Santiago De Guatemala Research Articles

Sonic Decency: Music in the Aftermath of Guatemala’s 1773 Santa Marta Earthquake

Abstract For several decades, the topic of natural disaster has featured significantly across the humanities; in musicology, however, the severity of such events has been marked primarily in the footnotes to our histories. Often leaving a substantial and insurmountable lacuna in the historical record, natural disasters are rarely considered for their generative potential. This article demonstrates the value of a disaster-studies approach to musicology, showing how natural events can have long-term impacts on the development and evolution of musical practices. It centers on the Santa Marta earthquake of 1773 and its effects on music and musicians in the colonial capital of Santiago de Guatemala. Colonial disasters, in particular, generated a flurry of written documentation, requiring correspondence at the local, regional, and imperial level to negotiate the process of restoring order to urban centers. I argue that it is precisely the disruptive nature of disaster that allows us to observe new details of both the extraordinary and ordinary musical practices of a colonial city. Embedded in an extensive archival record is evidence of the ways ecclesiastical notions of decencia (decency) in the post-disaster landscape were enacted through musical performance, which contributed to the political process of reinstating colonial power over a destroyed Guatemala. The article expands the relationship between music and nature, placing colonial musical practices in dialogue with the sociopolitical impacts of disaster, weaving together a history of music that intersects with environmental history.

Strike Fear in the Land: Pedro de Alvarado and the Conquest of Guatemala, 1520–1541

Historians of the early colonial period, once considered a moribund field, have opened new spheres of inquiry into the Spanish conquest of Latin America and the Caribbean. Reanalyzing early chroniclers' works, employing previously unexplored sources, and rethinking colonization processes have resulted in important contributions to conquest literature. Strike Fear in the Land much resembles the New Conquest History. The authors present a thorough and timely reassessment of the Alvarado clan—headed by Pedro de Alvarado, his brother Jorge de Alvarado, and notable cousins and kin such as Pedro de Portocarrero—and their pivotal role in Spain's conquest of Guatemala and Central America more broadly. The book illuminates negotiations between Spaniards and Indigenous groups and the Spaniards' brutal tactics employed to “pacify” Indigenous peoples resisting invasion. As highly respected scholars, W. George Lovell, Christopher H. Lutz, and Wendy Kramer craft a narrative built on archival research and work in special collections, buttressed by an exhaustive review of secondary sources. Their truly important contribution promotes understanding of mechanisms and processes laying the substrata for inequitable racial and class structures plaguing modern Guatemala.Divided into four chapters with useful appendixes, Strike Fear in the Land strongly succeeds in presenting genuinely accessible cutting-edge scholarship. The book easily elucidates questions of gender, race, and class without theoretical abstruseness; an overly theoretical approach would likely have hindered the authors' goal to illuminate conquest history in clear prose. The book successfully challenges established notions like Pedro de Alvarado's allegedly single-handed leadership of the Spanish conquest. Indeed, the authors convincingly argue that Jorge de Alvarado played a greater role than once assumed and that fluency in Indigenous languages, namely Nahuatl—a certain lingua franca throughout the region—proved essential to negotiations with Indigenous leaders (pp. 70, 72–75).All chapters present notable contributions; however, chapter 4 engages with the second book of minutes of Santiago de Guatemala's municipal council (the Libro segundo del cabildo), an invaluable sixteenth-century source long thought lost but recently located in New York's Hispanic Society of America. The chapter reveals the precarious Spanish hold on power plus the internecine discord existing among Spanish elites (pp. 80–84). Typically, supplemental materials contain specialized data and speak to expert readers, but Strike Fear in the Land instead aims to engage a broader audience and renders the appendixes approachable. This accessibility uniquely combines with original scholarship, especially in the case of appendix D, an engrossing narrative of the resistance movements led by the Kaqchikel nobles Ahpozotzil Cahí Ymox and Ahpoxahil Belehé Qat. The reverential terms ahpozotzil, “principal leader,” and ahpoxahil, “second-in-command,” refer to the leaders of the Kaqchikel polity of Iximché (p. 4n7). Initially Cahí Ymox and Belehé Qat allied with the Spanish, but in 1524 they staged an insurrection and then negotiated peace; however, discontent with the harshness of Spanish rule and brutal labor requirements led to a second Kaqchikel insurrection in 1533 (pp. 149–51). Strike Fear in the Land delves deep into the reasons why Indigenous leaders like Cahí Ymox and Belehé Qat disappear from conquest histories written by non-Indigenous people. In the process, Lovell, Lutz, and Kramer present a richer and more complex discussion of reasons for onetime allies like the Kaqchikel resisting Spanish domination.Despite its impressive scholarship, Strike Fear in the Land contains some weaknesses. Published originally as Atemorizar la tierra: Pedro de Alvarado y la conquista de Guatemala, 1520–1541 (2016), Strike Fear in the Land fails to indicate updated or abridged portions; however, the authors seemingly addressed criticisms of the earlier volume and included further Indigenous voices. A more serious flaw of the book is its exclusion of Africans, except for mentioning Africans as slaves and a prohibition against Black and Spanish men loitering near waterways, both of which appear in appendix A (pp. 103–4). Notably, Strike Fear in the Land presents a narrative focused on Indigenous peoples and Spaniards. While the book offers important correctives on Indigenous experiences of conquest history, its exclusion of Africans works against the goal of challenging established histories. While information on African participation in the conquest of Guatemala is scant, at least one African combatant appears in the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, an invaluable Indigenous chronicle of the region's conquest. Yet, to its credit, Strike Fear in the Land highlights numerous areas of potential inquiry, one of which centers on the participation of Africans in the conquest.Overall, the book illustrates the importance of reevaluating histories once thought settled. Written in accessible and engaging prose, Strike Fear in the Land is essential reading for specialists, undergraduate and graduate students, and those interested in better understanding the complexities of Spanish colonization.

The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks and Practical Enlightenment, 1784–1838

Reformers in late eighteenth-century Central America, after a devastating earthquake in 1773 that destroyed their capital, Santiago de Guatemala, worked relentlessly to reimagine the landscapes of their kingdom, pushing away visions of ruin and decay to promote ambitious new plans to harness “useful nature” and, as Sophie Brockmann puts it, “turn the narrative of decline into prosperity” (p. 24). In her richly detailed and engaging new book, they seem to have been everywhere, reading Enlightenment science, writing letters to one another, and contributing articles and sharing field reports in the Gazeta de Guatemala, the newspaper published by the Real Sociedad Económica de Amantes de la Patria de Guatemala. Though the economic society was suspended between 1800 and 1810, for Brockmann its membership maps a loose network of reformers, including peninsulares and criollos, royal officeholders and local municipal officials, clergymen and soldiers, merchants and landowners. All were influenced by transatlantic intellectual currents but were largely preoccupied with distinctly Central American challenges. Few, she argues, were anticipating the end of colonial rule or advocating for it.Consider, for example, José Estachería, the president of the Audiencia de Guatemala, who in 1785, after receiving a letter from the parish priest of a remote village in Chiapas, recruited an Italian architect and a Spanish captain to survey the newly rediscovered ruins of the Maya city of Palenque. Their survey, of course, relied on Ch'ol Maya in the town, who knew the site. This is a familiar story that Brockmann, in her first chapter, frames in an interesting new way: a field project that engaged engineers and soldiers used to mucking about in the mud, not bibliophiles more comfortable in libraries, their minds on ancient texts and wild theories. Estachería expected reports that conformed to bureaucratic norms, modeled on relaciones and visitas, attentive to local geography and the particular natural resources that might have sustained an ancient city of such size and complexity but also contributed somehow to its ruin. The goal was to acquire practical knowledge of the landscape, to map roads, assess the fertility of soils, and catalog plants that might have commercial value. Brockmann acknowledges that news of the ruins, and descriptions of them that appeared in the Gazeta in the 1790s, aroused some speculation about their origins and the people who built them, but less so in Guatemala than in Europe, when, in 1822, reports like that of Antonio del Río were published in London.Subsequent chapters focus especially on the economic society's work and publications. Brockmann makes a convincing case that the purposes and energies of the society, first promoted by Archbishop Caetano Francos y Monroy in 1784 and licensed by the king in 1795, were defined less by initiatives emanating from the crown and more by loose partnerships among local and regional actors. Writing around the theme of “making enlightenment local,” she identifies many of these actors and samples their correspondences and published commentaries. Their plans attracted naysayers as well as advocates, as when an article was printed on the public health risks of banana trees in what Brockmann casts as “the great plantain debate” (p. 106).Chapter 4 is devoted to the economic society's most ambitious project, the Descripción Geográfica de Guatemala, a comprehensive cartography of the kingdom, with detailed local and regional maps drawn and annotated by Central American experts themselves. The work was conceived as an alternative to the encyclopedic approach of many European geographers, who were criticized by the editors for making, in Brockmann's words, “a mathematical abstraction of space” (p. 123). Her discussion of their commentaries on the futility of European cartographic conventions is rich and finely drawn, and especially interesting.Like Jordana Dym and others, Brockmann disavows framing the intellectual politics of late colonial Central America as precursors to independence. Nonetheless, in the last two chapters, her material informs our efforts to understand what was to come. She highlights the deep frustration that many reformers expressed, frustration with the scale of the environmental challenges, the failures of so many of their schemes, and the resistance, especially among Maya, to reform. Yet her final chapter documents the persistence of reformers under the federal republic. The economic society was revived by Mariano Gálvez, governor of Guatemala, in the 1830s. And, in 1832, Gálvez chartered a national Academy of Sciences, which sponsored new scientific publications and reformed the national university. New international collaborations began, especially with English field scientists and geographers, who enjoyed the sponsorship of merchant firms eager to invest throughout the region. This is familiar ground in the historiography, but Brockmann offers a concise overview that serves as an effective conclusion to her very fine study.

Disassembling cattle and enskilling subjectivities: Butchering techniques and the emergence of new colonial subjects in Santiago de Guatemala

When they introduced cattle into Guatemala in the 16th century, Europeans also brought a whole new industry involving ranches, slaughterhouses, and new forms of labor. On the one hand, cattle producers had to treat the animals as intact living organisms requiring care and nurture to maintain and increase the herds. Those animals were grown by the ranchers for specific purposes. In the first place, colonial Mesoamerican cattle were raised to produce hides and leather for intercontinental trade with Spain. The regularized disassembling of the bovine bodies created these new products, but it also had some unintended consequences, namely the generation of new subject positions among the indigenous workers of these facilities. New forms of butchering techniques aimed at extracting animal parts were unlike the indigenous practices of animal hunting and exploitation, which aimed at preserving the physical integrity of the animals’ bodies. The newly introduced techniques that involved the compartmentalization of animal bodies also involved an increased compartmentalization of labor, accompanied by new body techniques and gestures. As the butchers and the tanners became enskilled, their bodies changed and so did their hexis. To operationalize these ideas, technological approaches combined with zooarchaeological (butchery marks), ethnographic, and historical evidence are used to investigate how humans and cattle mutually grew each other’s matter and subjectivities.

Some of Them Just Die Like Horses. Contact-Induced Changes in Peripheral Nahuatl of the Sixteenth-Century Petitions from Santiago de Guatemala

The aim of this paper is to examine contact-induced changes, visible on lexical and lexico-syntactical levels, in the set of twenty sixteenth-century petitions in Nahuatl from the region of Santiago de Guatemala. They comprise such phenomena as the creation and usage of neologisms, extentions of meaning, the adoption of loans in the morphological system of Nahuatl and the usage of calques. The material is divided in three parts. The first one focuses on specific traits of the Nahuatl language in which the Guatemalan petitions were composed, taking into account an ongoing discussion among researchers concerning the identification of this language or languages. The second part focuses on the presentation of selected lexical and lexico-syntactic changes in Nahuatl due to the influence of the Spanish language, as compared with similar contact-induced phenomena from Central Mexico and attested within the same time span. In the last part of the paper the interdependence of language contact and culture contact is discussed within the perspective of a presumed conceptual equivalency and interchangeability of the Spanish and Nahuatl terms for deer and horse, which appears in one of the studied documents.

Inclusion Politics/Subalternization Practices: The Construction of Ethnicity in Villancicos de Negros of the Cathedral of Santiago de Guatemala (16th-18th Centuries)

This article problematizes the notion of ethnicity underlying villancicos de negros of the Archdiocesan Historical Archive of Guatemala (AHAG). Although these are musical pieces that project the idea of social harmony in a festive context, the truth is that identities emerge in conflict with colonial power, based on an ambivalent discourse that consolidates and naturalizes racial stereotypes.

La ciudad como narrativa de violencias y exclusión social en tres fragmentos textuales

This paper begins from assuming human life, social life, as narration and self-narration. In that sense, observing the city as a space for social narrative is not an idle exercise, because it allows to resignify, on an interdisciplinary basis, its field and space by the defamiliarization of the regulatory approaches of institutional discourses. Through the analysis of narration as a way of “representation”, the city is addressed as a multistage with different forms of violence and social exclusion portrayed in a literary text such as Mapocho, written by Nona Fernandez (2002), and fragments of two testimonial documents such as Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte, Jesus mio (2013), and Elizabeth Burgos’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchu y asi me nacio la conciencia (1997). These literary works show the statement, temporal structure and guiding approach of narrations, as well as the significance and discursive articulation that narrate stories of three cities (Santiago de Chile, Mexico City and Guatemala) at a specific moment of history. This work aims to present the city as a narrative of violence and exclusion in a literary work (novel), from a ghostly journey that inquires about its origin, past and identity, and as a place that seems to be alien after the last dictatorial period in two testimonial fragments through the eyes of indigenous women.

Alone at the Altar: Single Women and Devotion in Guatemala, 1670-1870. By Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara

In her remarkable study of Guatemala’s late colonial period, Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara lays out the case that significant numbers of non-elite women in Guatemala’s two capitals are better understood not as socially marginalized, but as centrally active in Catholic institutions, exercising agency and shaping society. The author presents meticulous archival research to show how non-elite, laboring, single and, often, mixed-race women created mutually-beneficial alliances with male clergy, gained moral status, exercised spiritual authority, obtained protection, and acted at the center of social debates, influencing public religiosity, education, and politics. Her focus on non-elite women makes this book ground-breaking. Especially interesting is Leavitt-Alcántara’s argument that the alliances between these women and the church forged alternative ideals of the feminine, allowing flexibility on married status and sexuality and endorsing apostolic labor by women in the world, rather than removed from it. The author demonstrates the difference for these women’s lives of very local circumstances, shaped by Santiago de Guatemala and Guatemala City’s distance from imperial power centers as well as their particular economics, demographics, and religious institutions.

300 years of hydrological records and societal responses to droughts and floods on the Pacific coast of Central America

Abstract. The management of hydrological extremes and impacts on society is inadequately understood because of the combination of short-term hydrological records, an equally short-term assessment of societal responses and the complex multi-directional relationships between the two over longer timescales. Rainfall seasonality and inter-annual variability on the Pacific coast of Central America is high due to the passage of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Here we reconstruct hydrological variability and demonstrate the potential for assessing societal impacts by drawing on documentary sources from the cities of Santiago de Guatemala (now Antigua Guatemala) and Guatemala de la Asunción (now Guatemala City) over the period from 1640 to 1945. City and municipal council meetings provide a rich source of information dating back to the beginning of Spanish colonisation in the 16th century. We use almost continuous sources from 1640 AD onwards, including > 190 volumes of Actas de Cabildo and Actas Municipales (minutes of meetings of the city and municipal councils) held by the Archivo Histórico de la Municipalidad de Antigua Guatemala (AHMAG) and the Archivo General de Centro América (AGCA) in Guatemala City. For this 305-year period (with the exception of a total of 11 years during which the books were either missing or damaged), information relating to Catholic rogation ceremonies and reports of flooding events and crop shortages were used to classify the annual rainy season (May to October) on a five-point scale from very wet to very dry. In total, 12 years of very wet conditions, 25 years of wetter than usual conditions, 34 years of drier conditions and 21 years of very dry conditions were recorded. An extended drier period from the 1640s to the 1740s was identified and two shorter periods (the 1820s and the 1840s) were dominated by dry conditions. Wetter conditions dominated the 1760s–1810s and possibly record more persistent La Niña conditions that are typically associated with higher precipitation over the Pacific coast of Central America. The 1640s–1740s dry period coincides with the Little Ice Age and the associated southward displacement of the ITCZ.

Patrimony Lost: Hispanic-American Treasures in Foreign Collections

The greatest thrill that any researcher can experience is coming across, quite unforeseen, priceless documents long given up as lost. In the case of myself and two close colleagues, Wendy Kramer and Christopher H. Lutz, the documents that have come to light and that have so delighted us include Libros de Cabildo numbers two and three of the city of Santiago de Guatemala, the capital of Spanish Central America. Libro Segundo is a register of events that took place between 1530 and 1541; Libro Tercero is a log spanning the years 1541 to 1553. Our incredulity at learning the whereabouts of these two volumes was matched, if not surpassed, by the anticipation of verifying their existence and thereafter consulting them, something that has not occurred (as best we can determine) in over a century. Far more than the minutes of mundane municipal affairs, these two Libros de Cabildo contain valuable information about Spanish conquest and colonization, and indigenous resistance to it, that will enhance considerably our understanding of the early colonial period, not only in Guatemala but throughout Central America. Furthermore, the Libros de Cabildo have proven to be the proverbial tip of the iceberg, for the cache of which they form part contains other treasures perhaps not quite so unique but nonetheless of significant historical worth.

The construction of the Cathedral of Antigua Guatemala in the 17th century from the pictorial documents

<p>In 1678, the painter Antonio Ramírez elaborated a picture explaining the condition of the works of the cathedral of Santiago de Guatemala (now la Antigua Guatemala), a picture that allows us to establish the evolution undergone by the cathedral from the second half of the XVII century to its current state. Throughout this evolution, we want to highlight those construction elements that have been able to withstand not only the course of time, but above all, the force of the numerous earthquakes that have affected Guatemala since 1678 until today. In addition, Ramirez's work offers a series of brief but very illustrative brushstrokes on the organization of a construction in the second half of the XVII century, data that enriches the history of Guatemalan colonial architecture.</p>

Saqueo En El Archivo: El Paradero de Los Tesoros Documentales Guatemaltecos

News of the discovery of the lost second and third sixteenth-century municipal council books of Santiago de Guatemala by Sebastian van Doesburg ignited important discussions about individual versus collective ownership of historical documents. Setting aside their value for the early history of colonial Latin America, the books, presently housed in the Hispanic Society of America in New York, are part of the systematic processes of the expropriation of cultural artifacts from the global South. Wendy Kramer, W. George Lovell, and Christopher Lutz interrogate the journey of the books not to indict those who had a hand in their disappearance but to illustrate ways that scholars might use imaginative approaches to uncover other ostensibly vanished manuscripts.Kramer, Lovell, and Lutz begin their discussion with the Hispanic Society of America, an organization that, to its credit, has worked with researchers to expose the route traveled by the books from Guatemala to the United States. Tracing the dispossession of sixteenth-century documents requires tenacious dedication, as rarely do such materials move along easily identifiable paths. Rather, as in the case of the lost books, manuscripts often move from one country to the next, at times lying forgotten in one location for years until an interested collector purchases them. Valued less for their historical content than for their signatures of conquerors and other notable figures, the municipal council books experienced what Jorge Luján Muñoz (2011) identifies as “adventures and misadventures.” Indeed, Kramer, Lovell, and Lutz discovered that the books first traveled to Germany before eventually arriving in the United States as part of Archer Milton Huntington’s massive collection.The authors demonstrate that dispossessed manuscripts follow tortuous routes: some books are taken by outright theft, others are given as gifts by functionaries to curry favor with allies, and others still are purchased from private collectors who came to possess them at a time when national archives and laws, intended to protect cultural patrimonies, did not yet exist. Despite laws prohibiting their sale, the lost books disappeared from Guatemala in the early twentieth century. Indeed, they appear in a 1913 sales catalog of the Leipzig book dealer and editor Karl W. Hiersemann. Yet, rather than attempt to condemn the illegal removal, Kramer, Lovell, and Lutz wisely concentrate on discussing how rare book dealers and bibliophiles viewed historical manuscripts and the transoceanic links between wealthy collectors. Deeply influenced by the racist ideologies of their time, early bibliophiles and collectors saw their libraries as a means to protect historical materials for future generations. Ironically, while manuscripts may have originated in the global South, European and US collectors did not trust subjugated peoples to care for them properly. In analyzing these attitudes and the links among collectors, the authors raise important questions about how manuscripts became highly prized commodities and the nature of collecting historical materials.Kramer, Lovell, and Lutz have crafted a succinct and engrossing book that makes a strong case for researchers to investigate repositories typically ignored. Therefore, rather than rely on dated catalogs, they convincingly argue that researchers should thoroughly investigate archives and special collections such as that of the Hispanic Society of America. Given the tremendous value of the lost books for the history of sixteenth-century Latin America, one wonders how many other rich historical manuscripts lie dormant, awaiting the moment when they can reveal their secrets to modern scholars.

Healing on the Edge: The Construction of Medicine on the Jesuit Frontier of Northern New Spain

Healing on the Edge:The Construction of Medicine on the Jesuit Frontier of Northern New Spain Rebecca Crocker (bio) Like a servant of God who bends his back over virgin soil, they recorded the charge of misery in the presence of our Lord God: the introduction of Christianity occurs; blood-vomit, pestilence, drought, a year of locusts, smallpox are the charge of misery, also the importunity of the devil. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel Healing, sickness, and disease formed the backdrop of Spanish colonization of the Americas, a process that unleashed such rapid decimation of Native populations that it is recognized as one of the greatest demographic collapses in the history of humankind (Cook and Lovell 1991). Illness and death were so pervasive in the daily experiences of regional peoples following initial Spanish contact in 1492 that Reff (1991) has noted the entire process of colonization should be understood to have taken place in a “disease environment.” As such, scholars have extensively examined the demographic demise and the important role played by such extreme loss of life in Spain’s rapid political and military victories throughout the region. As with most historical treatises, however, the story generally relayed is that of the core regions—in this case, the colonial capitals of Mexico City, Puebla, Santiago de Guatemala, and Lima—populated by highly organized and hierarchical societies with developed medical and apothecary systems, while a dearth of knowledge exists regarding the experience of health on the remote colonial outposts. This is certainly the case for the colonial province of Sonora, an isolated [End Page 293] and sparsely populated region along the northwestern Spanish American frontier. This article examines historical, ethnographic, and archival records to portray how medicine and healing were constructed in this frontier region during the Jesuit period (1617–1767), and the influence of Jesuit philosophy and practice on local medicinal practice. Chambers and Gillespie (2000:228) argue that a geographic region can constitute a “scientific locality” when there exists “a local frame of reference in which we may usefully examine the role of knowledge construction and inculcation.” I maintain that colonial Sonora during the Jesuit period constitutes its own scientific, and specifically medical, locality due to three primary factors: (1) the influence and healing perspective of the erudite and scientifically minded Jesuit missionaries, (2) the area’s geographical isolation, and (3) the biopharmaceutical composition of the arid northwest. The available historical record reveals that these three factors interacted to necessitate and encourage the continued use of regional healing substances and practices in concert with imported modalities. Due to the dearth of medical informants from the era, much of the information in this article comes from the broader region of Sonora rather than O’odham territories specifically. Nonetheless, the regional experience of fusing medical techniques and theories is applicable to the O’odham, and the second section of this article will employ a modern ethnographic resource (Bahr et al. 1974) to focus the discussion more specifically on what we can glean about the O’odham historical experience. If we take as true Porter’s (1985:192) statement that “health is the backbone of social history,” the hypothesis forwarded here is not just important in the realm of healing, but also in the field of regional processes of cultural change and continuity. The Interaction of Culture Contact, Geography, and Biology The isolation and apparent desolation of Sonora spelled cultural isolation from the colonial core for a long period following initial exploration of the region by Spanish military parties during the 1540s and 1560s. When European penetration of the area was reinitiated, it took place largely under the auspices of Spain’s newest religious order, the Society of Jesus. Whereas the church and state served as “dual columns of royal authority” on the frontier (Radding 1997:11), the institution of the Jesuit mission was the primary foreign influence on local cultural [End Page 294] order (see also Sheridan 1992; Valdés Aguilar 2009). The Jesuits distinguished themselves from their fellow religious brethren by refusing tithes, declining to wear the habit, applying themselves to learning the languages of their converts, and educating themselves in the...

Intimate Indulgences: Salvation and Local Religion in Eighteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala

Most studies of pious foundations in colonial Spanish America examine an elite spiritual economy that was headed primarily by noble patriarchs whose substantial endowments sponsored the ecclesiastical careers of descendants and reinforced ties between elite families and the clergy. This analysis takes a different approach and examines modest perpetual mass foundations funded by a broader array of benefactors. These perpetual mass foundations illuminate an alternative spiritual economy in eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala marked by the active participation of sacred images and spaces, priests and monastic communities, and single and widowed laywomen. This analysis offers a new lens onto local religion in a colonial Spanish American urban center and reveals the complex web of relationships that framed death and salvation.

City Indians in Spain’s American Empire: Urban Indigenous Society in Colonial Mesoamerica and Andean South America, 1530-1810

City Indians in Spain’s American Empire: Urban Indigenous Society in Colonial Mesoamerica and Andean South America, 1530-1810

From the “Kingdoms of Angola” to Santiago de Guatemala: The Portuguese Asientos and Spanish Central America, 1595–1640

Abstract The evidence presented in this article establishes the era of the major Portuguese asientos (1595–1640) as a key moment in the history of African migration to Spanish Central America. Between 1607 and 1628 alone, Portuguese slave traders made at least 15 voyages from Angola to the Caribbean coast of Central America, landing in most cases “by accident” at the Honduran port of Trujillo while allegedly en route to Veracruz. Many of the West Central Africans carried on these voyages were subsequently marched inland by the same Portuguese merchants to be sold in Santiago de Guatemala, capital of the Audiencia of Guatemala. Their final destinations were often rural properties located in or near the Pacific lowlands of modern-day Guatemala and El Salvador, where the largest sugar and indigo plantations counted dozens of Angolans among their enslaved workers. A decided majority of these involuntary migrants were young men, most no doubt having departed from Luanda following misfortune in the wars that, with a good deal of Portuguese encouragement, wracked their homelands after 1575. Their migration experiences testify to a significant shift in the point of origin of Africans brought to Central America away from Senegambia and neighboring regions of West Africa, birthplace of the majority of Africans transported to Central America prior to 1595. The later-arriving and larger West Central African workforce played a more important role than heretofore understood in satisfying the demands for labor that arose in the early seventeenth century as commercial agriculture briefly boomed amid persistent indigenous population decline.

Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala

In a major contribution to our understanding of early postconquest society, Robinson A. Herrera focuses on the colonial city of Santiago de Guatemala. Founded by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524 and established on its present site in Panchoy Valley in 1543, Santiago is today the popular tourist destination known as Antigua Guatemala. Until its destruction by earthquake in 1773, Santiago was Spanish Central America’s principal administrative, commercial, ecclesiastical, and cultural center, the seat of a royal audiencia for most of the colonial period, and a city that ultimately boasted a population of some 40,000 souls, making it one of the most significant regional urban centers in the Americas.Thanks to Antigua’s agreeable climate, beautiful physical setting, and charming colonial ruins, as well as the availability in nearby Guatemala City of rich and well-organized documentation, Santiago has long attracted scholars’ attention. A fair share of it has gone to the sixteenth century, but no one yet has approached Guatemala’s formative generations with the vision, determination, and minute attention to detail that characterizes Herrera’s effort. Inspired by James Lockhart’s early work on sixteenth-century Peru, the author has patiently sought out the ordinary doings of ordinary people, as reflected primarily in the notarial registers that hold the wills, property conveyances, powers of attorney, partnership papers, labor contracts, and similar documents, which provide clues to the daily experience of the great majority of the city’s population. Herrera also makes good use of criminal records, civil suits, and official correspondence. Skilled at the deft juxtaposition of scattered bits of information, he portrays a city that, even in the first generation, was already beginning to flourish as a commercial hub, a center for artisan production, and a magnet for migrants from nearby indigenous communities, neighboring isthmian provinces, and even more distant places in the Americas and Europe.Thanks to Christopher H. Lutz’s indispensable 1994 demographic study of Santiago (Santiago de Guatemala, 1541 – 1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience, Univ. of Oklahoma Press), the multiethnic complexity of the colonial city’s popular classes is already familiar to us, but Herrera goes a step beyond Lutz, not only in descriptive detail but also in painstaking reconstruction of daily interactions among persons of differing social classes and racial and cultural backgrounds. While power, privilege, and high social status remained concentrated at the top of a rigid hierarchy rooted in traditional Spanish values and prejudices, Santiago is revealed as a place where ordinary European colonists — far from disdaining manual labor and petty commerce — scrambled to make a living, often in close association with natives, Africans both free and slave, and the usual variety of persons of mixed ancestry. More than half of the book is devoted to non-elite Europeans: not only Spaniards (although they were certainly the majority) but also Italians, Portuguese, and the odd Irishman. Substantial chapters also address the experiences of Santiago’s numerous indigenous inhabitants, as well as its population of blacks and mulattoes. In an effort to bring gender in as well, Herrera takes periodic account of the roles played by women, either directly or indirectly, in the social and economic life of the community.The strength of this important book is also in some ways its weakness. The method pioneered by Lockhart and adapted so masterfully to the Guatemalan case by Herrera provides a view of the past not available elsewhere, but it also imposes certain limitations, not the least of which is the difficulty of generalization from scattered and partial evidence, sometimes from only one or two observed cases. Some readers may find Herrera too daring in this regard, such as when he concludes on the basis of only two labor contracts that free blacks were paid more than mestizos for similar work (p. 126). But Herrera’s sources and reasoning are generally visible, so that readers are free to evaluate them and to accept or reject them. On another issue, more attentive fact checking might have helped Herrera to avoid the occasional “nuisance” error — Puerto de Caballos placed on the Pacific coast rather than the Caribbean (p. 29), the Council of Indies seated at Havana (p. 107), slaves imported from New Guinea rather than Guinea (p. 118) — but none of these is central to the book’s purpose or argument, and, in the end, such slips do not diminish the author’s real achievement.That achievement is, in fact, substantial. Robinson Herrera’s book greatly enriches the historiography of sixteenth-century Guatemala. It introduces us to real people with real concerns, whose lived experience did not always conform neatly to the comfortable categories into which we are accustomed to sort the social realities of the early Spanish period. As such, it warrants the careful attention not only of specialists on colonial Central America but also of students of the social history of early Latin America in general.

Chocolate, Sex, and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeenth and Early-Eighteenth-Century Guatemala

Chocolate, in the form of a hot chocolate beverage, was widely available to men and women of all ethnic and social groups in late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, the capital city of colonial Central America. At the same time, chocolate acted as a central vehicle of women's ritual power, used as the basis for magical potions to cast supernatural illness, in sexual witchcraft practices, and even, at times, as a flash point for women's disorderly behavior in public settings. The gendered associations of chocolate with ritual power and disorder in Guatemala are considered within the broader context of the changing cultural uses and meanings of New World food products during European expansion in the Americas.

Colonial Gender History

Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, And The Politics Of Power In Colonial Guatemala. By Martha Few. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Pp. 188. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.) Women's Lives In Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, And Economy In Spanish America. By Kimberly Gauderman. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Pp. 177. $24.50 cloth.) Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing The Lives Of Women In Spanish America. By Kathleen Ann Myers. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. 273. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.) Surprise Heirs I: Illegitimacy, Patrimonial Rights, And Legal Nationalism In Luso-Brazilian Inheritance, 1750–1821. By Linda Lewin. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Pp. 214. $55.00 cloth.) Surprise Heirs Ii: Illegitimacy, Inheritance Rights, And Public Power In The Formation Of Imperial Brazil, 1822–1889. By Linda Lewin. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Pp. 397. $60.00 cloth.) Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality In Colonial Latin America. Edited by Pete Sigal. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. 223. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.) Latin American colonial social history recently celebrated its fifty-first birthday, since it was in 1953 that Richard Konetzke published the first volume of his Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810.1 The intervening years have seen methodologies, ranging from prosopography and quantitative analysis to the "new" social history, come and go and sometimes come again. [End Page 254] At the same time new topics have been born and old topics have been reworked. Thus we have important studies of social groups, marriage and family, "subalterns," women's history, and more limited studies of gender history, crime, childhood, honor, and sexuality. Within these many subfields of social history, colonial Latin American women's history is today a well-established field of study. It began to take off in the late 1970s with the publication of Asunción Lavrin's edited volume, Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives,2 and was involved in documenting the social and economic roles of women while understanding both the scope and limits of their actions. As another generation of scholars emerges, a generation much influenced by James Scott's idea of "colonialism as a contested process," new interpretations of the role of women in colonial society are being put forth. Colonial women, according to this new paradigm, were social actors able to resist a European male-dominated social and economic structure. Furthermore, non-elite women (members of so-called "subaltern groups") demonstrate a high degree of "agency" in resisting the colonial system. Thus, this work raises the question of the degree to which colonial women were either victims of patriarchy or a self-empowered group able to fashion their response to power. In spite of its rather vague subtitle, Women Who Live Evil Lives is ostensibly about "female sorcerers, witches, magical healers and leaders of clandestine religious devotions" (2). Martha Few is interested in the relationship of gender (and to a lesser extent ethnicity) to religion and power, but she is hardly the first scholar to write on this topic.3 The locale for this study is the city of Santiago de Guatemala from 1650 to 1750, and while the author justifies this location, we are never told why she chose to study these years. This book is representative of a spate of doctoral dissertations produced in the 1990s that have systematically mined one or another type of Inquisition cases. Few's book is an example of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to history. One clear weakness is the scant number of cases; indeed, according to the author, cases involving male sorcery were more common. Unfortunately she makes little attempt to consider these cases in an analysis of gender-based differences. In spite of having only forty-four cases (or an average of less than one case [End Page 255] every two years), Few ignores most of this evidence, concentrating instead on a handful...

:Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala

Preface Chapter 1. Contested Powers: Gender, Culture, and the Process of Colonial Rule Chapter 2. Society and Colonial Authority in Santiago de Guatemala Chapter 3. Magical Violence and the Body Chapter 4. Illness, Healing, and the Supernatural World Chapter 5. Female Sorcery, Material Life, and Urban Community Formation Chapter 6. Conclusion Notes Glossary Bibliography Index