Spanish American Research Articles

The Separation of Church and State as an Imperial Project in the Philippines during the Early American Colonial Period

This paper examines the separation of church and state in the Philippines during the early American colonial period, contextualizing it within the process of American overseas expansion and considering it as one of the projects of imperial hegemony construction. After the Spanish–American War, the United States substituted Spain as the new colonial ruler of the Philippines, legitimizing its regime as the spread of ‘civilization’ to the Filipinos. On this basis, the Americans enacted laws guaranteeing religious freedom and introduced an American-style institution dealing with church–state relations. Beyond the legal and administrative initiatives, the new regime also constructed an official narrative of the transformation of political–religious relations in the Philippine that emphasized the absolute ‘difference’ between the American human rights principle, which guaranteed freedom of worship, and the Spanish theocracy, which was dedicated to the consolidation of privileges. By legislating the separation of church and state, buying up church properties, recognizing the equality of denominations, and constructing the official imperial narrative of church–state relations, the Americans hoped to ‘teach’ Filipinos that the ‘true’ belief was rooted in the inner convictions of individual Christians, not in the authority and coercion of the hierarchical church. By disciplining the construction of ‘difference’ under tutelary colonialism, the separation of church and state movement initiated by the American colonial government in the Philippines became an important source of imperial self-endowed legitimacy.

Methods for Dating the First Spanish American Lacquerwares: Seventeenth-Century Barniz de Pasto and Peribán Lacquer

This article examines the first Spanish American lacquerwares produced by Indigenous artisans in the seventeenth century, barniz de Pasto in Colombia and Peribán lacquer in Mexico, and discusses how the evolution of the decorative motifs, techniques, and forms of these lacquerwares can establish an initial dating chronology. Over the last thirty years, a sufficient number of examples of seventeenth-century Spanish American lacquerware have come to light that are datable, whether through provenance, historical references, or radiocarbon dating, and that make possible tentative chronologies for their production. The Hispanic Society of America in New York City holds at present the most significant collection of datable pieces of barniz de Pasto and Peribán lacquerware that now provide the key dates that can serve as the basis for establishing dating chronologies.

The Role of the Army Medical Corps (MC) in the Caribbean Campaign of the Spanish American War.

The 5th Army Medical Corps Caribbean campaigns provided valuable lessons on the noncombat hazards to troops and the challenges to the provision of care in a tropical theater of operations. The Army quickly adapted the lessons learnt for the invasion in Puerto Rico and future overseas expeditions.

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/).

Montgomery Ward's Export Department: international orders and mail-order consumers in Latin America, 1890-1930

New primary source material documents the expansion of Montgomery Ward’s mail order through their export department to Latin American consumers from the end of the Spanish American War in 1898 to ca.1930, and the formative period of export advertising and mail order marketing for the first time. Chicago was the center of mail order and ready-made clothing; women’s ready-made suits provide a case study of merchandise. A Chicago clothier requested a U.S. State Department inquiry to study the viability of introducing American ready-made clothing in Latin America in 1899. This Government study provides significant details about ready-made clothing in Latin America previously unknown to scholars. U.S. mail order required international parcel post for growth, and a Ward employee championed its passage in 1919. New primary sources have been contextualized within the frameworks of business, advertising, postal, and dress history and political economy. Advances in export advertising led to growth, which has been traced using statistics from trade journals and an internal document about the history of the export department. The essay ends by examining the names and addresses of Latin American consumers from extant Montgomery Ward return envelopes that have been digitally mapped and interpreted. Latin American consumption theory will be examined apropos of consumers and the meaning of mail order goods.

Market integration, empire and industry in the colonial economic development of the Buenos Aires meat industry (1770s–1800s)

ABSTRACT Building on recent literature on the history of political economy and Spanish imperial history, the article reconstructs the ideas that supported the colonial development of the meat industry in the Río de la Plata. Archival and printed sources are employed to illustrate the different arguments revolving around colonial economic development and imperial rule, in the words and practices of merchants, explorers, administrators and ministers. This way, it is possible to disclose the multiple imperial visions circulating in the Spanish Atlantic. The analysis suggests that economic reformism was not only a European intellectual and political movement but was shared and appropriated by Spanish Americans. They employed arguments in political economy to foster their agenda, namely the economic improvement of their territory in the broader context of the Spanish commercial empire. If a shared consensus around imperial political economy between Spanish and Spanish American vassals provided arguments supporting this colonial industry, the diverging economic interests, imperial rivalries, and the different geographical spaces of enunciation determined a variable dialectic between projects for the expansion of salted meat production and their realisation.

A Comparative Study on the Trade Structure between China and Major Spanish American Countries

As one of the largest emerging economies in the world, the Latin American region is also a region with high global strategic value. The trade between 19 Spanish American countries and China has a significant impact on economic and trade cooperation between China and Latin America. This article is based on the perspective of trade commodity structure, analyzing trade data between China and Spanish American countries in recent years, comparing and studying the import and export commodity structure between China and three major Spanish American countries: Mexico, Chile, and Peru, and analyzing the changes. Finally, in response to the issues identified in the study, some suggestions are proposed for trade exchanges between China and Spanish American countries, with the hope of providing reference for optimizing the trade commodity structure between China and Spanish American countries and for enterprises to further develop the Latin American market.

Economic Complementarities and Local Divergences: The Process of Separation of the Kingdom of Chile and the Region Mendosanjuanina in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

This article aims to examine the complexities faced by the economies of Santiago (Kingdom of Chile) and the mendosanjuanina region at the end of the eighteenth century, alongside the intense change existing in the Spanish American territories. The economic complementarities that united both economies were prioritized by local interests that sought to achieve greater autonomy for each of the cities within the monarchical group. Our argument is based on the analysis of the customs notes of Buenos Aires and the documentation generated by the Chilean authorities, the agents of Mendoza, and San Juan in the Spanish Court.

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.

‘Remember the Maine!:’ The Spanish–American War Invades the Parlor

Long before role-playing games or the popular first-person shooter games such as Hell Let Loose and Pavlov VR, people reenacted wars and global conflicts through tabletop board games, puzzles, and card games. Prior to World War II, no American conflicts were highlighted more in board and card games than the Spanish–American War and its offshoot, the Philippine– American War. Game designers joined other cultural producers such as journalists, novelists, and artists in crafting images of the battlefield for home front audiences. Between 1898 and 1902, the toy industry produced a multitude of games and puzzles focused on famous battles, military figures, and patriotism, informing both the public’s contemporary and historical understanding of these conflicts. Through an analysis of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century games depicting the Spanish–American and Philippine–American Wars, I argue that cultural producers used a variety of images, game-types, and instructions to lionize key military leaders, facilitate vicarious participation in the conflicts, and unify citizens on the questions about the wars and their consequences.

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.

The Spanish Hospital in Cayey in the Latter Part of the 19th Century

This paper provides a detailed historical account of the Spanish Miliary Hospital in Cayey, Puerto Rico during the latter part of the 19th century, focusing on its role during the Spanish-American War and its impact on public health in Puerto Rico. The paper is divided into ten sections, each highlighting the development, growth, and function of the hospital during the Spanish American War and concludes with a look at the hospital today. Overall, this paper provides a comprehensive historical account of the Spanish Hospital in Cayey in Puerto Rican history, shedding light on its role in military medicine and public health during the Spanish-American War in the Central Mountain Region of Puerto Rico.

Autopsy, Patrimony, and a Christianized Reforma: Manuel Ramírez Aparicio's Mexican Conventual History, 1861–1862

The article offers a contextualized introduction to one of the most interesting and understudied Spanish American responses to mid-nineteenth-century anticlericalism: Manuel Ramírez Aparicio's Los conventos suprimidos en México (1861–62), a unique assessment of the Reforma's aftermath and a pioneering historiographical effort eluding any facile categorization. Penned by a moderate Liberal who did not endorse the obliteration of the Catholic legacy, it inaugurated the conventual history genre in Mexico, the first of many textual and visual efforts to preserve the receding religious memory in print. The article highlights the first-person autopsy regime that determined the work's methodology, uncovers the assumptions that underlay Ramírez Aparicio's conception of inevitable historical change, and showcases how the notion of national material patrimony, paired with the idea of a Christianized Reforma, aimed at guaranteeing the permanence of all that was noble, admirable, and beneficial in conventual life while reconciling it with the Liberal Party's main tenets.

The Arms Trade and American Revolutions

Abstract This essay argues that the international arms trade bound the revolutions in British North America, Saint-Domingue, and Spanish America in dependent relationships. Throughout the colonial era, an informal arms control regime made it impossible for Europe’s American subjects to mass-produce war material or buy enough on the open market to equip independence through war. As became clear by late 1776, even the hemisphere’s best-connected colonists could not overcome this obstacle. Only the decisions of France and Spain to secretly arm and then openly support the British North Americans made their revolution a success. But as France and Spain would soon come to realize, US independence fatally undermined the early modern arms control regime that had kept independence a practical impossibility in their own colonies. North American merchants became the indispensable arms dealers to the hemisphere’s later revolutionaries, first in Saint-Domingue and then across mainland Spanish America. Crucially, though, the United States never offered terms remotely as generous as those it had enjoyed during its own independence struggle. Rather than rely on imperial patronage or republican solidarity, Haitians and Spanish Americans had to navigate a cutthroat market to obtain the tools of independence. That comparative disadvantage would haunt their postcolonial histories.

Methodologies for the Characterization and Identification of Natural Atacamite as a Pigment in Andean Colonial Painting

Painting materials used in Spanish American Colonial art comprised pigments and binders from European origin as well as those that were already known in pre-Hispanic times. In recent years, we have identified for the first time the mineral atacamite, a basic copper chloride (Cu2Cl(OH)3), in Andean Colonial art pieces (Viceroyalty of Peru, 16th–18th centuries). This work proposes a methodology based on a multitechnical approach to identify and establish the origin (natural or synthetic) of the atacamite pigment in Andean cultural heritage objects. Optical microscopy (OM), scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS), portable X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (pXRF), attenuated total reflection infrared spectroscopy (FTIR-ATR), micro-Raman spectroscopy, and wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS) were applied to analyse green pigments from the altarpiece of the Church of Ancoraimes, atacamite mineral samples from Chile, and atacamite obtained as a secondary product from traditional recipes used to produce verdigris, a copper acetate. Viride salsum by Teófilo Presbítero (SXII) and the Spanish translation by Andrés de Laguna (1566) of “De Materia Médica” from Dioscorides are both texts that include recipes involving the use of metallic copper as a starting material. These studies will contribute to the history of Spanish American Colonial art and to the knowledge on technological capacities and skills in the Andean region during this period.

Doctoral Studies in TIS in and about Spanish America

This article presents the findings of a bibliometric study carried out on a corpus of 108 doctoral theses in translation and interpretation studies (TIS) produced in Spanish America or with a Spanish American theme. Aspects analyzed include place, country and year of publication; the language used in the research and publication; and the researcher’s sex and academic affiliation. The results also reveal the main hubs of production by country, a high rate of women who successfully conclude their doctoral studies, and the main research topics, as well as those whose coverage is insufficient.

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

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

The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature by Lesley Wylie (review)

The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature by Lesley Wylie (review)

The Politics of Literary Prestige: Prizes and Spanish American Literature by Sarah E. L. Bowskill

Reviewed by: The Politics of Literary Prestige: Prizes and Spanish American Literature by Sarah E. L. Bowskill Will H. Corral SARAH E. L. BOWSKILL The Politics of Literary Prestige: Prizes and Spanish American Literature New York. Bloomsbury Academic. 2022. 215 pages. SARAH E. L. BOWSKILL'S succinct study deals properly with the "never-ending network" discussed in her eighth and last chapter, which is ultimately the ample partisan positioning that is the subtext of the Spanish-language literary prizes she analyzes. In a 1981 press release on the misfortune of being a young writer, Gabriel García Márquez, no stranger to prizes and aware that they reveal who readers perceive as your peers, regrets young writers' "almost childish enthusiasm" [End Page 94] for national awards and fashionable fame. For him, with those prizes the publisher "not only mugs the novice writer, but the publisher uses [him] to become richer with little effort." Bowskill examines the politics behind such machinations, and her fine introduction encapsulates her methodology and goals. Her first chapter evaluates the relation among literary prizes, controversy, and the state in Spanish America; the second, how Spanish publishers intensified their cultural and economic influence during the Franco years with awards to Spanish American authors. In a strict chronology of those developments, the first chapter should follow the second, followed by the fifth (on Spain's Biblioteca Breve prize and "the forgotten women of the Boom," rightly rescuing "Ana Mairena" and Nivaria Tejera), even though the sixth chapter, "Women Winning Prizes: A No-Win Situation?" dovetails smoothly from the previous one, asserting that prizes are no country for younger women. This redistribution is as academic as The Politics of Literary Prestige but reinforces Bowskill's optimistic view of the relatively unknown writers she marshals in the seventh chapter, "Prizes for Literatures in Indigenous Languages." Evidently a sociological study (Pierre Bourdieu is ever-present) conceptually framed by James English's The Economy of Prestige, Bowskill has a fine eye for detail and information that may seem "gossipy." Her attention and dependence on digital resources, charts, and archives is impressive, leading her to conclude that "As the prize network colonizes more and more positions in the literary and political fields, there remain few options for authors wishing to remain beyond the network," although she avers that "caution must also be exercised when proclaiming the freedoms of publishing online as this space is increasingly colonized by corporations using our data for profit." Her ideological stance is well considered when ChatGPT could write books, or this review, and the humanities are losing prestige. At this state of the art, likening literary and political fields, or emphasizing "colonization," is better served by questioning the dependence on those terms, for concrete and ideological reasons. If Spanish America has not yet produced a Sherman Alexie, who writes in English, what network would judge literature in what Indigenous languages? Would such a web replicate the wheeling and dealing of mainstream prizes based on "a discourse of globalization rooted in Europe," in which exoticism and condescending attitudes still prevail? What to do with scandal-ridden prizes like the Planeta, or that since 1969 only six women have won the Anagrama prize, facts absent in Bowskill's analysis? She is right that women-only prizes or "the transcultural, transnational pan-Hispanic identity created and envisaged by the Premio Alfaguara" are not the solution as a counterdiscourse to anglophone acculturation. For the Colombian Héctor Abad Faciolince, who has lost prizes for over forty years, the statistics for gender equity, "official literatures," and conspiracy theories prove the senselessness of affirmative-action solutions for Spanish America. For the fourth chapter—which seeks common ground among Roberto Bolaño, Carmen Boullosa, and Fernando Iwasaki, writers with vastly different talents, as the reception of the latter two shows—putting in perspective other writers could have benefitted from Discípulos y maestros 2.0: Novela hispanoamericana hoy, much of which deals with emerging novelists' ethics vis-à-vis contests; and an earlier compilation, The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel: After Bolaño, which contextualizes almost all the recent novelists Bowskill discusses. If she proposes the notion of "network" to understand how prizes shape a wider literary...

Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (1940–2022)

Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (1940–2022)