Colonial Latin American Research Articles

Documenting Feature Pools in Language Expansion Situations: Sibilants in Early Colonial Latin American Spanish

AbstractThis paper proposes a reconstruction of the demographic and linguistic composition of the Spanish settling contingent in the American colonies as one of several key factors determining the evolution of Spanish in the early colonial period (sixteenth century). It focuses on the evidence for contact among several sibilant systems, including seseo, i.e. the reduction of four medieval sibilants to /s/. In the standard narrative of the history of Latin American Spanish, this reduction is seen as the consequence of the demographic primacy of seseo in the early metropolitan colonial mix and the inherent phonological simplicity of the merger (Catalán 1958; Granda 1994; Parodi 1995; Hidalgo 2016). This study calls for a reassessment of several of these previous assumptions. The bulk of the data in this study come from a corpus of private letters by early colonial settlers from Spain, analysed quantitatively and contextualized on the basis of additional demographic and linguistic evidence. The sociolinguistic reconstruction that emerges from this data contradicts the canonical presentation of the internal and external ecology of early colonial Latin American Spanish, and calls for the incorporation of a variety of cognitive and sociodemographic triggers beyond the action of the metropolitan input.

Mal Olorand Colonial Latin American History: Smellscapes in Lima, Peru, 1535–1614

AbstractNoxious airs from trash discards, irrigation canals, marketplaces, hospitals, and plazas vitiated colonial Lima's environment. Using olfactory history, this article examines how residents reacted to their pungent environs. Early modern Iberians believed that foul smells were harmful. Fully understanding this relationship, municipal leaders subjugated the San Lázaro district by relocating its indigenous population and moving noxious trades and institutions to the area. I argue that the concentration of miasmas in San Lázaro represents an environmental conquest. San Lázaro's ethnically and socially diverse population lived with unhealthy airs that threatened their health. By contrast, central Lima enjoyed fresher airs in locations primarily occupied by Spanish vecinos (male, landowning citizens, who were allowed to participate in local politics) in and around the Plaza de Armas, the cathedral, the viceroy's palace, and the municipal hall. The protection of central Lima's airs reveals that environmental management corresponded to social status and political power.

Multiple–Layered Encoding as an Editorial and Pedagogical Strategy for Colonial Latin American Studies

Multiple–Layered Encoding as an Editorial and Pedagogical Strategy for Colonial Latin American Studies

Rewriting History: Colonial Latin American Women in Historical Fiction

Rewriting History: Colonial Latin American Women in Historical Fiction

Exploring the Impact of Captions on the Construction and Presentation of Colonial Latin American Cultural Identities

Spanish Colonialism in Latin America from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century constitutes a time period during which the interactions between numerous cultural groups, both indigenous and colonial, resulted in the creation of distinct regional, cultural, and individual identities and artistic practices. The proposed paper explores the role and importance of Spanish captions in paintings created in the colonial viceregal centers of New Spain (today Mexico) and Peru through a discussion of two maps from the Relaciones Geográficas (indigenous made maps), three colonial portraits, and two casta paintings (painted records of racial mixes). These paintings, spanning from the end of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, all feature written segments directly on their surface to enable the effective communication and portrayal of the chosen colonial subject to the viewer. Being created in such a diverse and unstable cultural climates each paintings’ capacity for success in communication and representation was ensured through the use of captions. Thus, the paper approaches the study of captions through a close consideration of the discussed captions’ messages, their intended perception, and main audience. My paper will discuss the instrumental role of the Spanish captions when visualizing and creating distinct colonial identities. The caption served as a means of literally spelling out the importance of the colonial settings, their distinct social systems and identities reinforcing their validity vis-à-vis the imposed Euro-Spanish ideal.

Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes

With the publication of Ananda Cohen Suarez’s book, Andean studies and colonial Latin American art history at last have an English-language treatment of mural painting in highland Peru, one of the most significant artistic genres of the colonial period. This book is guided less by one central claim or question than by an attempt to advance a general approach: Cohen Suarez urges us to contextualize murals within their architectonic settings and the historical moments of their production and reception. Seeing murals as “embedded” (an oft-repeated word) in social frames reveals overlapping registers in which murals could produce meaning for different audiences. Though focused on some of the most well-known and accessible cycles in churches on the route connecting Cuzco with Lake Titicaca, Cohen Suarez suggests her approach could be extended to any example in the broad territory, stretching into present-day Bolivia and Chile, in which mural painting has been was a central-colonial art form.While this methodological approach is not particularly novel—indeed, it characterizes a dominant art-historical paradigm—it represents a significant departure from earlier literature on this topic, which was primarily concerned with cataloguing, stylistic and temporal classification, and iconographic description. Moreover, these works, for which little direct written documentation exists, do not lend themselves to contextual history, and Cohen Suarez should be praised for the wide net she casts to resituate these works within the historical conditions of their making and viewing. Though libros de fábrica (records of church expenditures) constitute her main archival base, the author gains her chief traction through the recruitment of a kaleidoscopic array of sources including archaeological evidence, published sermons and plays, Spanish chronicles, conservation accounts, oral histories, and a large body of secondary historical literature.Four case studies follow an introductory survey of the mural tradition from the pre-conquest era through the colonial period, which touches on issues related to sources, labor, technique, and conservation history. The case studies span the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries and focus on six mural programs, introducing many others as comparanda. These chapters anchor mural programs within overlapping oral, visual, and performative registers of early seventeenth-century evangelization efforts, late seventeenth-century redecoration campaigns, eighteenth-century economic reforms, and struggles to reinstitute state and church control after the Tupac Amaru rebellion. Such colonial agendas are shown to be articulated through or unintentionally complicated by local conditions and indigenous ideologies, such that Inca adornment of sacred huacas, for example, becomes as critical to the legibility of “textile murals” as the Bourbon repartimiento de mercancías and highland cosmopolitanism, and the bodies of water in scenes of Christ’s baptism come to refer both to the river Jordan and to primordial Inca pacarinas. Cohen Suarez thus reveals how static artworks produce layers of dynamic and potentially contradictory meaning that proliferate and shift in changing social conditions. For some, the author’s provocative readings may occasionally tip to the speculative or the implausible: for instance, the proposal that a parrot (a common motif with engraved precedents) in Urco’s Baptism of Christ was meant to signify the Amazon, render St. John a chuncho, and underscore his unbaptized state vis-à-vis Christ.The reader would be well advised to focus a skeptical eye on issues of agency. When Cohen Suarez can pull a historical actor out of the quagmire of anonymity, she tends to ascribe to him—whether a priest, a bishop, or an artist—agency over decisions made about a mural program. She herself acknowledges, however, that commission dynamics and labor history are all but unknowable; there is thus a risk of over-assigning individual intention and responsibility into what were surely complex social negotiations. Moreover, the lack of quality (or entire absence of) reproductions often makes it impossible to follow the subtlety of the author’s visual arguments. Fortunately, the reader can seek out high-quality images that Cohen Suarez went to great lengths to make available online and in earlier publications. These matters aside, the field should be grateful to have this book, both for the scholarly inroads it makes into this corpus and for its unusually readable and well-encapsulated chapters, which make it a wonderful teaching resource.

Subaltern technologies and early modernity in the Atlantic World

Colonial Latin American and Atlantic-world scholarship that does not explicitly concern indigenous, black, and other subaltern individuals and groups continues to marginalize, if not completely ignore, them. This lingering, if often inadvertent, Eurocentrism endures, according to this essay, for several reasons, including a preoccupation with modernization, notions of ‘nature’ that make it easy to ignore ‘culture,’ and models of culture that presume fixed boundaries rather than permeability. This essay suggests that a focus on ‘technology’—capaciously defined to include phenomena such as hammocks and chocolate, as well as mining and storm management—is one way out of this predicament. Investigating the myriad technologies that dominated colonial Latin America reveals the centrality of subaltern actors throughout the region and the Atlantic world more broadly. It also affords a fruitful way to explore the relationships between material and symbolic culture in the context of an ‘entangled’ early modern world.

Diachronic Applications in Hispanic Linguistics ed. by Eva Núñez Méndez

Reviewed by: Diachronic Applications in Hispanic Linguistics ed. by Eva Núñez Méndez Armin Schwegler Núñez Méndez, Eva, ed. Diachronic Applications in Hispanic Linguistics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Pp. xiii, 353. ISBN 978-1-44389-052-6. The result of a conference panel organized for the Pacific Modern Language Association in 2013 in San Diego, California, Diachronic Applications in Hispanic Linguistics unites nine in-depth studies by established specialists in Hispanic linguistics: Robert Blake, Miriam Díaz Granado, Steven Dworkin, Patricia Giménez-Eguíbar, Sonia Kania, Cynthia Kauffeld, Eva Núñez-Méndez, Carlos E. Sánchez Lancis, Israel Sanz-Sánchez, Fernando Tejedo-Herrero. Each takes a decidedly diachronic approach, by and large favoring long-term historical analyses that span Old to Modern Spanish. The topics covered too are broad and include: 1) lexical survivals in Ibero-Romance; 2) lexical variation and change in early modern Spanish; 3) the confusion of b with v [End Page 700] in Spanish (which dates back to the roots of the Spanish language in the Peninsular territories); 4) the origins and footprints of Andalusian Spanish in the Americas; 5) seseo and yeísmo and its evolution; 6) Latin American Spanish verbal morphology (which, as the excellent contribution by Israel Sanz-Sánchez makes clear, is considerably more varied than is generally assumed) and how koineization has impacted it; 7) scribal evolution and continuity in Romance syntax in texts from the Early Middle Ages; and 8) long-term semantic shifts that have gradually transformed ser, estar, and haber in Spanish. To be sure, a majority of studies in Diachronic Applications in Hispanic Linguistics are couched in the philological tradition, championed most vigorously perhaps in the United States in decades past at UC Berkeley, where several of the contributors to this volume (the editor included) received their training. It bears mentioning, however, that the articles assembled in the book under review all excel at taking decidedly modern approaches, thereby making them a most informative and up-to-date read from beginning to end. At the same time, even a quick glance at the book reveals that, true to the philological tradition, the majority of the articles concentrate on the Iberian Peninsula to the detriment of Latin America and the Caribbean in particular. This collection of essays succeeds so admirably in part because it cohesively focuses on fascinating issues in the evolution of the Spanish language while also answering—convincingly so—knotty questions that this reviewer and his students have often debated in graduate seminars on the history of Romance languages: Why do certain lexical Latinisms survive in Iberia but not in other Romance territories? What social and other factors favored the incorporation (and, often, subsequent loss) of Arabic words in Spanish and Portuguese? How did the advent of printing impact the standardization of its lexicon and orthography? What was the true role of Andalusian Spanish in the eventual evolution of Latin American Spanish? Which social and demographic factors were most influential in the formation of colonial Latin American Spanish? And finally, to what extent did scribal practices really represent spoken medieval Spanish? Diachronic Applications in Hispanic Linguistics will benefit students of Hispanic Linguistics, as well as general readers and scholars with an interest in the field. To serve the first targeted audience (students), each chapter is usefully accompanied by suggestions for further reading as well as a list of topics for additional discussion. Linguistic jargon is fairly abundant at times, yet the chapters succeed in presenting the relevant information, including data, concepts, and theories in a clear, succinct, and easy-to-follow manner (individual glossaries at the end of each article help readers resolve potential difficulties with technical vocabulary). Each chapter culminates in a brief "Conclusion" that not only restates essential points but also guides newcomers to the field by elucidating why specialists currently prefer certain competing explanations or theories. In this regard, Israel Sanz-Sánchez's chapter "Diachronic perspective on Latin American Spanish Verbal morphology: reassessing the role of koineization" is particularly praiseworthy, as it offers a concise and unusually convincing explanation of how a multi-causational approach—one that highlights the primacy of local social networks...

Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns by Lisa Voigt

Reviewed by: Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns by Lisa Voigt Ricardo Padrón Lisa Voigt. Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns. U of Texas P, 2016. 225 Pp. IN THIS CAREFULLY RESEARCHED AND THOUGHTFULLY CRAFTED BOOK, Lisa Voigt makes a compelling case against José Antonio Maravall’s argument that civic festivals were among the key practices used by church and crown to direct the culture of the Hispanic world during the Baroque period. According to Maravall (and others), such festivals rehearsed the triumph of civilization over barbarism, Christianity over paganism, and Spain over its various ethnic and racial others, thereby serving to impress the masses with the majesty of the Crown or the truth of the Faith. Voigt overturns this argument by carefully examining a series of printed descriptions of religious and secular festivals held in the colonial Latin American mining towns of High Peru and Minas Gerais. According to her, celebrations of Corpus Christi, official entrances of secular and ecclesiastical officials, and other such festivals did not speak with a single voice, but with many. The people responsible for them as sponsors and participants of various kinds did not just hear the commanding voice of God or king and submit to it, but also found ways to express their own agendas and identities as criollos, Amerindians, and Africans. The book is divided into two parts of two chapters each, with a separate introduction and conclusion. Part 1 deals with criollo patriotism in festival descriptions, with chapter 1 focused on the festivals included in Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela’s Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí (1737), and chapter 2 on Simão Ferreira Machado’s Triunfo Eucharistico (1734) and the anonymous Aureo Throno Episcopal (1749). In each chapter, we see how these texts celebrate the identities of the criollo elites of mining boomtowns, often against metropolitan aspersions. Arzáns, for example, uses his accounts of Potosí festivals over the course of a century to defend creoles against metropolitan arguments that the inhabitants of the Americas were less sophisticated, intellectually and culturally, than their European counterparts. The Portuguese texts, meanwhile, portray the mining towns of Minas Gerais as centers of piety and devotion, thereby answering to the claim of metropolitan [End Page 235] discourse that their locations in the far reaches of the empire meant that they lacked the piety of Portugal. Part 2 is probably the more interesting of the two, insofar as it involves greater interpretative challenges. In chapter 3, Voigt returns to Potosí and Arzáns, but adds Diego Mexía de Ferangil’s El Dios Pan (early seventeenth century) to the mix; in chapter 4, she returns to Minas Gerais, Machado, and the Aureo Throno. In returning to these texts, Voigt’s goal is to examine how Amerindians in Peru and Africans in Minas Gerais appropriated civic festivals for their own ends. Baroque civic festivals putatively included Amerindian or African participants in order to enact the submission of subject populations to king and church, but Voigt demonstrates that subaltern groups were able to inhabit these roles in ways that converted them into celebrations of Amerindian or African identity. She does so by reading against the grain of the criollo narrative, fastening onto places where subaltern agendas peek out through the overt rhetorical program, using comparisons with relevant archival material and ample references to the secondary literature to tease them out. This reviewer was most interested in the discussion of mulattoes in Carijó costumes, which made them look like Tupinamba Indians and African kings at the same time, allowing their performance to mean different things for different publics. Like Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic, Voigt’s first book, Spectacular Wealth benefits from the author’s rare ability to move capably and easily between the Spanish and Portuguese speaking worlds. Brazil and Bolivia receive equal attention. As a result, we learn how the same practices of performance and inscription characterize the Iberian Baroque on both sides of the line of demarcation. We also observe fascinating parallels between Amerindian and African festival participation, something that would hardly be possible if the argument did not...

Women, Men, and the Legal Languages of Mining in the Colonial Andes

Abstract Histories of colonial Latin American mining have cemented the image of a scientifically backward society whose pursuit of easy wealth sacrificed the lives of indigenous and African miners in places like Potosí. By examining a mid-seventeenth-century mine dispute between an Andean woman and a Spanish man, this article suggests how legal archives can reveal indigenous women’s contributions to the history of colonial silver. It also provides an appendix with one hundred cases of indigenous, creole, and Spanish women miners, refiners, and managers in Alto Perú, 1559–1801, suggesting how women of different socioeconomic and technical backgrounds participated in the silver industry.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Art and Architecture in Mexico

This book is a timely contribution to the literature in English about Latin American art. It is the first extensive English-language survey of Mexican art since Joshua Taylor's translation of Justino Fernández's book Arte mexicano, de sus orígenes a nuestros días (1958), published as A Guide to Mexican Art (1969). The later compendium Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (1990), released in connection with the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition of the same title, covered select Mexican works from antiquity to the first half of the twentieth century and is now out of print.In contrast to these precedents, James Oles's book concentrates on the art of colonial and independent Mexico to the exclusion of ancient Mexican art. This decision fits within recent developments in the history of art that stress the specificity of each region and period of Latin American art. Oles extends this approach to illustrate the diversity of Mexican art within Mexico by covering artistic production not only in Mexico City but also in regional areas. Simultaneously, the book acknowledges the field's attention to globalization by analyzing Mexican art in relation to a multiplicity of international styles and tendencies.Art and Architecture in Mexico is well researched and effectively summarizes and elaborates on the relevant scholarship in the history of Mexican art. The author presents the material chronologically, illuminating his formal analysis of the artworks with references to pertinent social and political issues. This book is exceptionally strong in its coverage of modern art, especially for the period from 1960 through 2000, including sustained discussions of abstract, conceptual, and performance art as well as artists' collectives, which to this date are understudied. The breadth of the artistic material, the solid documentary foundation, and Oles's clear and engaging writing style make this volume an excellent resource for introducing undergraduates to the history of Mexican art.Because Oles recognizes that Mexican art developed within global networks, he proposes to turn from the “pervasive” theoretical framework of mestizaje that scholars have used to describe the integration of indigenous with Spanish artistic traditions to the more inclusive concept of hybridity (pp. 10–11). In his opinion, hybridity functions as a capacious term that includes not only Aztec and Spanish but also other European artists as well as slaves, merchants, artisans, travelers, and émigrés from various parts of the world (p. 11). While this reasoning is clear, in the rest of the book Oles seldom mentions hybridity explicitly, except in relation to the art of the sixteenth century. In this section, he asserts that cultural hybridity mirrors racial hybridity (p. 21). In the remainder of the book, the reader is left to infer hybridity from his explications of the artworks, which do not reference the original theoretical frame. For example, in a section on casta paintings, the discussion focuses on the phenomenon of racial mixing, with acknowledgment of some of the works' European pictorial sources but with no direct reference to hybridity. The relationship of both mestizaje and hybridity to race is complicated as Oles later identifies neocolonial architecture from the early twentieth century as a perfect expression of mestizaje (p. 236).In his famous essay “Indianism, Mestizaje, and Indigenismo as Classical, Medieval, and Modern Traditions in Latin America” (1966), George Kubler forcefully critiqued the application of the concept of mestizaje to art on the grounds that it was a “racialized expression.” To Kubler, race and art were incommensurable categories. In his book The Mestizo Mind (1999), historian Serge Gruzinski explains mestizaje as Spanish and indigenous mixtures but limits its use to the sixteenth century. Considering these understandings of mestizaje, Oles is justified in thinking the term too restrictive to describe Mexican art, but surprisingly, he expresses no reservations concerning hybridity.The concept of hybridity has been subject to volumes of critique since the mid-1980s, mostly in response to writings by Homi K. Bhabha later reprinted in the collection The Location of Culture (1994). In the celebrated essay “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America” (2003), the art historians Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn eloquently argued against the utility of hybridity as a descriptive term for colonial Latin American art because, like race, it failed to illuminate anything but surface phenomena, leaving invisible and essential aspects of artistic practices, such as labor, unexamined. Oles mentions this article in a bibliographical essay (p. 412) but fails to engage with it in the text. Addressing at least some of the previous critiques of both mestizaje and hybridity would have strengthened this book's theoretical frame. These omissions do not diminish the book's considerable didactic value. Rather, they raise the question of whether a theoretical gesture without expansion adds anything to a substantial survey text.

A Latin Americanist Looks at Early American Literature

A Latin Americanist Looks at Early American Literature Rolena Adorno (bio) In her letter inviting me to participate in this anniversary commemoration, Early American Literature editor Sandra Gustafson wrote: “I see this anniversary as an opportunity to reflect on the maturation of the area of literary studies covered by EAL and to build ties to neighboring fields.” Coming from the neighboring field of colonial Latin American literary studies, I was delighted to accept her invitation because, nearly forty years ago, I had answered a call for papers for an MLA convention panel on Native American studies. As I recall, the panel’s sponsor was the the MLA-affiliated Association for Studies in American Indian Literatures. In any case, my proposal was rejected on the basis that I had my “own” division, that is, “Latin American Literature before 1900,” under whose rubric Native American studies that focused on areas south of the Rio Grande could be entertained. (I was working at the time on the account of an extraordinary native Andean writer from Spanish colonial Peru, whose manuscript work remains part of my scholarly signature to this day.)1 Revealing the dilemma of inclusion versus exclusion that we debated in the 1970s, the Native Americanist panel’s topic was: “Is American Indian Literature a Separate and Distinct Literature of This Continent or Is It a Sub-Branch of American Literature, an Ethnic Sub-Branch, or Are There Two Bodies of Indian Literature, the Quick and the Dead?” (Program of the 1976 MLA 1023). Had my paper proposal been accepted, I would have answered that American Indian Literature was not a “separate and distinct literature of this [North American] continent” but that it could include not only Mexico, which sits on the North American continent, but also Central and South America, too. Yet a project in “my” field, the creation of the journal Latin American Indian Literatures, affirmed the tendency of that time, which was to keep separate the geographical and therefore cultural [End Page 41] areas of study of Native American cultures. In short, the exclusionary tactic was practiced in the hemispheric South as well as the North. Yet in the period that extends from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the objective was not to exclude from consideration but rather, for the first time, to identify, highlight, and make worthy of study areas of cultural production that had been ignored. These efforts to “create space” characterize scholarly initiatives for all Americanist literatures (Anglo-, African-, Asian-, Latin-, Latino-, and so forth) of the late 1960s and 1970s, when women’s and gender studies, ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies also emerged. Suzanne Bost has observed, with respect to her areas of scholarship in postmodern and feminist theories and Chicana/o studies: “After all, the intellectual formations and identities I study did not exist prior to 1848, maybe not even prior to 1968” (235).2 Today’s ongoing efforts to be both precise and inclusive are exemplified by the evolution of my principal division’s name from “Latin American Literature before 1900” to “Latin American Colonial Literature” to the current “Latin American Colonial Literatures,” to the proposed “Colonial and Pre-Columbian Latin American Literature.” The current mission statement of Early American Literature supports the same goals of precision and inclusiveness: Early American Literature, published three times a year, is the journal of the Society of Early Americanists and of the MLA’s Division on American Literature to 1800. Its province is American literature through the early national period (about 1830). Founded in 1965, EAL invites work treating Native American traditional expressions, colonial Ibero-American literature from North America, colonial American Francophone writings, Dutch colonial, and German American colonial literature as well as writings in English from British America and the US. While honoring the journal’s current inclusion of “colonial Ibero-American literature from North America,” I want to go back in time to highlight some of the studies in the nearly fifty years of EAL, from 1967 to the present, that track its engagement with the Ibero-American world. Several of those essays slip farther south than the North American continent (which, we must always remind ourselves, includes Mexico...

An Ecological View of Whole‐Class Discussions in a Second Language Literature Classroom: Teacher Reformulations as Affordances for Learning

This article analyzes whole‐class discussions between a teacher and her students in a Latin American Colonial literature course at the college level. The study is theoretical–exploratory in nature in that it (a) articulates theoretical assumptions inherent in an ecological perspective on second language learning and teaching and (b) attempts to operationalize the affordance construct (van Lier, 2000, 2004) in the context of a second language (L2) literature classroom. The study's findings underscore the importance of teacher reformulations in whole‐class discussions as well as students' engagement with and awareness of the unfolding talk. Furthermore, how the teacher dynamically interacts with one student and his/her contribution potentially affects other students' understanding of the ongoing discussion which, in turn, can influence their comprehension of the literary texts under analysis. Teacher reformulations during whole‐class discussions therefore can serve as affordances for learning. Theoretical implications of the affordance construct, in addition to implications for L2 language and literature teaching, are delineated.

The Last Acolhua: Alva Ixtlilxochitl and Elite Native Historiography in Early New Spain

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgementsI am very grateful to Susan Schroeder, Amber Brian, and Brad Benton for bringing our group of Ixtlilxochitl scholars together, and to David Tavarez for helping to launch our project. I have also benefited greatly from the expertise and patient guidance of Camilla Townsend, Kris Lane, and the editors of the Colonial Latin American Review. Finally, I thank Dana Velasco-Murillo and Kevin Terraciano for their generosity, support, and advice.Additional informationNotes on contributorsPeter B. VillellaPeter B. Villella is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His research centers on the legal, political and intellectual histories of native leaders in colonial Mexico, as well as their contributions to the development of Mexican national historiography.

As Historical Subjects: The African Diaspora in Colonial Latin American History

AbstractThis article celebrates and explores the current historiography on colonial Afro‐Latin Americans in the Spanish Americas to illuminate how scholars can continue to develop their methodological approaches to recuperating enslaved and free agency. Drawing on Michel‐Rolph Trouillot's distinction between historical actors and purposeful subjects, the essay suggests that even within slavery, men and women of African descent were able to contest slaveholding, develop their own standards within racial hierarchies, claim subject positions as Catholics, and lay claim to freedom. By asking questions regarding African‐descent defined objectives, scholars have begun to allow Africans and their descendants to articulate interior selves.

A Trail of Precious Goods: Colonial Latin American Commodity History

AbstractProducts such as cacao, tobacco, sugar, cochineal, emeralds, and silver were produced or extracted and, in many cases, originated in the region now called Latin America. They became global commodities under Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule during the early modern period, roughly 1500 to 1800, when they were traded to Europe and Asia. In many cases, goods that were originally limited to elites and defined as luxuries were transformed into products destined for mass consumption. African and indigenous slavery and other forms of unfree labor were crucial in the production of colonial commodities. Commodity historians approach these goods in different ways, some taking a world systems approach to discuss the development of capitalism while others focusing on physical and esthetic taste, patterns of consumption, and social relations and status. Some commodity writers focus on consumption patterns in Europe and Asia while others focus on the production and labor side of the equation. Recently, scholars have used a commodity chain approach that looks at all stages of the process of production, commodification, circulation, and consumption.

Crossing the Line in the Sand: Francis Drake Imitating Ferdinand Magellan in Juan de Miramontes's Armas antárticas

This article examines the third canto of Juan de Miramontes's colonial Latin American epic, Armas antárticas (1608-1609), in which Francis Drake narrates the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan to Elizabeth I of England. The study begins by analyzing how Armas antárticas portrays Magellan as an epic hero and defuses certain long-standing controversies surrounding him by appealing to classical epic models and judiciously drawing from historiographic texts. Despite the general effectiveness of this portrayal, however, Armas antárticas creates entirely new problems for the perception of Magellan by presenting him as a precursor of Drake. In fact, the text poetically and ironically suggests that Magellan transgressed the antimeridian of the Line of Tordesillas, and in doing so preceded Drake in his piratical activities in the Pacific. In this way Armas antárticas evinces unexpected parallels with ideas about piracy and international law expressed by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in Mare liberum (1609).

Contact, Mediation, and Myth in Early Latin American Literatures

Contact, Mediation, and Myth in Early Latin American Literatures Joanne van der Woude (bio) Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Rolena Adorno. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 148 pp. Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico. Mónica Díaz. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2010. 229 pp. On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru. Sabine MacCormack. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 320 pp. The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. Yanna Yannakakis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 290 pp. Michel de Certeau wrote: "By an art of being in-between, he draws unexpected results from his situation"—an intriguing expression that opens Yanna Yannakakis's book. In her work, the citation applies to Native intermediaries, but it seems just as pertinent to scholars and teachers who (seek to) work comparatively. They, too, must distance themselves from their monolingual training and expertise in order to tackle new fields in the hope of "unexpected," or even enlightening, "results." This is true not only for those who work across languages but also for anyone who cultivates [End Page 201] a transatlantic, transcultural, or transhistorical perspective on early America—and so, suddenly, nearly everyone can be called a comparativist, in some sense of the word. I make this point in order to argue for the importance of Latin American scholarship to North American studies. The flourishing field of Latin American literature and history should be taken into account not just out of a sense of duty but because it offers real methodological and theoretical advantages. For those who still wonder why they should care, this review begins by pointing out specific genres and themes that are shared across the colonial Americas, and that would benefit from comparative consideration in criticism as well as in the classroom. Teaching, to be honest, is still complicated: there are few, good, affordable editions and translations of Latin American sources that can be assigned to undergraduate classes and professors harbor an understandable reluctance to assign many texts in translation or are simply hesitant to change time-tested syllabi. Rather than add another voice to the extensive debate about whether early American culture is best taught transatlantically, hemispherically, or both—let alone try to convince or castigate anyone about the need to assign more diverse texts—this overview begins by delineating productive pairings of Spanish writings with more canonical (and therefore usually English) texts. The idea behind this arrangement, which is followed by brief summaries and reviews of the four listed books, is to spark interest instead of inducing guilt, stressing the relevance of Latin American texts to current perspectives on North American literature and history. Fictional dialogues are a popular genre across the American colonies. John Eliot's Indian Dialogues (1671) comes most immediately to mind, as well as its scholarly readings by Kristina Bross, David Murray, and Thomas Scanlan. Although this tract was purportedly written to aid future missionaries, Eliot uses the opportunity to stage wishful exchanges that speedily convert Native leaders while also assuaging the fears of "a colonial audience concerned about the outbreaks of violence with coastal Algonquians" (Bross 119). (For the sake of realism, this piece is perhaps best read alongside another less fictional Eliot tract, though its obvious fakery also, arguably, constitutes its charm.) Christoph Saur's A Dialogue between a Newcomer and a Settler in Pennsylvania (1751), translated from the German by Patrick Erben for Carla Mulford's Oxford anthology (735-44), is a promotional piece for the Middle Colonies, which contains a wealth of information [End Page 202] on colonial Pennsylvania as well as on eighteenth-century Europe. It includes a spirited defense of Pietism, alongside such endearingly honest questions as: "If it would happen to me as it has happened to many people in this country [Germany], and I could not pay everything in cash and had to go into debt, would that be a big issue?" (Mulford 739). Helpful additions to this pair might be Manuel da Nóbrega's Dialogue for the Conversion of the Indians (Castillo and Schweitzer 1556-57) and the dialogue written by Fray Bernardino de...

Little Stories of Christmas and the Big Story of God’s Love

Little Stories of Christmas and the Big Story of God’s Love Timothy Matovina (bio) Alejandro García-Rivera is highly regarded as a professor of theology who mentored more than three dozen graduate students and directed more Latina and Latino theologians in their doctoral dissertations than any other scholar.1 He is even more known for his own impressive production of theological works.2 One of García-Rivera’s most frequently-cited claims is his insistence that what he calls the “little stories” of everyday life reveal the “Big Story” of God’s love for humanity, and indeed God’s love for all of creation. García-Rivera’s initial development of this insight was in his first book, the 1995 work St. Martín de Porres: The “Little Stories” and the Semiotics of Culture. That volume examines testimonies from the beatification process of San Martín de Porres, the son of an African mother and Spanish father in colonial Peru whose life, deeds, and holiness are narrated in the fascinating testimony accounts. Employing the semiotic method and insights gleaned from thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Eugene Genovese, and Robert Schreiter, García-Rivera explores the interrelations between the “signs, codes, and messages” of the Martín de Porres testimonies to uncover the “cultural text” of colonial Latin American societies. He contends that the “violent and unequal encounter of cultures” is a core sociohistorical dimension of the colonial cultural text that witnesses for San Martín’s beatification sought to subvert through their storytelling.3 Many who admire such scholarly analyses, as well as García-Rivera’s mentoring contributions, remain relatively unaware of his publications in popular pastoral and theological journals. A key concept underlying many of these publications is the relation between the little stories and the Big Story that García-Rivera addresses in the St. Martín de Porres book, although in that work, and in subsequent treatments of the concept, he does not limit the relationship between the Big and little stories to a single definition. Rather, he employs these terms as a wide-ranging metaphor to reflect on the interconnectedness between the everyday elements of our lives—what Latina and Latino theologians call lo cotidiano—and the larger realities so powerfully revealed in ordinary life, if we but have the eyes to see them. For example, in St. Martín de Porres, García-Rivera contrasts the Big Story of the “Old” and the “New World.” He avows that in the era of colonial conquest, the European concept of humanity revolved around reason, while in the Americas, testimonies such as those about the life of San Martín revealed deeper truths: the uniqueness of each human person as a creation of God and our innate longing for communion with one another and ultimately with God. Thus, the little stories San Martín’s admirers told about him corrected the Big Story of European conquerors and conveyed the biblical Big Story about human creatures and our vocation “to know and love God.”4 At the same time, in the St. Martín de Porres volume, García-Rivera also associates little stories with a people’s popular faith expressions. In a subsequent article, tellingly titled “Listen to Catholicism’s Little Stories,” he further articulates this devotional dimension. He notes that “the little stories of popular devotion have a charm and profundity that somehow reveal the ‘Big Story’ of the Church. The little stories of the faithful reveal the profound imagination of the Church. And in that imagination, the Big Story of our faith is visualized.”5 In a word, for García-Rivera the little stories of our lives are windows into the big stories that shape our existence, and the ultimate Big Story is God’s boundless love for human creatures and for the beautiful world of God’s creation. Though God made each of us as unique creations, our commonalty is that each of our lives is a wondrously exquisite microcosm of that ultimate Big Story. Part of his genius is that García-Rivera was a master of unveiling the Big Story in the little stories of people’s...