Seventeenth-Century Mexico Research Articles

The Baller and the Court: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Battle with Ololiuhqui and His Courtship of the Mexican Inquisition in Seventeenth-Century Mexico

The Baller and the Court: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Battle with <i>Ololiuhqui</i> and His Courtship of the Mexican Inquisition in Seventeenth-Century Mexico

Anatomy of Torture by Ron E. Hassner

Reviewed by: Anatomy of Torture by Ron E. Hassner Ryan M. Welch (bio) Ron E. Hassner, Anatomy of Torture (Cornell University Press 2022), ISBN 9781501762031, 200 pages. Torture works (sometimes). That rather non-committal declaration might risk me being labelled pro-torture by some. At least, that’s the feeling I get from my past experiences. For example, early in my graduate school career, a heavy-hitter scholar visited our department. He graciously took a few graduate students to coffee at our campus café. There he told a story detailing the impossibility of publishing a paper that showed state torture levels correlated with fewer terror [End Page 347] attacks in the future. Reviewers and/ or editors, it seemed, could not bring themselves to publish something that empirically showed torture may be in any way efficacious. This anecdote meshed well with my experience in a graduate seminar the following year with the rather uncomfortable title, the Ethics of Torture, where I found myself wondering aloud to the class about torture’s ability to compel people to divulge information they would rather keep secret. The looks on the students’ faces in the decidedly anti-torture class made me wonder if I had become a torture apologist just for considering it. If only Ron E. Hassner’s Anatomy of Torture had been available a decade sooner. In the book, he sets out to answer a fundamental empirical question: Can torture work? Anecdotes abound, but, due to both ethical and national security considerations, until now, we have had no way of systematically answering that question. Or so we thought. Instead of patiently waiting decades for governments to declassify material, Hassner devised a rather creative solution—look to the past; so far into the past, that the present government has no political reason to oppose the research. To that end, Hassner relies on centuries-old archives of the Spanish Inquisition. For all of the gore-filled reality of torture, the Inquisition kept decidedly tidy books of the practice including: the victims, what the Inquisition knew prior to the torture, what the victims divulged, and what the Inquisition uncovered after the torture. Voilà! Systematic data on torture and its effects. Over the course of seven chapters, Hassner paints a picture of the Spanish Inquisition as a strategic actor that learns over time. He wisps us from fifteenth-century Spain to seventeenth-century Mexico, introducing us to the human beings that would become the (future) victims of the Inquisition’s torture practices. Over these two centuries, and across several victims, the Spanish Inquisition learned a great deal about the most effective ways to wield pain for the purposes of acquiring information. In what follows, I review this brazen book by giving a short description of what Hassner finds and his methods for doing so before, then, posing several questions, that, without the book would not have occurred to me. As I’ll make clearer throughout this review, although I have several questions on main points of the book, the intellectual conversation it kicks off is invaluable for both ethical and policy reasons. Chapters 3 through 6 represent the main empirical contribution of the book. In Chapter 3, Hassner uses archival evidence to perform a sort of comparative case study between the Inquisitional courts in Ciudad Real from 1484–1500, and those same courts during the years 1500-1515. This period represents the earliest years of the Inquisition and Hassner uses it to present the Inquisition as a strategic actor capable of learning over time. From 1484-1500, the Inquisition uses a rather scattershot strategy, haphazardly deploying its tools in the service of identifying and eliminating the underground Jewish networks populated by what it called “conversos.” In this exploratory phase, the Inquisition did not know much about who belonged to these networks much less the specific religious crimes they were committing (i.e., various Jewish customs such as keeping the Sabbath on Saturday, refraining from eating pork, funeral rituals, and celebrating Jewish holidays). What it did know came from an attempt at initial information collection that came mostly from a grace period the courts instituted that offered individuals absolution for informing on [End Page 348] others. This, in...

“Ícaros de discursos racionales”: The Comet of 1680–1681, Sor Juana’s Neptuno alegórico, and the Enduring Function of Myths in an Age of Enlightenment

Abstract Stark differences have been noted in the ways Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora responded in 1680 to the arrival in New Spain of both a new viceroy as well as a great comet. Such comparisons have tended to hinge on the question of which of the two colonial Spanish-American writers was more “modern” versus “traditional.” Such valuative contrasts between Sor Juana and Sigüenza y Góngora implicitly evoke a commonplace but erroneous historical narrative that privileges the advent of modern science at the expense of poetry and myth. It is by acknowledging the shared affective goal of myth and early modern science in regulating human fears of natural forces, as Hans Blumenberg has done, that scholars can better assess the enduring function of Neptune for a poet like Sor Juana in an Age of Enlightenment. This reappraisal of myth’s function permits in turn a more dialogic reading of Sor Juana and Sigüenza y Góngora’s respective arches and their shared Neptunian response to the debates that raged in seventeenth-century Mexico City over flood control efforts and the value of indigenous hydraulic knowledge. In this reading, Neptune represents a European mythographic discourse of power over nature that serves to both assuage criollo fears of flooding while also displacing the challenge posed by indigenous hydraulic knowledge to Spanish intellectual hegemony in New Spain in part by replacing the Mexica god Tlaloc with Neptune.

Author Response

Author Response

PXRF Analysis of Obsidian Artifacts from a Rural Spanish Household: Investigating Spanish-Pueblo Interactions in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico

pXRF analysis is used to identify the geographic origins of obsidian artifacts from a seventeenth-century New Mexico Spanish homestead. Socio-economic factors that may have influenced the presence of obsidian sources found at the site are then examined. The analysis provides a needed starting point to begin addressing questions concerning the incidence of obsidian and other flaked lithics recovered at early Spanish sites in the region and demonstrates the potential of obsidian to investigate broader historical archaeological and anthropological issues. I conclude that interpretations concerning the presence of lithic artifacts at Spanish sites need to move beyond functional explanations (e.g. lack of metal or material properties) and, instead, incorporate analysis with documentary evidence (when available) and larger social and economic contexts.

From Conquest to Centralization: Domestic Conflict and the Transition to Direct Rule

Why do governments centralize control over regions? We present a theory of the transition from indirect to direct rule, focusing on the strategic interaction between a ruler and local potentates who provide civil order in exchange for a share of tax revenue. When the threat of rebellion from below falls and elites become less crucial intermediaries, the ruler is able to centralize power, replacing local potentates with direct agents of the state and investing in a fiscal bureaucracy for future state development. We assess the theory using subnational data from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico around the time of a dramatic demographic collapse, which undermined the threat of domestic conflict. Using a difference-in-differences approach and an instrumental variables empirical strategy based on the climate shocks associated with a virulent series of epidemics, we show that state centralization occurred faster in areas experiencing a more dramatic decline in population.

The Inconvenience of Chocolate: Disciplining the Society of Jesus in Seventeenth-Century Mexico

This article traces over one hundred years of a campaign against chocolate use in the Mexican province by Jesuit leadership in Rome. The Fathers General posited chocolate use as their “worst enemy” in the Spanish colony. I argue that their angst about chocolate drinking highlights greater anxieties around governance and discipline throughout the seventeenth century in one of the largest overseas dominions of the Society of Jesus. This article clarifies previously presented notions of Jesuits and their involvement with chocolate through a close analysis of hitherto unexamined sources. It disrupts the historiographical interpretation of Jesuits as supporters of the indigenous beverage—a generalization that has led to mischaracterizations of the Society of Jesus. Instead, the movement against chocolate serves as an important lens to better understand challenges to Jesuit authority, in particular, and proselytization in the colonies, more broadly.

A Triumphal Arch for the Count of Moctezuma: Architectural Poetics and Artistic Competition at the Cathedral of Mexico City, ca. 1670–1700

In seventeenth-century Mexico City, the viceroys appointed by the kings of Spain began their tenures by processing through two ephemeral triumphal arches, one of them erected at the portal to the west transept of the Metropolitan Cathedral. The designs of those arches and their decoration with paintings on mythological themes are recorded in festival books printed to accompany the ceremonial entries. Previous scholarship has focused on the iconographic programs of the arches, seeing them as official statements on good government and the expression of an elite self-image. Less attention has been paid to the architectural structures themselves, the focus of ATriumphal Arch for the Count of Moctezuma: Architectural Poetics and Artistic Competition at the Cathedral of Mexico City, ca. 1670–1700. In this essay, Michael Schreffler presents a close and comparative reading of the descriptions of the arches in the festival books, providing insights into architectural knowledge and artistic competition in seventeenth-century Mexico City.

Cristóbal de Villalpando’s Adoration of the Magi: A Discussion of Artist Technique

As a key participant in the 1686 revitalization of the Guild of Painters and Gilders of Mexico City, Cristobal de Villalpando (c. 1649–1714) played a critical role in establishing a high standard of practice for painters in seventeenth-century Mexico and beyond.[1][1] Signed and dated at the

Mestisaje (miscegenation) and Labor: Rethinking free Afromexicans and the colonial labor market in the Age of Mercantilism

From an early stage, the economic exploitation of free African descendants preoccupied Spanish officials in the American colonies. Miscegenation complicated the organization of the colonial workforce by rendering any intention to generate a labor system based on a priori divisions between ethnic groups impossible. By analyzing labor proposals regarding African descendants in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico—which had one of the largest populations of free Blacks in the Americas—this article investigates how Spaniards responded to the emergence of new types of peoples who were the unintended consequence of early European colonialism. I further claim that the attempt to implement labor policies toward colonial populations deemed "undesirable" should be understood within the desire of the early modern state to expand its jurisdiction through the development of new conceptualizations of population and wealth.

Gender and Authority in Sor Juana's Sonnet to Sigüenza y Góngora

Gender and Authority in Sor Juana's Sonnet to Sigüenza y Góngora Stephanie Kirk When Sor Juana died of the plague in 1695, the Archbishop of Mexico, Francisco Aguiar y Seijas–if Octavio Paz is to be believed–presided at her funeral for which her fellow Baroque intellectual and friend Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora had written a eulogy entitled Oración fúnebre. While it seems fitting that such an important ecclesiastical figure should officiate at the great poet and Hieronymite nun's funeral, it is worth remembering that he, famously misogynist, had constantly attempted to undermine Sor Juana's intellectual activities and bring her in line with his view of how nuns should conduct themselves. Also worthy of note, Sigüenza y Góngora seemingly later refused to part with the Oración fúnebre and to allow Juan de Castorena y Ursúa to publish it in the homage section of the third and final volume of Sor Juana's works, published in Spain in 1700 as I will delve into a little later in this essay. This masculine appropriation of Sor Juana's death echoes the constant struggle she faced in life in establishing her authority as woman, a nun, and a poet. Indeed, the concepts of authority, gender and the written word were deeply entwined in the early modern period. In New Spain, Sor Juana's anomalous condition as a nun who wrote secular works without the supervision of her confessor rendered her vulnerable to critiques of impropriety and exposed to claims that she trespassed on a territory designated only for men. It is the latter point I would like to examine here through an analysis of a sonnet dedicated to Sigüenza y Góngora along with the circumstances within which Sor Juana produced it. In this seemingly trifling poem of praise, Sor Juana lays down her authority as a creole poet, rejecting the challenges of those who sought to undermine her.1 [End Page 231] As with so many aspects of Sor Juana's life there is little extant evidence that describes the relationship between her and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, the two towering figures of the Barroco de Indias. Sor Juana the great poet and philosopher, Sigüenza y Góngora, the historian and antiquarian (also a poet, but less talented),2 figured greatly in the intellectual milieu of late seventeenth-century Mexico City. Many scholars have described the friendship as possessing varying degrees of intimacy, their chief piece of evidence being the Oración fúnebre. The mention of the eulogy comes in the slightly eccentric prologue to the third volume of Sor Juana's works, the Fama y obras póstumas, compiled by her supporter, the cleric Juan de Castorena y Ursúa. In the "Prólogo a quien leyere," Castorena makes a series of defensive remarks about his disappointment in not being able to transport from Mexico texts both written by Sor Juana and about her. These include the aforementioned Oración fúnebre,3 along with some of Sor Juana's own manuscripts which, Castorena explains, somehow landed in Sigüenza's possession and which he was unable to secure before leaving for Spain. It seems that Castorena feels most begrudging about his inability to include the seductively titled "El equilibrio moral" whose "borradores" he locates with Sigüenza whom he describes as the "curioso tesorero de los más exquisitos originales de la América":4 quando me transporté de Nueva España a estos Reynos no los pude aver a las manos (pero sí con certidumbre a la memoria): retirómelos lo uraño, con noble ambición de atesorarlos, o recatólos la discreción de mesurada prudencia, que malogré obligar con mis instancias, por la precisión de mi viage. Castorena paints a not too flattering picture here of the Mexican intelligentsia–among them Sigüenza–who refused to release their grip on Sor Juana's unpublished writings. Owing to Sigüenza's refusal to hand them over to Castorena [End Page 232] and to guaranteed publication in Spain, these writings would be lost forever. Perhaps...

Violence and vigilance in Nahua communities of seventeenth-century central Mexico

While historians have long studied the institutional dimensions of crime and punishment, this article examines the informal, extra-legal efforts of Nahuas and other residents of central Mexican communities to contend with violence and resolve conflicts. Residents of Nahua communities could not rely entirely on the authorities for protection and justice; rather, by being vigilant and taking matters into their own hands, they played a vital but underappreciated role in policing their communities, dealing with disorder, and preserving the peace. As such, they shouldered some of the law enforcement functions of the state apparatus. At times, their contributions could prove indispensable to the administration of justice. Their efforts not only helped to maintain public order and protect one another but they also tell us much about perceptions of acceptable behavior as well as notions of civic responsibility and, by extension, community membership and social solidarity.

Divinity and decay: the narrative of miraculous renovation and the repair of sacred images in colonial Mexico

Miraculous images in the early modern period were continually restored and touched up to ensure their continued decency, relevancy, and efficacy as divine conduits. This article focuses on the miraculous narratives that accompanied those artistic alterations, and in particular, on the trope of miraculous renovation that explained the dramatic restoration of several blackened and decayed crucifixes in seventeenth-century Mexico. By unpacking the biography of the Señor de Santa Teresa, Mexico's most famous Cristo Renovado, I reveal how the ‘renovation narrative’ that took hold in the region wove together artistic and religious discourses to explain the formal transformation of indecent statues of Christ. I also show how the story resolved broader concerns regarding artistic decorum, the inherently corruptible media from which the images were crafted, fears of native idolatry held by the clergy, and the struggle between devotees and patrons to control images imbedded within devotional communities.

The Persistence of the slave market in seventeenth-century Central Mexico

ABSTRACTThis study, based on an extensive notarial database, demonstrates the significance of slavery in Central Mexico during the seventeenth century. Thousands of bills of sale from Mexico City and Puebla – the largest and most lucrative slave markets in the region – show that the slave trade did not collapse with the end of the Portuguese asiento in 1640. A growing population of American-born creoles sustained the market during the subsequent decades, along with a modest number of new African arrivals. In 1700, slavery remained integral to Central Mexico's economy.

Subversive Images and Forgotten Truths: A Selected Visual History of Black Women Religious

Subversive Images and Forgotten Truths: A Selected Visual History of Black Women Religious Shannen Dee Williams (bio) Paintings and sculptures of black women religious produced during the era of the transatlantic slave trade and photographs taken of black sisters before the turn of the twenty-first century are invaluable historical artifacts. Because so much of the history of black Catholic sisters has been systematically erased and made inaccessible by archival restrictions, visual sources are sometimes the only evidence available to researchers – beyond oral history – that document black sisters’ presence and experiences of racial segregation and exclusion in religious life.1 This is especially true for the church’s earliest black sisters and African-descended women and girls who entered European and historically white sisterhoods in the modern era. In an effort to bring more attention to black sisters’ rich, but often elusive, visual history, this issue of American Catholic Studies features seven pieces of visual art and photographs that survey their history from the rise of transatlantic devotion to St. Iphigenia (cover image) in the sixteenth century through the canonization of St. Josephine Bakhita in 2000. These selected images not only document black sisters’ pioneering histories in female religious life, but also chart their fiercely contested presence in the church when most equated whiteness with purity and holiness and blackness with evil and moral debasement. Unsurprisingly then, several of these images have been used by black Catholics and other members of the faith at various moments in history to promote black evangelization and contest white supremacy in the church and wider society. [End Page 93] Click for larger view View full resolution Photo Courtesy of Ben Tavener The eighteenth-century statue of St. Iphigenia (shown above) enshrined at the renowned and slave-built Sao Francisco Church and Convent of Salvador in Bahia, Brazil is one such example. Although extant church records reveal that Iphigenia and her convent of 200 Nubian virgins pioneered female religious life in the first century, widespread devotion to the church’s first black sister-saint did not begin until the late sixteenth century.2 This followed the forced conversion of [End Page 94] millions of Central and West Africans to Catholicism during the transatlantic slave trade and African dispersal throughout the Spanish and Portuguese world. As historian Erin Rowe has demonstrated, the veneration of sub-Saharan African saints by black Catholics and other members of the church’s faithful resulted in “the widespread distribution of images, including sculpture, painting, and engravings” of Iphigenia in Iberia and Latin America. 3 This visual art, often commissioned by black confraternities (lay associations), combined with fervent devotion, enabled African-descended Catholics struggling to free themselves from the chains of chattel slavery, European colonization, and racial apartheid to forge an alternative spiritual discourse on blackness that rejected demonization.4 It also seemingly inspired free and enslaved African-descended Catholic women and girls in Iberia and Latin America to seek freedom and other opportunities to expand their social mobility through various forms of female religious life. In late seventeenth-century Mexico, for example, at least one clandestine confraternity of African-descended women who appear in the historical record called themselves the religiosas (nuns) of Iphigenia.5 Although the church’s active participation in chattel slavery, colonization, and racial apartheid in the Americas and Africa kept the global black sister population low and statistically insignificant through much of the twentieth century, thousands of women and girls of black African descent embraced the religious state in the modern era. In Latin America, where St. Iphigenia was widely venerated, hundreds of African-descended women and girls entered religious life during the colonial era alone. However, admission restrictions based on blood purity, race, and color relegated black sisters to the lowest rank in their [End Page 95] Click for larger view View full resolution Courtesy of the University of New Mexico Press communities with rare exceptions.6 Most were permitted only to serve as donadas (religious servants who took vows and wore veils) and restricted to domestic and menial labor in their orders regardless of their status, education, and spiritual perfection. 7 Although church records are inundated with direct and fleeting references to African-descended donadas...

Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico by Anna More

Reviewed by: Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico by Anna More Erin Graff Zivin KEY WORDS Erin Graff Zivin, Anna More, Creole, Archive, Colonial Mexico, Baroque, Sovereignty, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Triumphal Arches, Riot of 1692 more, anna. Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. 360 pp. Those readers who, like me, are not specialists in Anna More’s areas of expertise—seventeenth-century Mexico, Sigüenza y Góngora, the Baroque, and Creole governance in Spanish America—may find themselves unexpectedly drawn into the complex theoretical arguments of Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (University of Pennsylvania, 2013), which received an honorable mention for the LASA Mexican Studies Humanities Award. In this book, More diplomatically yet forcefully argues that “identity and subjectivity, insofar as they suggest psychological conditions of consciousness, are insufficient analytical categories through which to interpret seventeenth-century Creole writings” (10). She advances the audacious theory— over and against dominant identitarian readings of Creole subjectivity—that [End Page 351] an affective bond with what she terms Creole patria was fashioned through the elaboration of a local archive, an archive that, she convincingly demonstrates, established a regional sovereignty that “became an answer to the impasse of seventeenth-century Spanish imperialism” (15). Allegorical hermeneutics, then, trumped genealogical claims in the constitution of a local authority in seventeenthcentury colonial Mexico. The book is divided into five chapters, each of which proposes a thematic or conceptual entryway into the problem of Creole sovereignty. While the introduction outlines the principal argument of the book, Chapter 1, “Allegory, Archives, and Creole Sovereignty,” fleshes out the thesis she proposes in the introduction by tackling the triangular conceptual relation between “Baroque,” “allegory,” and “archive” that will be central to the following four chapters. Focusing upon a relatively understudied period in colonial history—the seventeenth century— More insists that the multiple crises of this epoch (the decline of the Habsburg monarchy, the surrender of Jamaica to England, the emergence of explicit ethnic divisions) exposed the cracks in the sixteenth-century colonial project, which was built upon the double fiction of the peaceful conversion of non-Christians, and the creation of two republics, one Spanish and one Indian (30). This cluster of crises provided an opportunity for local elites, who were able to take advantage of the power vacuum created by these circumstances. Creole patrimonialism emerged not as a way to rebel against Spanish imperial authority, but rather “to confront and overcome the paradoxes of Spanish imperialism itself” (44). It is the archive—defined here as both “material collection and epistemological privilege” (45)—that allowed the Creole elite to emerge, grounding itself in a local past as a way to compensate for the trauma of the conquest. While the contents of the archive are largely (although not entirely) inaccessible to the contemporary scholar, writings about the archive provide clues to the way in which the “toponomological” structure of the archive (to borrow from Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever)—its marriage of place and of law—served as the condition of possibility for the Creole sovereign who would hold the key to the interpretation of a local past. More turns to Walter Benjamin’s work on Baroque drama, specifically, allegory as the art of collecting of profane objects “to create the spark of redemption” (Benjamin qtd. in More, 51). The collection of such objects assigned redemptive potential to the humanized sovereign, whom Benjamin describes as a melancholic figure “incapable of decision” (51). In the particular case of colonial Mexico, the viceroy functioned as a supplementary simulacrum of the absent body of the king, adding another layer of complexity to the figure of the melancholic sovereign. Basing herself upon the conceptual framework developed in Chapter 1, and always careful to insist upon the formal (conceptual, topo-nomological) and material aspects of archive-building, in Chapter 2, “‘Nostra Academia en Barbara …’ [End Page 352] Building an Archive on the Imperial Frontier,” More details the creation of a Creole archive in the seventeenth...

Magnus Lundberg, Church Life between the Metropolitan and the Local: Parishes, Parishioners and Parish Priests in Seventeenth-Century Mexico, Madrid/Frankfurt, Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2011, 278 p.

Resena sobre Magnus Lundberg, Church Life between the Metropolitan and the Local: Parishes, Parishioners and Parish Priests in Seventeenth-Century Mexico, Madrid / Frankfurt, Iberoamericana / Vervuert, 2011.

Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico

Revolt: An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico

La plata del Rey y de sus vasallos: Minería y metalurgia en México (siglos XVI y XVII)

It has been a long time since colonial Mexican mining has received the diligent attention it receives in this work. Jaime J. Lacueva Muñoz has delved into treasury records (mainly in the Contaduría section of the Archivo General de Indias, but also in Zacatecas) and administrative papers in the same archive (from the Audiencias of Mexico City and Guadalajara) to produce a book that offers two major sets of findings.The first will be of most general use and interest to historians of colonial Mexico. Lacueva provides the most complete set of series of silver production in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico that can be obtained from currently known sources. Annual figures for production, measured in pesos of eight reales, are presented for the treasury districts of Zacatecas, Guadalajara, Durango, Sombrerete, Mexico City, San Luis Potosí, Guanajuato, and Pachuca during the years for which records survive for silver being taxed in each treasury office. Gold production is also shown where tax payments on it were recorded. These series are also presented in charts showing five-year totals, and in pie charts representing each region’s percentage of silver production in different periods before 1700. The charts on page 347 show that New Spain (i.e., broadly speaking, the center and south of Mexico) yielded some 60 percent of the total of silver between 1580 and 1634. After then, the most productive areas were the west and northwest (paying royalties into the treasury offices of Guadalajara and Durango). The Zacatecas district gave around a third of the total from 1580 to 1634 and thereafter about a fifth. One of Lacueva’s purposes is to show that Zacatecas was not so dominant in Mexico silver mining before 1700 as has generally been believed, and indeed that its mining history was not so typical of the whole as may have been assumed. The evidence for this contention is clearly and copiously presented.Another common assumption that Lacueva challenges is that amalgamation was by far the dominant means of silver refining in Mexico before 1700. In his view far more silver was smelted than is generally thought. This is a fascinating question that will primarily interest historians of mining and technology. Lacueva argues strongly for his contention about smelting but goes further, proposing that amalgamation was not nearly so much the key to colonial Mexico’s enormous output of silver as has been thought. In the case of Zacatecas, a particular object of his attention, he suggests that refiners’ excessive reliance on amalgamation hindered their response to the sharp drop in mercury supply that took place in the 1630s. As a result, labor and investment funds moved farther north and west, stimulating the rise of silver production in those more remote regions. Zacatecas was slow to recover, not clearly doing so until late in the century, when (in the 1690s) smelting provided almost half the silver taxed there.It is impossible to summarize in a brief review Lacueva’s discussions of ore yields, labor, raw materials, investment of merchants’ funds, merchant-creditors’ domination of silver producers, efficiency and costs of refining methods, tax evasion, and much else. Those discussions are cogent, energetic, and thought-provoking, although founded more on economic principle than on new empirical data. That being so, the book suggests pathways for much new local research.This is a most welcome work. Historians needing to know the production of gold and silver in New Spain, to 1700, will find it more accessibly stated here than anywhere else, analyzed by time and region. Those concerned with the technical means by which silver was produced will find probably the fullest discussion of the question to have appeared to date.

Thinking with the Inquisition: Heretical Science and Popular Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Mexico

Digo, que entre los libros de mi uso matematico, filologos, humanistas y otros diferentes, hay algunos que necesitan de alguna expurgacion asi en elogios de herejes, como en errores que incidentemente traen y no de proposito controvertidos ni asumptados ... --Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora In his influential genealogy of the Latin American intellectual, La ciudad letrada [The Lettered City] (1984), Angel Rama interprets the relationship between colonial erudite and popular culture as an antagonistic competition between two linguistic registers. One of these registers that of public pomp and ostentation and was strongly impregnated by peninsular courtly norms [fue la publica y de aparato, que resulto fuertemente impregnada por la norma cortesana procedente de la peninsula], while the other popular and everyday, used by Hispano and Lusophone speakers in their private lives and in their social relations within the same lower class [fue la popular y cotidiana utilizada por los hispano y lusohablantes en su vida privada y en sus relaciones sociales dentro del mismo estrato bajo] (Rama 43-44). (1) In Rama's analysis, writing and orality are coextensive with social categories: encircling the colonial writerly city [ciudad escriturarial was the real city [ciudad real] composed of urban and rural subjects, collectively associated with the plebe or vulgo. To illustrate the attitude of the colonial elite toward the urban lower class, Rama cites a passage from the Mexican Creole scholar Siguenza y Gongora's 1692 letter to his friend the Admiral Pez, at the time a resident in the Spanish court in Madrid. In his letter Siguenza describes the massive riot that occurred in Mexico City the same year, blaming the disturbances on the resentment and ingratitude of the urban plebe. As Rama notes, Siguenza describes Mexico City's plebeian subjects in a cascade of racial epithets after declaring that they were extremely plebeian plebeians that they can only be known as the most wretched [plebe tan en extremo plebe, que solo ella lo puede ser de la que se reputare por la mas infame] (Siguenza y Gongora, Seis obras 113; Rama 46). Yet although he is correct in assigning language a central place in the articulation of the social relationships among colonial subjects, Rama's absolute division between high and low societies obfuscates the extensive areas of their mutual interaction as well as the particular ways in which the writings of colonial letrados invested social categories with meaning. The works of Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora are a case in point. While Siguenza's 1692 letter to which Rama refers clearly reflects elite anxieties about social and ethnic mixture, as he says the condemnable folly with which we live amid so many plebeians at the same time that we consider ourselves to be formidable [culpabilisimo descuidado con que vivimos entre tanta plebe al mismo tiempo que presumimos de formidables] (Siguenza y Gongora, Seis obras 119-20), the Creole scholar's invocation of terms such as plebe and vulgo is also part of his larger project to imagine a local public sphere. Without contradicting the political and theological models that underpinned Spanish absolutism and orthodox Catholicism, Siguenza's works anticipate a public arena in which what Rama calls the letrado would communicate directly with local citizens. This imagined public was the recipient of his most impassioned projects. In what some scholars have interpreted as an anticipation of Enlightenment values, Siguenza was one of the earliest examples of Creole antiquarianism and scientific modernity in a colonial context dominated by elite displays of loyalty to peninsular administration and scholastic orthodoxy in the Church and University. (2) Yet it is not often noted that both history and science were integral to Siguenza's vision of a Mexican patria, an expansive local homeland that demanded a concept of both patrimony (material documents of a local tradition) and citizenship (the interpellated subject of the love of patria), and thus are only fully explicable in reference to the political context in which they appeared. …