Santiago De Guatemala Research Articles

Genetics and the Logic of Evolution; A Century of Mendelism in Human Genetics; Intelligence, Race, and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen; The Golems Among Us: How a Jewish Legend Can Help us to Navigate the Biotech Century; Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel; True Nature: A Theory of Sexual Attraction; Natives, Europeans, and Africans in

Genetics and the Logic of Evolution; A Century of Mendelism in Human Genetics; Intelligence, Race, and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen; The Golems Among Us: How a Jewish Legend Can Help us to Navigate the Biotech Century; Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel; True Nature: A Theory of Sexual Attraction; Natives, Europeans, and Africans in

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

New Spain’s Inquisition in Santiago de Guatemala (present-day Antigua) designated women under investigation for sorcery, healing, and spiritual leadership as “mujeres de mal vivir” (women who live evil lives). These women, most of them mulatas, enacted physical and spiritual cures, settled disputes, and performed “love magic.” Martha Few’s concise presentation of their history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, based primarily on inquisitorial documentation, brims with fascinating details about the clandestine activities of these “evil living women.” Her chapter on illness is especially rich in its presentation of healers’ and midwives’ herbal and supernatural remedies.Few makes a significant contribution to the discussion about the relationship between marginal groups and institutional power that has engaged historians of Latin America for three decades. Her goal is to analyze “the gender and ethnic dimensions of cultural authority and power within the process of colonial rule in Latin America” (p. 2). Scholars have done little work on this question as it pertains to gender and religion in colonial Guatemala, so her research is a welcome addition. She provides compelling evidence that control over women and their behavior was instrumental to the maintenance of Spanish authority in this peripheral region of New Spain.Few organizes her study around three issues. First, she examines marginalized groups’ contestations of colonialism, arguing that castas, Indians, and women resisted domination through participation in Spanish, African, and indigenous religious traditions. Second, she examines how spiritual leaders deployed authority at the community level, asserting that such figures based their legitimacy on their knowledge of the natural world and of the human body. Women, in particular, drew expertise from their experiences with birth, lactation, food preparation, and readying corpses for burial. Finally, Few examines the local networks formed among these women, their clients, and those who witnessed their cures. These multiethnic and cross-class associations threatened Spanish colonial power at the local level. She concludes that colonized groups challenged the power of the colonial state, ideologies of patriarchy, and “the honor/shame complex.” Unlike in New Spain’s political core, these ideologies “were not yet fixed” in Guatemala during the late colonial period (p. 130).The book opens with the story of a Spanish priest who charged a mulata and a mestiza with bewitching him. Few returns to his tale to discuss how the priest’s account of these women’s attacks—forcing his body into the shape of a cross, beating him, and sucking blood from his wounds—“suggested a symbolic inversion of male sexual violence used against women” (p. 48). In other passages, she describes the use of foods infused with women’s own body fluids as a means to “free men of anger” or attract sexual partners (including priests). She tells of others who cured or cursed people by causing them to vomit foreign objects such as hair, charcoal, or bits of cloth; still others “shape-changed” into alien creatures. Few concludes that that the locus of these women’s powers lay in “the female body and physical manifestations of female sexuality,” which “became a ritual weapon” (p. 52) used to contest colonial authority. Her argument parallels the conclusions made by Jean Franco, Ruth Behar, and Irene Silverblatt in the contexts of colonial Mexico and the Andes.Few acknowledges the daunting task of reconstructing the spiritual and social practices of a group of prosecuted women from the historical documentation of their prosecutors. Her evidence certainly supports the conclusion that some disgruntled victims, the officers of the Inquisition, and perhaps even the abstract entity of Spanish colonial authority feared the power inversions implied by the spiritual activities of these “evil living women.” However, her interpretations of the perpetrators’ intentions are based on more ambiguous grounds (assuming they even did engage in the activities they were charged with, something Few sometimes appears to assume). Should we conclude that because the court feared these women for using the “ritual weapons” of their bodies to attack colonial authority, this is how defendants themselves viewed their activities? Does her evidence reveal a history of resistance or instead a history of a fear of resistance? Few’s provocative interpretation would have been strengthened by further evidence that these healers and religious leaders subscribed to the same paradigms of gender and power as the institution that investigated them. Nevertheless, this engaging study will interest scholars of gender, ethnicity, and religion, and its brevity and colorful narratives also make it an attractive option for classroom use.

Extractos de escrituras públicas: Archivo General de CentroaméricaExtractos de escrituras públicas: Archivo General de CentroaméricaExtractos de escrituras públicas: Archivo General de Centroamérica

The result of decades of effort by genealogist Juan José Falla, these volumes are a useful guide to the riches of Guatemala’s notarial archives for the period from roughly the mid–sixteenth to the mid–seventeenth century. Himself an attorney and notary, Falla has abstracted a large number of notarial acts, or escrituras, of all kinds, sworn before 33 escribanos practicing in the colonial city of Santiago de Guatemala (today’s Antigua). The collection, based on manuscript registers found in Guatemala City’s Archivo General de Centro América (AGCA), is by no means complete, and it tends to reflect Falla’s own research interests, especially the affairs of the colony’s most prominent families and the history of specific properties in the central city. Even so, the selection is broad enough to provide a vivid picture of social and economic life in the early colonial period, including material on the personal and business affairs not only of such well-known individuals as Pedro and Jorge de Alvarado, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Juan Vázquez de Coronado, and Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, but also of hundreds of lesser-known and humbler permanent and temporary residents of Santiago.Falla organized the collection alphabetically by notary and chronologically by individual act. All sorts of notarial acts are represented here, including wills, conveyances, powers of attorney, contracts, and obligations, as well as transactions peculiar to the period and culture, such as the so-called cartas de no jugar, which profligate colonials took upon themselves in an effort to swear off financially ruinous gambling habits. While some records warrant only a brief summary, Falla abstracts others in substantial detail; this is especially useful to historians in the case of documents that contain inventories. He also facilitates the analysis of urban real estate transactions with the inclusion of editorial notes that direct researchers to the location of the properties on a map that is reproduced in each volume. Each volume also features an extensive and detailed index, which will enable scholars to locate quickly escrituras dealing with specific individuals or families, or with specific topics.The reward structure of North American academia does not encourage laborious compilations of primary materials of this sort, but they remain valuable nonetheless. Having Falla’s guide at hand will speed the work of colonial historians who must consult notarial records in the AGCA or in the extensive microform collections of Guatemalan notarial materials found at McMaster University and the Genealogical Society of Utah. They will also prove valuable to scholars who desire to introduce graduate students to the kinds of analysis that research in notarial archives can support. We may be grateful that, in Central America, dedicated and competent individuals outside the historical profession, such as Juan José Falla, continue to devote their own time and resources to maintaining the respected isthmian tradition of amateur historiography.

Negros esclavos y libres en las ciudades hispanoamericanas

Our image of African slavery in the Americas, Carmen Bernand argues, has been unduly shaped by studies of the plantation economy. Historians, she says, have neglected the African experience in the Spanish American city, a key locus of Spanish American social and cultural development since the early colonial period. That neglect has hardly been complete; the author depends heavily on existing scholarship to make her case. Her book, nonetheless, offers a useful and often rich, if too brief, survey of the African experience in urban Spanish America from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, along with some thoughtful analysis concerning the distinctive nature of that experience.For Bernand, Spanish American uniqueness resulted, in part, from the fact that slavery and liberty were never entirely antithetical in societies rife with alternative legal conditions like yanaconaje. As mestizaje and manumission were added to the mix, descendants of enslaved African immigrants came rapidly to inhabit numerous “hybrid” statuses that diluted collective identity and promoted assimilation into a broad plebeian sector. Cities, where many Spanish American slaves were concentrated, provided spaces in which routine and relatively anonymous social interaction further destabilized boundaries to which color was already an unreliable guide. Impertinent slaves were but one of the more notorious dangers to colonial order to emerge from these milieux, as Bernand reveals by attending to the “voices” of people of African origins in judicial records. Thus an enslaved mulatto coachman, Ignacio Arriola, was arrested for drunkenly insulting and persistently threatening a Spaniard in Buenos Aires in 1790 because a member of the latter’s household had failed to produce a promised supply of cigars (p. 124).Lamentably, the author can provide this level of archival detail only for late colonial Buenos Aires. Otherwise, she relies in particular on Richard Konetzke’s classic collection of royal legislation to achieve documentary “coverage,” teasing out, for example, the regular infractions by free blacks and castas of laws intended to block their mobility. This method is quite effective, but the frequent use of lengthy quotations from published sources seems unnecessary, and evidence drawn from royal legislation is sometimes misleading. Bernand rightly argues, for instance, that tribute status was a social as well as an economic issue for free blacks and mulattos, but wrongly supposes on the basis of a late-eighteenth-century cédula that militiamen of color in Guatemala, and they alone, had never managed to obtain tribute relief (p. 165). In fact, they were winning it already in the 1690s.Surprising bibliographical gaps may account for this sort of weakness. Bernand makes extensive use of essential work done on Lima, for example, but ignores key studies of Mexico City and Santiago de Guatemala that focus precisely on themes she emphasizes. It is reasonable to deny, as she does, having either the intention or the capacity to focus with equal intensity on the African experience in every historically important urban center. One wonders, though, whether the basic principles of that experience, which she expresses the desire to enunciate, might appear more heterogeneous if, say, the coastal cities receiving most of her attention were to be systematically compared with highland ones surrounded by dense indigenous populations.Such comparison will have to be sought elsewhere, however. This book’s focus narrows dramatically—more or less to Buenos Aires—once the nineteenth century is reached. The conclusion then unexpectedly reprises old notions that black populations suddenly disappeared following abolition, and discovers the nefarious influence of present-day multiculturalism in the work of George Reid Andrews (p. 193). It seems an odd way to end a book that in general treats questions of identity and the African experience in Spanish America with a subtle touch.

Nuestro pesar, nuestra aflicción: Tunetuliniliz, tucucuca, memorias en lengua Náhuatl enviadas a Felipe II por indígenas del Valle de Guatemala hacia 1572

Indian communities in colonial Mesoamerica employed a wide variety of strategies to defend their interests, including the use of written petitions. Indigenous-language petitions, which appeared as early as the 1550s, were usually addressed to a high-ranking Spaniard, often the district magistrate but at times the viceroy or king. They sought to lighten tribute and labor demands, defend community lands, or rein in local priests and often initiated litigation. They had their own conventions and vocabulary. They addressed Spanish authorities in reverential language and referred to the petitioners, themselves often members of the indigenous high nobility, in humble, deferent terms, characteristic of preconquest speechmaking. Because petitions were generally longer, more varied, and less formulaic than more mundane genres of indigenous-language documents, they are extraordinarily rich as ethnohistorical sources. The editors view this edition as analogous to The Broken Spears, the well-known compilation of Nahua accounts of the Spanish conquest, edited by Miguel León-Portilla, in providing access to hard-to-hear indigenous voices.This edition is based on a collection of 20 Nahuatl (and 2 Spanish) petitions, originating from the city and environs of Santiago de Guatemala (Antigua) in 1572 and addressed to Philip II. The existence of documents written in Nahuatl in a region dominated by speakers of Cakchiquel Maya reflects a long history of central Mexican influence. In the late classical period, successive waves of migrants created communities of Nahuatl-speakers as far south as Nicaragua, whose descendants are known today as Pipiles. At the time of the Aztec empire, long-distance merchants, or pochteca, used Nahuatl as a lingua franca along the trade routes that reached into southern Mesoamerica. And in the early sixteenth century, colonies of central Mexican Nahuatl speakers accompanied the Spanish conqueror Pedro de Alvarado to Central America and the majority remained in or near the city of Santiago. After the conquest, the Spaniards themselves encouraged the use of Nahuatl as a lingua franca throughout Mesoamerica. The edition raises the question of what this history suggests about the authors of the 1572 petitions. Were they drawn from bilingual (Maya/Nahuatl) communities or did they represent a small group of interpreters who learned Nahuatl as a lingua franca?The edition has three parts. The first is an essay, written by historian Christopher Lutz, who introduces the historical context in which the petitions were written and their major concerns—a recent increase in tribute assessments, forced labor, mistreatment by local Spanish officials and settlers, and the sale of Indian orphans. The heart of the edition is the second part, presenting a facsimile reproduction of the petitions and then their transcription and (on the facing page) translation into Spanish. Specialists and non-specialists who read Spanish, including students, will benefit greatly from reading these primary documents. The third part, written by the accomplished Nahuatl linguist Karen Dakin, includes both a word list and a linguistic study of the language used in the petitions; both will be of tremendous interest to specialists.Based on linguistic analysis, Dakin argues that the Maya communities that produced these petitions were not bilingual and that the authors were not native speakers of Nahuatl. Rather, they employed a lingua franca, learned imperfectly and not in daily use. Furthermore, this lingua franca was neither Pipil nor any other dialect from the eastern Mesoamerican periphery, but appears to have been an archaic form of central Mexican Nahuatl, introduced long before the arrival of central Mexican migrants in the sixteenth century, probably along the trade routes of the pochteca. Thus, it was the antecessor to the classical Nahuatl encountered by the Spaniards in central Mexico when they arrived in the sixteenth century. The style of the petitions—simplified forms with a restricted vocabulary—also reflects a lingua franca and represents a regional tradition of Nahuatl writing far removed from the polished rhetoric and complex idiom typical of prominent towns in central Mexico, which this edition so effectively brings to our attention.

Santiago de Guatemala 1541–1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience. CHRISTOPHER H. LUTZ

American EthnologistVolume 22, Issue 4 p. 1030-1031 Santiago de Guatemala 1541–1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience. CHRISTOPHER H. LUTZ PHILIP C. PARNELL, PHILIP C. PARNELL Indiana UniversitySearch for more papers by this author PHILIP C. PARNELL, PHILIP C. PARNELL Indiana UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: November 1995 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1995.22.4.02a00570AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume22, Issue4November 1995Pages 1030-1031 RelatedInformation

Profits, Prestige, and Persistence: Juan Fermín de Aycinena and the Spirit of Enterprise in the Kingdom of Guatemala

W X 7ITH a thousand pesos and perhaps the names of helpful contacts in Cadiz and Mexico, Juan Fermin de Aycinena left his native Navarre in 1749 to seek his fortune in the Indies. He was about 20 years old. Following a brief apprenticeship in Mexico City, the precocious peninsular launched an enterprise running mules in Oaxaca; in the span of four years, it raised his worth to upward of 20,000 pesos. He was not yet 25. By 1754, the restless Navarran had moved again, this time to Santiago de Guatemala. There he stayed. In the time between his arrival in the Central American capital in the 1750S and the devastating earthquakes of 1773 (which prompted the migration of the capital itself), Aycinena had made his own seismic impact: he had become the leading merchant and banker in the Kingdom of Guatemala and probably its richest man. In the next decade, he acquired the only noble title in late colonial Central America, entered the Knights of Santiago, and built the only private residence on the central plaza of the

Women, Religion, and Power: Gender and Resistance in Daily Life in Late-Seventeenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala

Women's power to reshape and refabricate social identity is explored in two case studies from the records of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Women manipulated religious symbols, language, and rituals to push against the narrowly defined structures of their lives. Gender, along with race and class, is central to understanding resistance strategies in colonial life. The Case of Dofia Lorensa de Galves In October i668 Dionisia de Castellanos, a sixteen-year-old mulatta slave, presented herself to the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Santiago de Guatemala (today Antigua) to accuse Dofia Lorensa de Galves of witchcraft and superstitions.' Dofia Lorensa, an elite widow of unspecified ethnic origins, had been married to Don Nicolas Enriques de Castellanos. A month before, Dionisia and five of her female companions-a black slave, two Indians, and two mulattas, all servants of a neighbor-were in the house of Dofia Lorensa de Galves. Dofia Lorensa told them that a shawl, a petticoat, and a woman's head covering had been stolen, and that she wanted to find the thief. To do this, she attached one end of a silk thread to a hoop and the other end to a pair of scissors. Dofia Lorensa and her servants, Maria (a free mulatta) and Melchora (a black woman), held the hoop between them and con dedos animados (with animated fingers), swung the scissors around, praying Saint Peter and Saint Paul and all of the Apostles tell me who has stolen these things.2 As they continued to swing the scissors, Dofia Lorensa said the names of all those present. When she mentioned the name of Dionisia's friend Madellena, the silk thread began turning over and over in a circle. Three Ethnohistory 4z:4 (fall I995). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-i8oi/95/$I.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.138 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 06:03:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773: city, caste, and the colonial experience

Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773: city, caste, and the colonial experience

Erratum

The following note on a contributor to LARR volume 29, number 2 was inadvertently omitted from that issue. Christopher H. Lutz and W. George Lovell coauthored “Conquest and Population: Maya Demography in Historical Perspective.”CHRISTOPHER H. LUTZcofounded the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica in Antigua, Guatemala. He is the author of Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience and coeditor with Robert M. Carmack and John D. Early of Historical Demography of Highland Guatemala.

Water and Society in a Spanish American City: Santiago de Guatemala, 1555-1773

Water and Society in a Spanish American City: Santiago de Guatemala, 1555-1773

Water and Society in a Spanish American City: Santiago de Guatemala, 1555-1773

HE importance of urban life to the Spanish experience in the New World is reflected in the many studies of colonial Spanish American communities which have appeared in recent decades.' Municipal works and services in general have, however, attracted little detailed scholarly attention, although they obviously had a role in determining the nature and quality of urban lifeespecially in those towns which, over time, grew into important cities. One service in particular, the establishment and maintenance of a public water supply, was vital.2 It is certainly true that without water no city can live.3 But it is equally true that beyond this minimum prescription there are many possible levels of service. What one age, place, or social class accepts as adequate, another may not. Social, cultural, geographical,

The Indian Population of Southern Guatemala, 1549-1551: An Analysis of López de Cerrato's Tasaciones de Tributos

The tasaciones de tributos compiled between 1548 and 1554 under the supervision of Alonso López de Cerrato have long been recognized as the most important tribute documentation extant for mid sixteenth-century Central America, being of particular interest to all those whose inquiries have focussed on various aspects of the economy and demography of regions stretching from Chiapas and Yucatán in the north to Honduras and Nicaragua in the south. For the purpose of this paper, we wish to concentrate simply on one spatial component of the Libro de tasaciones forming part of the celebrated legajo 128, a rich set of documents housed in the Archivo General de Indias in the section of the archive classified as the Audiencia de Guatemala: that spatial component referred to by contemporary Spanish officials as “los términos y jurisdictión de la ciudad de Santiago de Guatemala,” that is, the territory which in early colonial times fell under the administrative authority of the city of Santiago.

The Indian Population of Southern Guatemala, 1549-1551: An Analysis of López de Cerrato's Tasaciones de Tributos

The tasaciones de tributos compiled between 1548 and 1554 under the supervision of Alonso López de Cerrato have long been recognized as the most important tribute documentation extant for mid sixteenth-century Central America, being of particular interest to all those whose inquiries have focussed on various aspects of the economy and demography of regions stretching from Chiapas and Yucatán in the north to Honduras and Nicaragua in the south. For the purpose of this paper, we wish to concentrate simply on one spatial component of the Libro de tasaciones forming part of the celebrated legajo 128, a rich set of documents housed in the Archivo General de Indias in the section of the archive classified as the Audiencia de Guatemala: that spatial component referred to by contemporary Spanish officials as “los términos y jurisdictión de la ciudad de Santiago de Guatemala,” that is, the territory which in early colonial times fell under the administrative authority of the city of Santiago.