Colonial Mexican Research Articles

Mexican Lacquer at the Victoria and Albert Museum: Analysis of Three Bateas

This study investigates the materials and techniques used in three Mexican platters, or bateas, from the Victoria and Albert Museum collection. Our analytical approach included the use of non-invasive techniques, such as infrared reflectography, scanning X-ray fluorescence, and digital microscopy, which informed limited but targeted sampling. Traditional pigments were identified, including indigo, carbon black, red lead, lead white, and orpiment, and materials such as dolomite, gypsum, ochres, and clay were also found. A red organic dye was seen but could not be identified. The stratigraphy of the objects was also investigated. The condition of the objects was also evaluated, and the results will be used to inform future conservation decisions. The findings add to the published knowledge of the materials and techniques of early colonial Mexican objects and can be of use in future investigations, facilitating exchanges and collaborations focused on this type of objects, which are rare in UK collections.

Non-destructive electrochemical evaluation of corrosion protection systems subjected to accelerated ageing tests: a strategy for the conservation of colonial Mexican metal alloys

Non-destructive electrochemical evaluation of corrosion protection systems subjected to accelerated ageing tests: a strategy for the conservation of colonial Mexican metal alloys

Haunted Monasteries: Troubling Indigenous Erasure in Early Colonial Mexican Architecture

This essay examines the placement and displacement of Nahua labor in the architectural history of Mexico’s early colonial monasteries. It takes as its point of departure the story of a ghost in the Tlaxcala monastery as told by a Franciscan missionary to analyze the discursive and spatial dimensions of emergent racial ideologies in Mexico’s earliest Catholic missions. While the ghost’s appearance signals the eruption of unresolved tensions between the missionaries and the Tlaxcalans in a cohabited religious complex, the specter also animates settler colonial domination. Cross-referencing Nahuatl and Franciscan documents reveal the ghost story as a whitewashed tale of monastic ritual life wherein the ghost effaces Indigenous labor at precisely the moments and places missionaries deemed it most threatening. In so doing, this study illuminates how racial ideologies were structured discursively and experientially at the missions and contributes to urgent debates about how the history and preservation of Catholic architecture in Mexico conceals and represses the lived experience of Indigenous peoples.

Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters by José Francisco Robles

Reviewed by: Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters by José Francisco Robles Miruna Achim KEYWORDS Colonial Mexican Intellectual History, Creole Science, Creole Archive, Eighteenth-Century Mexican Literature josé francisco robles, Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters. Oxford UP, 2021, 387 pp. Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: A New World for the Republic of Letters is built on a premise that has been a point of departure for much writing in the history of science and cultural history of Spanish America since Antonello Gerbi's The Dispute of the New World (1960). Said proposition contends that the eighteenth century saw an escalation of the transatlantic polemics whereby Spanish American scholars sought to disprove their European counterparts' allegations that American climates had a pernicious effect on human and non-human lives, producing mentally and physically deficient individuals. In time, even the offspring of those born elsewhere—Spanish-American Creoles—would gradually soften and deteriorate under these influences. Assumptions about natural and racial inferiority—such as those José Francisco Robles pointedly documents in his discussion of the "Ordenanzas del Baratillo de México," a mid-eighteenth-century text that described Creoles as lazy, dishonest, licentious, and generally immoral, traits they inherited through the milk they suckled at the breast of their Indigenous wet nurses—translated, with the implementation of Bourbonic reforms by the middle of the eighteenth century, into the political marginalization of Creoles from influential positions they had previously held. To counter prejudices and their very real effects, Creole writers produced, to use a term coined by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, "patriotic epistemologies," that is, strategies for knowing the New World built on situated and locally-sensitive descriptions and observations. They argued that only an intimate knowledge of the Americas, which came either with being born or having dedicated oneself to them through study, would result in more balanced accounts of American natural and human histories and the profitable management of American riches. Cañizares-Esguerra's historiographic proposals have shaped how eighteenth-century intellectual and scientific productions in the Americas have been studied in the past two decades. And while some of the best works in this tradition have given nuance to the concept of "patriotic epistemologies" to make significant contributions to the field, others have limited themselves to applying the concept flatly and rigidly, as a kind of mold, to different sets of colonial materials. One of the merits of Robles's book consists in his efforts to expand the colonial archive. Most cultural histories of Spanish America have engaged the last decades of the eighteenth century—for which both the archival and printed materials are significantly more abundant—in the context of a restructuring of the sciences that produced expeditions, institutions, and periodicals. Robles studies an earlier generation of writers, including such powerful figures as Juan José Eguiara y [End Page 107] Eguren, Díaz de Gamarra, and Granados y Gálvez, who came of age before the mid-century and have received comparatively scant attention. Drawing mostly on eighteenth-century printed sources and a readily available apparatus of secondary literature in both Spanish and English, Polemics, Literature, and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Mexico is both a historiographic overview and a reference for the earlier manifestations of Creole definitions and defenses of Mexican intellectual traditions. The book reconstructs the intellectual and political spaces which made it possible for the later generation of scholars to write about the human and natural histories of New Spain. It would have been useful, in this sense, if Robles had pursued the discussion of how, if at all, these early writings were taken up by the generations of scholars writing at the end of the eighteenth century. Otherwise, one gets the impression, despite repeated claims that these towering intellects were members of a "global" Republic of Letters, that they labored away mostly in isolation, both because their contemporaries outside Mexico and later generations of scholars seem to have had little concern for their work. In this sense, it is not always obvious what the "polemics" in the title refer to because...

Recreating Colonial Mexican Fudge

Research Article| February 01 2023 Recreating Colonial Mexican Fudge: Panochita in the Culinaria Kitchen Laboratory Patrick Charbonneau, Patrick Charbonneau Patrick Charbonneau is professor of chemistry and physics at Duke University. He studies soft matter and statistical physics, and occasionally lectures on the science of cooking and on the history of chemistry. His investigation of historical North American confections stems from the interplay of these various pursuits. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Kelsey Kilgore, Kelsey Kilgore Kelsey Kilgore is the Administrative Assistant and Kitchen Coordinator at the Culinaria Research Centre, UTSC. She is an upper-year PhD Candidate in U.S. History, writing about multisensory infantry training. She professionally cooked for a decade in Ottawa and Toronto, and now bridges food theory and practice in the Culinaria Kitchen. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jeffrey M. Pilcher Jeffrey M. Pilcher Jeffrey M. Pilcher is professor of history and food studies at the University of Toronto. His books include Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Food in World History (2nd edition, Routledge, 2017). He is currently finishing a global history of beer. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Gastronomica (2023) 23 (1): 112–115. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2023.23.1.112 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Guest Access Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Patrick Charbonneau, Kelsey Kilgore, Jeffrey M. Pilcher; Recreating Colonial Mexican Fudge: Panochita in the Culinaria Kitchen Laboratory. Gastronomica 1 February 2023; 23 (1): 112–115. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2023.23.1.112 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 ContentGastronomica Search The kitchen laboratory has not yet replaced field work and the written archive as sites for Food Studies research, but recreating historical recipes has gained growing recognition for its value in understanding the materiality and taste of foods from the past. Already in the early twentieth century, the Vassar College historian Lucy Maynard Salmon brought cookbooks and kitchen utensils into her seminars—to sneers from her male colleagues. Barbara Ketcham Wheaton (1983) inspired a new generation of researchers with her work on early modern French cookbooks (see also Oliver 2006; Albala 2010). The approach has since found even more ancient applications, for which historical sources are sparse and ambiguous, in reconstructing stews from Babylonian tablets (Barjamovic et al. 2019). Likewise, in our attempt to discover the origins of a colonial Mexican fudge called panochita de leche (this issue), working in the kitchen to learn the physical properties... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas by Jennifer Scheper Hughes

Reviewed by: The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas by Jennifer Scheper Hughes Erik R. Seeman Jennifer Scheper Hughes, The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 2021) Jennifer Scheper Hughes breathes new life into an important topic: the relationship between the devastating toll of disease on Indigenous communities in sixteenth-century Mexico and the Christian affiliation of many Native Mexicans in that same time span. Readers of this journal will be most impressed by Hughes's theological readings of her primary sources. Though she does not sustain some of her claims, Hughes succeeds in categorizing colonial Catholicism as a church of the dead. Hughes focuses on an epidemic that began in 1576 and lasted roughly five years. The epidemic is not well-known outside specialist circles, perhaps because the disease itself remains unidentified. Marked by grim symptoms, including hemorrhages from the nose, the disease may have been caused by the bacterium Salmonella enterica, Hughes speculates (13). Instead of getting bogged down in medical guesswork, Hughes wisely refers to the illness by its Nahuatl name: cocoliztli. The 1576 epidemic caused such widespread death that Spanish observers defined the period as one marked by mortandad, which can be translated as "mortality," but which also connotes "carnage" and "slaughter" (16). Faced with this mortandad and the demise of so many Indigenous Christians, some missionaries despaired for the future of the Mexican Church. Hughes analyzes this [End Page 116] moment of despair with great sensitivity, focusing on (but not limiting herself to) 135 unpublished missionary letters written from 1576 to 1581. Relying on these sources, Hughes argues that Mexican Catholicism became a church of the dead, meaning that "every aspect of [it] was in some way defined by or responsive to the fact of cataclysmic death" (99). When describing the church of the dead, Hughes uses language that sometimes seems hyperbolic, as when she states that this "spectral church" was an "ecclesial body absent of living persons" (95). In other places, her poetic writing suggests that such characterizations are not meant to be taken literally but are rather attempts to describe the essence or spirit of colonial Mexican Catholicism: the church "breathed in death; it exhaled death; it dwelled in death" (99). Hughes supports these claims in four vigorously analytical chapters. The first focuses on the intimate bodily and spiritual care missionaries offered sick Natives. Serving as healers, priests infused their ministrations with theological significance. Healing was "a religious rite"; indeed, it was "a kind of sacrament" that helped "transform Indigenous bodies into Christian flesh" (37–38). Unlike in English North America, where (following Joyce Chaplin's interpretation) Native susceptibility to illness led colonists to believe in their own racial superiority, missionary encounters with Native illness in Mexico led to "the mystical incorporation of Indigenous persons into a larger, encompassing Christian body" (39). Chapter two continues the analysis of Indigenous bodies, emphasizing their relation to the corpus mysticum, a medieval phrase that conjures both the mystical body of the church and the literal flesh of Christ. Even as missionaries incorporated Indigenous bodies into the colonial corpus mysticum, the mortandad threatened that project: the mystical body was "injured and at risk" (66). To remedy this, priests turned to the healing power of blood. They urged Indigenous Catholics to shed their own blood in scourging penitential processions, and they performed bloodletting on their dying Native parishioners. The result was not racial othering but mystical union: Mexico's sanguinary theology "was often more about assimilating and erasing difference than about drawing ever sharper lines of division and distinction" (84). The next two chapters take spatial relations as their organizing principle: the third from the perspective of the missionaries, and the fourth based on Indigenous sources. Whereas the mortandad led some priests to fear that the Mexican church was failing, others took up the challenge of ministering to a dying population. To do so, Archbishop Pedro Moya de Contreras walked 800 leagues (perhaps some 2,000 miles). According to Hughes, Moya and other missionaries "resanctified the landscape by walking" (106), expanding the...

Childhood stress and developmental instability: Comparing microscopic enamel defects and cranial fluctuating asymmetry in a colonial Mexican sample

AbstractObjectivesRecent tests of the relationship between enamel defects, an indicator of early life stress, and fluctuating asymmetry (FA), a measure of cumulative developmental instability, have produced equivocal results. This may be because they use methods that underestimate the number of defects. We reinvestigate this relationship using high‐resolution microscopy images of tooth surfaces. Further, we test the hypothesis that developmental stresses during the earliest period of tooth development have a greater impact on FA than stresses during subsequent periods.Materials and MethodsThe sample consists of 48 individuals from two colonial‐era cemeteries in Mexico City. Using one canine from each individual, we created photomontages using a 2D light microscope. Tooth crowns were divided into three developmental periods. Defects were identified as widely spaced perikymata using moving z‐scores. We compared defect presence, frequency, and timing to FA calculated from 11 landmarks using geometric morphometrics from 3D models of each cranium.ResultsBoth the presence and frequency of enamel defects are significantly associated with an increase in FA. Contrary to our expectations, defects that formed in the latest developmental period (4–5.5 years) were uniquely associated with an increase in FA, relative to the other two periods.DiscussionThe presence and frequency of stress during childhood increases developmental instability. The time between 4 and 5.5 years may be a sensitive window of development in which disruptions to growth have a long‐lasting effect on developmental instability. Results indicate that research on developmental stress should consider the timing and frequency of stress events to more fully understand their impact on later life.

A New Sun Emerges: the Aztec New Fire Ceremony in word and image

This study attends to the historical dimensions of the Mexica (or “Aztec”) festival known as the New Fire Ceremony, a ritual that took place every fifty-two years in pre-Columbian central Mexico. The New Fire Ceremony is most often discussed in terms of cosmic renewal and calendrical cycles. This article seeks to situate its cyclically recurring rites within the web of Mexican history, as represented in early colonial Mexican historical sources, both pictorial and textual. Specifically, it looks to historical genres to examine the cultural memory of the location chosen for the final New Fire Ceremony of 1507, considering the ways in which the Mexica yoked ancient rituals of renewal to contemporary political concerns. That territory had been the site of Mexica military defeat and subjugation during their earlier migration period. Celebrating the New Fire Ceremony here centuries later, at the height of their power, may have functioned as a reversal of that early humiliation. Thus, the Mexica king, as agent of the sun god, embarked on a pilgrimage back through time and space to affirm their contemporary political dominion.

Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain

Compound Remedies invites readers into the pharmacy of Jacinto de Herrera y Campos in late eighteenth-century Mexico City. The apothecary's medicines, equipment, and records provide a glimpse into early modern medical practice. Paula De Vos asks how Galenic medicine transformed and changed before arriving in New Spain, and how it evolved in the Americas with exposure to new environments and materia medica. In answering these questions, she challenges long-held assumptions that Latin American apothecaries tell us more about colonial than European medicine. In doing so, she embraces the global turn in the history of science. De Vos contends that the history of colonial Mexican pharmacies must include key learning centers in the Mediterranean world and beyond like Córdoba, Santander, Alexandria, Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Montpellier, Florence, Paris, and London (p. 15).This rich history traverses centuries of knowledge through the libraries and writings of several Mediterranean intellectuals, including Galen, Dioscorides, Paul of Aegina, Ibn Sīnā, and John Mesue. The text operates on two levels: pragmatic and intellectual. The former takes Mexico's early modern pharmacies and analyzes their inventories and technologies. De Vos contextualizes how these materials were used, understood, and applied in Western medicine. The latter level reminds readers that this art was never static—it was steeped in centuries of theoretical discourse, reflection, and revision. Nevertheless, De Vos highlights that a very small percentage of American materia medica, despite its evolving nature, was adopted and used by Iberian physicians in New Spain.One tremendous strength of the book is its geographical framing. De Vos recenters this history on the Mediterranean region and in particular Arabic scholars. This allows researchers and students to reconsider the Eurocentric roots of Western medicine and even the scientific revolution. For example, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a series of Arabic medical works were translated into Latin and disseminated in European learning centers like Salerno and Toledo. This corpus became “the basis for the medical curricula in newly established universities of Bologna, Paris, Montpellier, Padua, and, later, Salamanca” (p. 108).Another important intervention made by the book is its defiance of traditional chronological boundaries. Mexico's colonial medical practices simultaneously drew on ancient, medieval, and early modern medical theories. De Vos adeptly guides readers through these layers, bringing to the forefront actors like Mesue. Of note, Mesue's thirteenth-century Grabadin touted several key ideas that later shaped traditional Galenic practices. This included systematically organizing recipes by remedy type and determining how compound ingredients (several ingredients in one mixture) reacted when mixed.De Vos synthesizes the key concepts, texts, authors, materials, and practices of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition. She addresses additional gaps in the literature by problematizing the concept of medical virtue, examining the influence of material culture and artisanal work on the science of Galenic medicine, and exploring how chemical medicines were formulated and tied to medieval alchemy.The book benefits graduate students and researchers studying medicine in Latin America and the Mediterranean. The chapters progress naturally and balance both the theory behind pharmaceutical practices and their application in the lived world. Chapter 1 examines simples (raw natural materials) and their medical uses. Chapter 2 describes how pharmacists corrected and processed simples. It highlights how Arabic scholars attempted to explain inconsistencies in Galen's work. Moreover, in the chapter De Vos traces the search for the virtue of a total substance and the subsequent “astrologization” of natural philosophy (p. 75). Chapter 3 addresses an often-overlooked area: compounding. Compounding, key to Galenic pharmacy, involved optimizing the combination and mixture of simples. Chapter 4 focuses on Nahua materia medica from the Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Maya peoples (p. 149). The chapter demonstrates that approximately 110 Indigenous substances formed the core of Nahua pharmacopoeia (p. 153). Finally, chapter 5 discusses alchemical pharmacy, which diverged from traditional Galenic medicine but nevertheless retained deep roots in the Mediterranean world and medieval medicine. Compound Remedies is an indispensable contribution to the history of medicine in Latin America. It is a text that readers will prefer to have at hand because it provides a wealth of reference information and much inspiration within its pages.

Grain Architecture in Bourbon New Spain: On the Design of Guadalajara and Querétaro’s Alhóndigas

During the late colonial period, numerous Novohispanic cities embarked on an unprecedented number of projects aimed at reshaping their urban spaces and improving infrastructures, including new facilities for grain storage and supply. The construction of alhóndigas (public granaries), along with other public works and infrastructures, was further propelled by the implementation of Bourbon reforms in Spanish America and the 1780s reorganization of the colonies into intendencias (provinces), as part of the monarchy’s efforts to improve the colonial administration and economy and centralize royal power. The newly appointed royal officials (intendentes) were instrumental in the implementation of these reforms, overseeing tax collection, promoting economic growth and agricultural production, improving mining, and developing a program of public works to embellish and modernize the urban environments and ameliorate the living conditions of their residents in sanitation, public health, water infrastructure, and food supply. This essay explores the projected alhóndigas for two late colonial Mexican cities and how they engaged with contemporary discussions about the efficacy of public works, the circulation of ideals promoted by enlightened reformers on good governance and civic order, issues of artistic and architectural production, and the transmission of a reformist aesthetic agenda from the center to the provinces of New Spain.

Seeking Landed Security in (De)Industrialized Detroit and (Post)Colonial Mexican Ejidos

The utility of land as a form of security is nothing new; however, the exact interpretation of “security” has shifted during times of crisis. Security through landedness can mean grounds from which to extract resources; a commodity to be bought, managed, and sold; a tract from which to draw sustenance; or a space for habitation and community building. This essay explores these many conflicting fluctuations in the identity projected upon land, by both the state and private interests, through the rise and fall of two specific patterns of land tenure: the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan and the agrarian, communal ejidal settlements of Mexico.

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

Mapping Indigenous Land: Native Land Grants in Colonial New Spain

Art historians have shown a great deal of interest in Indigenous conceptions of space and place and their representations of such in pictorial documents. Another, heretofore largely unrelated line of research in history has examined Indigenous uses of the colonial court system to protect their rights. In this new monograph, Ana Pulido Rull unites both these topics, examining how Mexican Native communities made maps and employed them as evidence in court battles to defend their lands from Spanish depredations. What results is perhaps the most revealing study yet not only on such maps but also on how Native Mexicans manipulated colonial law to protect communal claims.The initial chapters describe how the Spanish empire developed a system of land grants, or mercedes de tierras, to distribute Indigenous lands to Spaniards. Indians in central New Spain (Mexico) began to oppose the mercedes by presenting their own maps showing that such grants were unjust or harmful to their communal welfare. In doing so, Indigenous maps became accepted, and even requested, by Spanish judges as permissible evidence. Afterward, Pulido Rull proceeds to the core of her work: examinations of maps used to oppose mercedes (or to defend them when they favored Indigenous land claims). She also examines the transcriptions of testimony from these cases, to see to what extent such maps worked in protecting Indigenous territory, and how such litigation came to be resolved.The most fascinating aspect of her research methodology, yielding the most revelatory results, is her use of infrared light imaging and ultraviolet light photography to examine the preliminary sketches, revisions, and previous versions that lay hidden underneath the maps. Through such a technique, she reveals that these maps went through several changes that corresponded to changes in the arguments and legal strategies of litigants. The Indigenous legal representatives of their communities would alter maps to strategically appeal to Spanish law or to cast doubt on the allegations of their Spanish opponents, often in ways that did not accurately correspond to the topography of the landscapes in question. These maps, hence, rather than being timeless expressions of Native territoriality, were cleverly crafted with the intent of swaying Spanish judges.Her study also brings to light new information on Indigenous participation in the colonial legal system in general. This aspect should appeal particularly to historians of Latin America. Pulido Rull's combing through colonial case files reveals that the resolutions of many of these quarrels over land either were never recorded or appeared suddenly with little or no explanation. This, along with other telling signs in the documentary record, implies that there were considerable extralegal (and often illegal) negotiations between Native community representatives and Spaniards. The final word in many a legal dispute came down to backroom dealings only implied in the archival corpus. Ultimately, Pulido Rull finds that even if the Native peoples of New Spain did not always succeed in defending their lands in court (and many times they did not), their use of maps was creative, ingenious, and, more often than not, effective.Her treatment of preconquest cartography and justice, however, is unfortunately largely descriptive and uncritical, using modern language with little discussion of the risk of anachronism. She takes at face value information from nostalgic colonial histories that hearkened back to an unrealistically idealized preconquest justice system suspiciously similar to that of the Spaniards (but reportedly free of corruption), replete with Aztec imperial “judges,” “courts,” and “petitioners” (p. 2). Particularly glaring is her unquestioned use of the term map to describe traditional Mexican Indigenous pictorial representations of land. As Pulido Rull herself briefly notes, Indigenous people had no word entirely equivalent to the European category of map, and it is unclear if their ostensibly similar documents exactly corresponded to Western maps. Art historians have noted this, though Pulido Rull largely sidesteps this noteworthy matter by averring that, whatever their differences, Indigenous and Western maps had a “correspondence in meaning” (p. 75).Nevertheless, the book excels in its innovative treatment of colonial Mexican Indigenous mapping for legal ends. Moreover, Pulido Rull's work furnishes further evidence that mapmaking in any culture, contrary to Western notions, is never a truly objective process, something that scholars studying maps from other societies have also recently noted. Pulido Rull furthermore provides another example showing that Indigenous knowledge, rather than being simply exotic or inconsequential trivia made by peripheral people, was sought after and utilized by Europeans. Consequently, this work will appeal to not only art historians or other specialists of Mexico and Latin America but any scholar of cartography or Indigenous peoples.

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

The Use of the Future Subjunctive in Colonial Spanish Texts: Evidence of Vitality or Demise?

This article examines the use of the future subjunctive in two corpora of colonial Mexican texts. The first corpus consists of 255 documents dated 1561–1646 pertaining primarily to the historical area of New Galicia and dealing with matters of the Real Audiencia of Guadalajara. The second consists of 191 documents dated 1681–1816 written in the altiplano central of Mexico, which covers a large geographical area from Mexico City to Zacatecas. After describing the syntactic distribution of the future subjunctive in Medieval Spanish, we examine the evidence of its patterns of usage in Peninsular Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From there, we analyze the quantitative and qualitative data related to the 428 tokens of -re forms found in our corpora and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The data support findings that the future subjunctive first fell out of use in temporal adverbial clauses, while exhibiting the most apparent productivity in relative clauses. However, the corpora examined provide no evidence that the paradigm survived longer in Latin American Spanish than in Peninsular Spanish, as has been argued. Rather, this study suggests that by the eighteenth century, the future subjunctive was a highly stylized marker of formality or politeness in written Spanish.

Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain

This superb volume deserves a place on the short list of books on colonial Latin America that one can give undergraduates, graduate students, professional scholars, and nonacademic friends and expect each to derive both pleasure and profit from it. That list includes Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 by Inga Clendinnen (1987), Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World by Greg Grandin (2014), All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World by Stuart Schwartz (2008), and Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages by William Taylor (1979), and perhaps a few others.Martin Nesvig's approach is to tell a large story by braiding together a variety of small ones, each based on deep, meticulous research. The book's overarching claim is that Spain's hold over its colonies was tenuous, particularly in the early postconquest years, and that the weakness of the empire afforded its subjects broad scope for crazed shenanigans.The writing throughout is excellent, featuring short, declarative sentences and hard-won, impossible-to-invent vivid detail. Working in the tradition of William Taylor's influential essay “Between Global Process and Local Knowledge: An Inquiry into Early Latin American Social History, 1500–1900” (1985), Nesvig trains his microscope on the lives of intermediaries, generally low-level representatives of imperial power.Chapter 1 deals with the conquest of Michoacán between 1521 and 1538, a horrific period during which Nuño de Guzmán did his best to prove the veracity of the Black Legend, slashing and burning his way through the region in search of loot. The darkness of this story is both relieved and deepened by Nesvig's eye for idiosyncratic detail and for telling departures from historical trends. In syphilitic conquistador Rodrigo Rangel, waking at night bathed in “a lagoon of his own sweat,” covered in sores, and blaspheming to the end, Nesvig gives us a portrait of the conquerors at their most repulsive (p. 36). Through the isolated case of doña Marina Montesdoca, a wealthy heiress of her husband's vast encomienda, Nesvig shows that the world of early Spanish Michoacán was overwhelmingly dominated by men. Nesvig depicts an unsettled colonial society in which conquerors tried to use extreme violence to overcome the tenuousness of their power. Most shared Franciscan Alonso de la Rea's contempt for Native people and belief in the righteousness of coercion: “To deprive someone of their normal and natural tastes,” he wrote of the Chichimec Indians, “can only be done by force” (p. 44).Much of chapter 2, “Burning Down the House, in Which the Spiritual Conquistadors Go to War with Each Other,” is given over to a comprehensive takedown of Vasco de Quiroga, whose supposedly peaceful methods of evangelization are often depicted as an isolated bright spot in a very dark story. Nesvig shows that the darkness of the times infected Quiroga's career as much as anyone's. In a long dispute with mendicant friars financially backed by the encomenderos, Quiroga often had to get his hands dirty, and bloody, to get his way. Nesvig lucidly lays out intricate archival detail to support his larger claims that dissent, political rivalry, moral compromise, and self-seeking were the prevailing themes of the early history of the church in Michoacán.A short review can't do justice to the rich portraits of the sadists, weirdos, losers, and cranks that Nesvig has unearthed in the archives and resurrected in chapters 3 through 6. What is most notable about these chapters is that Nesvig keeps examining these people long after most others would have passed a harsh judgment on them, bringing their complexities and unexpectedly sympathetic traits, the tragedies and ironies of their life stories, into view. In this sense the book brings to mind essays from Bernard Bailyn's Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence (1990), which found affecting human drama in the lives of obscure men.Some may object to Nesvig's lively translation of the blasphemies that he found in the archives. But translating an insult as “thieving, knavish traitor, highway bandit, punk-ass bitch” serves the same purpose as Nesvig's meticulous research, lucid prose, and careful contextualization: it brings the subjects closer to us and brings them alive while respecting the profound alienness of their cultures and times (p. 92).Scholars of colonial Mexico, the Spanish empire, and comparative borderlands should read Promiscuous Power and assign it to students at all levels.

Contingent Images: Looking Obliquely at Colonial Mexican Featherwork in Early Modern Europe

What did early modern European audiences make of the iridescent surfaces of colonial Mexican featherwork? While much previous scholarship relates their appeal to brightness, they also exhibit chromatic instability activated by alterations in the angle of illumination or view. This plurality of viewing experiences mirrored those provided by a range of other popular forms of contingent media such as anamorphic and ambiguous images. In ways both similar and distinct, featherwork exposed conventions of pictorial representation and the limitations of the sense of sight itself, embodying an epistemological dilemma that was especially important to the intellectual culture of seventeenth-century Spain.

Religion in Colonial México

The writing of colonial Mexican religious history starts with early 20th-century French historian Robert Ricard and his focus on missionary preaching and teaching endeavors. Ricard, whose historical writing reflects a pre-WWII Eurocentrism and Catholic victory mindset, relied heavily on Spanish and religious sources. In his work, he concludes that the missionary conversion process was successful spiritual conquest. Louise Burkhart's 1989 The Slippery Earth sets a new tone for colonial religious research, claiming that the process of conversion was not one-directional. Burkhart argues that the Nahua of central Mexico had more significance in the development of colonial Mexican Catholicism than Ricard imagined. Burkhart's book becomes the foundation of modern research on the topic, as it is the first to incorporate native-language sources. She heavily utilizes the sixteenth-century Florentine Codex, the twelve-book encyclopedic style manuscript written by Nahua elites under the supervision of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún telling of the culture and the people of Central México. Through her findings, she argues that the Mexican colonial religion reflects a cross-cultural interaction, which ultimately gave birth to what she coins 'Nahuatized Christianity.'

Broken flowers: Christian spolia in a colonial Mixtec household

The embedding of pre-Hispanic decorated carved stones into the facades of colonial Mexican churches has long been a well-known phenomenon. 1 The practice bears a family resemblance to the incorpora...

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La resistencia del deseo by Francisco Ramírez Santacruz

Reviewed by: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La resistencia del deseo by Francisco Ramírez Santacruz George Antony Thomas Ramírez Santacruz, Francisco. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La resistencia del deseo. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2019. 317 pp. Octavio Paz’s monumental book Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (1982) has been the standard reference work on the life and literature of the celebrated colonial Mexican writer since its publication in 1982. Francisco Ramírez Santacruz’s recent biography of Sor Juana offers a new interpretation, one that incorporates the many significant archival finds that have been made since Paz’s book first appeared. As Ramírez Santacruz explains in the prologue, his primary objective in this biography is to document the details of Sor Juana’s life and provide an objective analysis: “esta biografía propone una exégesis lo más objetiva posible de [End Page 873] todos los datos que se conocen de sor Juana hasta el día de hoy” (12). Paz attempted to paint a very broad picture, highlighting the colonial milieu in which Sor Juana worked and offering interpretations of many of her literary works, and he sometimes strayed from objectivity in trying to offer a psychological portrait of the nun in the mode of Ludwig Pfandl’s early monograph. Ramírez Santacruz’s biography is more traditional in that it covers the entire trajectory of Sor Juana’s life and it offers more details about her family and her interactions with a variety of important figures in the viceroyalty of New Spain. The first two chapters of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La resistencia del deseo deal with Sor Juana’s life before she became a Hieronymite nun. Chapter one, “Los riesgos del mar (¿1648/1651?–1664),” provides a great deal of information about Sor Juana’s family, beginning with her maternal grandparents. Although this biography does not resolve the issue of Sor Juana’s exact birth date, it does affirm that her father was a native of the Canary Islands named Pedro de Asuaje (24). In addition, while many critics (and Sor Juana herself) seem to have believed that her father was of Basque origin, Ramírez Santacruz proposes that this was probably not the case and that this feigned lineage possibly had something to do with the high esteem of the Basque community in New Spain (27). There is a wealth of information about Sor Juana’s family and her early years in this chapter. The author goes beyond emphasizing the importance of Sor Juana’s grandfather (and his library) by establishing the key role played by the Mata family (Sor Juana’s uncle and aunt), who adopted her into their home in the capital of New Spain and played a central role in establishing her place at the court of a new viceroy. Chapter two, “El objeto venerado (1665–1667),” attempts to provide a glimpse into Sor Juana’s time at the viceregal court of the marquesses de Mancera and her brief attempt to join the Discalced Carmelite convent in Mexico City. This period is very difficult to document and so the author frequently strays from discussing what Sor Juana did during these three years and instead tries to speculate on the nature of her religious faith and why she decided to profess as a nun. Many of the primary sources cited in this chapter are Sor Juana’s own writings in addition to the somewhat hagiographic texts written by contemporaries (Diego Calleja and Juan Antonio de Oviedo). Although the author does try to maintain his objectivity, some Sor Juana scholars have advanced alternative interpretations on these issues. Despite the clear difficulties in establishing many factual details pertaining to this period, the author offers many interesting ideas about why Sor Juana first chose the Discalced Carmelites and, when discussing her abrupt departure from their community, highlights the intriguing fact that, between 1665 and 1670, there weren’t any professions in the convent that Sor Juana chose to abandon (57–59). In comparison to chapter two, the subsequent section on Sor Juana’s ultimate profession and entrance...