Spanish America Research Articles

Prohibited journeys: power, mobility and resistance in early-modern Spain and Spanish America

This article explores the Spanish Crown’s increasing regulations on mobility and their attempts to inspect and classify transatlantic travellers, highlighting both top-down and bottom-up expressions of power. It explores the efforts of early modern power to control movement, while tracing their shortcomings and limitations, as well as the means through which some travellers reclaimed power and their freedom to move. The article offers an overview of the Crown’s initial efforts to control movement, using historical accounts to enhance our understanding of the complex interaction between mobility and power, and how they shaped each other. By considering public policies, testimonies from local authorities, and freedom litigation suits, the article traces how power was resisted and balanced through individual responses and legal mechanisms, contributing to more nuanced and interdisciplinary views of power dynamics, the free movement of people, and global mobility studies. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, it proposes tracing earlier stages of this diffused form of power, shedding new light on mobility as a governing mechanism and as an amalgam of experiences that reconfigure power relations and convey stories of resistance.

The Evangelization of Indigenous People in Spanish America: Motolinía and Las Casas

The aims is to highlight two divergent conceptions regarding the evangelization of the original peoples of Spanish America. In this sense, a comparison is established between the thoughts of the spanish franciscan friar Motolinía with the thoughts of the spanish dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas on the topic. The source is the Historia de los indios de la Nueva España (conceived from 1536 to 1541) and the Carta ao Imperador Carlos V (1555) by Motolinía as also the Único mode de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religion by Las Casas (written between 1523 and 1437). As a theoretical-methodological reference, we use the notions of the russian philosopher of language Mikhail Bakhtin. According to this author, there is only an object of thought and research where there is text. Every text has an author and this author has an intention. There is an interrelationship between the text and the author's context. For the russian philosopher, the work is a statement, as its author is always responding to the works of his predecessors, basing himself on and agreeing with the works of the same current, criticizing and combating the works of opposing currents.

Contesting Indigeneity in Colonial Cuba

Abstract: This article analyzes the differing trajectories of two Indigenous pueblos—Guanabacoa (outside Havana) and Jiguaní (on the outskirts of Bayamo)—to explore the persistence of Native communities in colonial Cuba and various contestations of indigeneity across the longue durée. Though protected Indigenous pueblos were grafted into a larger patchwork of unequal and overlapping republics that formed the building blocks of legal pluralism across the Spanish Americas, they were virtually nonexistent across the Greater Antilles because conquest and colonization had destroyed Native chiefdoms. Consequently, surviving Native communities in the Greater Antilles were suspended between their own claims to Indigenous ancestry and how those with power defined them as an incoherent population. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Spanish officials repeatedly dismissed the authenticity of Native communities on the island, suggesting that they were frauds from the Atlantic world or the vestiges of Indigenous communities that had long ago lost their "Color." Charting these contestations and attending to the formation, composition, and litigiousness of these pueblos demonstrates that indigeneity in Cuba was neither extinguished nor static; it was actively (re)created by a diverse community of indios who used histories rooted in the island's past and legal strategies routed across the Spanish American colonies. This article is accompanied by an appendix on the OI Reader (https://oireader.wm.edu/open_wmq/contesting-indigeneity-in-colonial-cuba/).

At the Heart of the Borderlands: Africans and Afro-descendants on the Edges of Colonial Spanish America

At the Heart of the Borderlands: Africans and Afro-descendants on the Edges of Colonial Spanish America

The majesty of commerce. Between royal supreme dominion and commercial law in the Spanish Indies (1674-1693)

This article analyses how, through trade, the “supreme power” of the Hispanic monarchy was refuted by natural law and the law of nations at the end of the 17th century in the kingdoms of the Indies. This work explains –from the court system approach– the reasons that provoked the turning point of a disintegration of the domestic economic system (oeconomia), based on the grand governments of the viceroys in Spanish America, to give way to another model of political economy, more secularised and centralised (Consulado de Comerciantes de Lima), in which freedom of trade and the defence of individual property led to the reconfiguration of the political and economic space of America. Finally, it will be concluded that the American consulates of commerce encouraged the end of the “absolute power” of the viceroys, while promoting commercial development and the defence of the law of nations, anticipating the reforms of the Enlightenment.

The Conflict Between the Manila Galleon Trade and the Mercantilism Policy of Spain

The purpose of this article is to delve into the rise and development of the Manila galleon trade between the 16th and 19th centuries and to focus on the deeper reasons for the limitations of Spanish control over this important trade route. The Manila galleon trade not only connected Manila in the Philippines with Acapulco, Mexico but also established economic ties between China and Spanish America, which used Manila as a transit point. In the entire trade, Spain, as a nominal trade monopolist, appears to be unable to effectively control this trade. Research suggests that this is mainly attributed to Spain's directional errors in implementing mercantilist policies in its colonies, which contradicted the principles of free trade that had developed in Manila's sailing trade during the first thirty years. Under the guidance of mercantilism, Spain excessively pursued gold and silver wealth while neglecting the overall development of the colonial economy, resulting in a serious mismatch between domestic and colonial production and actual demand. This policy orientation not only limited the growth potential of colonial economies but also weakened Spain's competitive position in global trade.

The fiscal transformation of the Spanish Carrera de Indias in the 17th century: a reinterpretation

AbstractThis article examines the fiscal transformation of Spain's trade with Spanish America during the 17th century. It analyses the taxation of trade combined with the evolution of the Hispanic Monarchy's long-term domestic debt. To this end, the author looks at the almojarifazgo de Indias (main customs duty), its juro (annuity) obligations and the evolution of the transatlantic trade. He argues that the fall in customs revenue and the increasing non-payment of the juros issued against the almojarifazgo were neither a consequence of the alleged crisis of the Carrera de Indias nor of the higher incidence of fraud. The Crown was not interested in exerting greater fiscal pressure on the trade or fighting fraud at the customs houses of Seville and Cadiz as the increased tax revenue would have gone entirely to service the unpaid juros. Instead, the fiscal burden shifted towards extraordinary contributions that were free of juro obligations.

Архетип гаучо в художественной культуре Латинской Америки

<p>The article examines the role of representatives of a specific ethnic group of inhabitants of the South American steppes-Pampas — pastoralists-Gaucho nomads in the formation, formation and development of national Spanish-American literature based on its genres such as oral folk art, lyrical and epic poetry, drama, realistic and psychological novel. The existence of this ethnic type can be traced back to 1775, but the process of turning a Spanish shepherd into a half-breed Gaucho is still largely unclear. The formation of Gaucho literature can serve as an example of the emergence of folk literature in the countries of Spanish America. Gaucho poetry reached the culmination point of its development with «Martin Fierro» by H. Hernandez, however, it did not take much time for the gaucho theme to turn into prose: drama, short story and novel. The transition from poetry to prose, as well as the transition from oral to written poetry, did not take place immediately. Gaucho poetry continued to develop and gained prominence for the reworking of the legend of Santos Vega, but new forms of Gaucho literature were already supplanting poetry. The novel about the gaucho arose from a primitive popular print, but the popularity gained by the very first attempts to create a novel about the gaucho testified to the prospects of this genre, which soon attracted the attention of truly talented authors. Thus, the Gaucho gave his native land a regional literature, which became a model of cultural and spiritual independence for all countries of Spanish America. Having formed a whole trend in literature, the Gaucho archetype has left a noticeable mark in other forms of art and, perhaps, will serve as an example to national forces called upon to make the transition from imitation of European models to literary Americanism.</p>

Clearing the king’s conscience: tyranny and legal fiction in the New Laws of 1542

ABSTRACT This essay argues that the New Laws of 1542 responded both legislatively and narratively to contemporary suspicions that Spanish rule in America constituted a tyranny, which, if true, would invalidate Charles V’s exclusive rights of sovereignty and property on the continent. To affirm the legitimacy of Charles’s authority, the New Laws showed him exercising good governance: reforming the corrupt Consejo de Indias, expanding the duties of the lackadaisical Audiencias, restricting the privileges of abusive encomenderos, and mandating the good treatment of his Amerindian vassals. The changes that the New Laws prescribe for the councilors’, oidores’, and encomenderos’ behavior tell the story of a righteous monarch defending the public good against the incursions of greedy and faithless subordinates, suggesting that they—not he—are the true authors of tyranny in Spanish America.

“From Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization”: (North) American Historians, Spanish Conquistadores, and the Fate of the Amerindians in the New World, 1840s–1960s

This article looks at the (North) American historiography on Spanish America with a particular focus on the fate of the Amerindians from the 1840s to the early 1960s. For over a century, (North) American historians routinely romanticized the Spanish conquest, while also routinely scorning the indigenous population (as well as mestizos and blacks), and embracing the rising pseudo-scientific Anglo-Saxon racism of the day. Down to the 1960s, (North) American historians by and large viewed Amerindians as savages and barbarians, while they interpreted the history of the Spanish conquistadores and their successors in ways that held Western civilization itself up as the main colonial heritage in the Americas (north and south).

Late eighteenth-century depictions of Peruvian primates in the Codex Martínez Compañón and the Quadro de la Historia Natural Civil y Geográfica del Reyno del Perú

King Carlos III of Spain supported numerous scientific and intellectual enterprises in Spanish America during the eighteenth century. One was the compilation, between about 1782 and 1785, of a vast ‘paper museum’, the ‘Codex Martínez Compañón’ or ‘Codex Trujillo del Perú’, in the province of Trujillo, Peru. There, the Bishop of Trujillo, Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, directed the preparation of hundreds of coloured illustrations of the people, geography and natural history of the region. Included were 17 images of mammals classified as primates from Peruvian forests. In 1789, this compilation was shipped to Madrid where some of these illustrations were copied into an impressive oil painting by Louis Thiébaut under the direction of the bishop’s nephew, José Ignacio de Lecuanda. This painting, the Quadro de la Historia Natural Civil y Geográfica del Reyno del Perú (1799), not only included images of almost a dozen primates, but also accompanying descriptions. Forming part of an unusually large painting, these depictions of New World primates served as channels for ideas about exoticism and potential European initiatives in the forested regions of Spanish America before independence. This paper discusses the identification of the primates and some other mammals portrayed in both Martínez Compañón’s Codex and in the Quadro del Perú of Lecuanda and Thiébaut.

New material connections in a mother-of-pearl Enconchado from the Viceroyalty of New Spain

Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1695–1700), an enconchado painting attributed to Miguel González, active in Mexico in the late seventeenth century, exemplifies the refinement of the arts produced in Spanish America as a response to the taste for Asian goods during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The painting and its original mother-of-pearl inlaid frame were examined and analyzed using non-invasive and micro-sampling methods, an approach that permitted answering outstanding questions about the stratigraphy, pigments, and the use of shells throughout the painting and frame. The identification of the mother-of-pearl, determined to be from a Pinctada species, was a central focus of this study. In addition to the inlaid shells in the painting and frame, shell fragments were observed mixed with gypsum in the ground preparation of the painting by SEM–EDS. To our knowledge, this is a novel identification of marine shells in the ground of an easel painting. Traces of workmanship in the inlaid shells observed by SEM and optical microscopy are possibly connected to pre-Hispanic methodologies of mother-of-pearl refinement.Graphical

Does time heal all wounds? The rise, decline, and long-term impact of forced labor in Spanish America

For most of human history, free wage labor was uncommon compared to various coercive institutions based on the threat of force. Latin America was no exception to this general rule. A number of scholars argue that past coercive labor institutions explain regional and national divergence within Latin America long after the institutions themselves have disappeared. A review of the literature, however, shows less agreement than is commonly recognized. There is evidence that forced labor on Spanish American mainland collapsed endogenously under its own weight, in which case it may have left few echoes in the present.

The Garden State: Conceptualizing Nineteenth-century Latin American Environmental Discourse on Nature/Nation's Transformation

Abstract: Imagining Spanish America as Eden and sublime force, colonial environmental aesthetics inaugurated American disponibilité , figuring environment in the colonial matrix of power as the non-place outside of European time and space. The image of the garden evoked by this aesthetics corresponded to the desired, secular transformation of environment, which delimited the location of a colonial vegetal-human relations of extraction. I contend that in the transition period from colony to republic, cultural, political, and scientific discourse used the image and language of the garden to reestablish claims over territory by shifting from the Edenic to georgic mode. I offer the Garden State as a (neo)imperial environmental aesthetic to lay bare the politics and poetics of place-making and its entanglements—through agriculture and horticulture—as part of a response to the rise of liberal agro-economic policy and the proliferation of the plantation model in the work of naturalists, politicians, Neo-classical, and Romantic writers. By placing ecocriticism, environmental history, and plant studies into conversation with garden theory through this framework, I argue we can better attend to the concentric material and literary gardens and garden-like formations tied to plantation logic and the ordered cultivation and civilization of space and human-vegetal relations in Latin America's nineteenth century.

:Cacicas: The Indigenous Women Leaders of Spanish America

:<i>Cacicas: The Indigenous Women Leaders of Spanish America</i>

A New Key Port in America: The Fortification of Buenos Aires in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract The outcome of the 1640 Portuguese rebellion against Spanish rule instantly turned Buenos Aires into a new key port in Spanish America, given its location on the frontier with now-Portuguese Brazil. Consequently, the Spanish imperial bureaucracy focused on its fortification in the second half of the century. That case was part of a larger process during that century of fortifying Spanish American cities with walls and more complex elements. The present article will focus on the role of the local authorities and their response to the crown’s plan, illuminating the difficulties and mistakes in that ultimately unsuccessful effort, such as hiring a lack of skilled workers, especially engineers, and the misconceiving of the territory and its resources. For that purpose, the research will be based on unpublished documents from the Archivo Histórico Nacional and Archivo General de Indias, as well as various plans for the projects.

Imperial Rule and Centers of Learning in the Spanish Atlantic World: The Role of the Bourbon Scientific Expeditions in the Creation of Enlightenment Institutions in Spanish America

Imperial Rule and Centers of Learning in the Spanish Atlantic World: The Role of the Bourbon Scientific Expeditions in the Creation of Enlightenment Institutions in Spanish America

Public law and control of power in verreyal Spanish America

El trabajo cuestiona la tesis según la cual durante los siglos XVI y XVIII funcionó en la Hispanoamérica Virreinal un régimen autoritario y extractivo; aporta evidencia de que, por el contrario, el orden virreinal o indiano funcionó según ideas e instituciones jurídicas que, en su contexto histórico, permitieron limitar el poder de las autoridades reales y de sus representantes; y argumenta por qué no se justificaba ni benefició a los ciudadanos de las nuevas Repúblicas romper de raíz con esas instituciones jurídicas para adoptar un derecho público ajeno como el derecho administrativo francés.

Masters of the Land: Native Ship and Canal Building During the Spanish-Aztec War

AbstractIn 1520, during the midst of the conquest of Mexico, Spanish conquistadors and their Native allies embarked on a massive naval project—the construction of 13 brigantines and a canal—needed to help conquer the aquatic city of Tenochtitlan. In the dominant historical literature on the war, the Spanish tend to receive most, if not all, of the credit for the success of the nautical program. The contributions of their Native allies by contrast are little-known and oft-overlooked in the historiography. Drawing on Spanish and Indigenous sources, this article highlights the vital roles that Native peoples played in the naval episode, whether it be felling timbers, carving wood, transporting logs, or excavating the canal. In addition to labor services, it also considers the importance of Indigenous ecological and hydrological expertise, and demonstrates how such knowledge played a pivotal role in the overall success of the enterprise. I argue, ultimately, that these contributions made the Native peoples, and not the Spanish, the true masters of the amphibious operation. Along the way, this essay seeks to contribute to several important strands of scholarship, chiefly the New Conquest History, environmental histories of New Spain, and the burgeoning literature on Indigenous knowledge production in Spanish America.

The 16th century Carrera del Pacífico: its sailor-merchants and their trade goods

This article focuses on the sailors who served during the initial years of the Carrera del Pacífico, one of the globalizing projects of the Spanish Monarchy. In particular, the paper aims to examine the sailors who took advantage of the Pacific trade circuits by actively participating in various income-generating activities created by the Carrera. Using the sailors’ economic endeavors, especially as sailor-merchants, as a lens can elucidate how early global trade was conducted and demonstrate the dynamics of the early Pacific trade. The paper argues that by seizing the opportunities presented by the Carrera, primarily by assuming the dual roles of sailors and merchants, these laborers helped consolidate the Spanish-Pacific region and reshape the consumption pattern of its local population. The sailors engaged in the transportation, sale, and purchase of global commodities during the early modern period, including textiles and chinaware, which catered to the demands of the broader consumer base in Spanish America. The sources draw data from the Royal Treasury of Acapulco registers during its first decade (1590-1600), where 1,574 sailors were identified. It belongs to Archivo General de Indias’ Contaduría (Account) records, which contain the duties of commodities entering and leaving the port of Acapulco.