions, methods, and theoretical frameworks which have guided research in both areas. It focuses particular attention on the divergent ways in which the two interdisciplinary arenas of scholarship have handled objects and materiality. The author argues that despite important differences in orientation, a focus on objects and materiality informed by STS perspectives can broaden the archive available to scholars of colonial Latin America, challenge and extend critical insights of colonial research, and call into question the adequacy of conventional Latin American and Atlantic spatial frameworks.

Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America. Edited by Zeb Tortoricci (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2016) 256 pp. $70.00 cloth $29.95 paper

<i>Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America</i>. Edited by Zeb Tortoricci (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2016) 256 pp. $70.00 cloth $29.95 paper

Paradise and Perdition: Jesuit Visions of Santiago, Chile, before and after the Earthquake of 1647

Abstract This study inserts Santiago, Chile, into contemporary discussions of colonial Latin America by reading two Jesuit documents—a map and a letter—created prior to and following the devastating earthquake of 1647, respectively. Alonso de Ovalle's Prospectiva y planta de la ciudad de Santiago (1646) presents an urban paradise in accordance with Spanish and Catholic ideals, a New World Jerusalem. This depiction is juxtaposed with a letter by Juan González Chaparro that describes postearthquake Santiago as “ruined at the powerful hand of the Almighty.” Focusing on the 1647 earthquake's religious dimensions and perceived causes, the study concludes that the religious authorities of Santiago stand out in the colonial Spanish Americas for assigning fault for such a disaster to their city's elites rather than to its underclasses.

Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas

Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas