Spanish Colonial Research Articles

ВАГОВІ СИСТЕМИ ІСПАНІЇ, ПОРТУГАЛІЇ І КРАЇН ЛАТИНСЬКОЇ АМЕРИКИ

During the centuries of being part of the Roman Empire, the population of the Iberian Peninsula adopted the Latin language, the Roman state religion, and the achievements of Roman material and spiritual culture. The Roman state system of monetary and weight measures operated in the territory of Roman Spain. The conquest of Spain in the V century by the Visigoths did not lead to changes in the material and spiritual culture of the local Romanized population. On the basis of this culture, the civilizations of the modern countries located on the Iberian Peninsula – Spain and Portugal – were later formed. At the beginning of the VIII century, Spain was conquered by the Arabs. In the territory of the Iberian Peninsula, they created their own state – the Córdoba Caliphate. Arabs and North African Berbers, who later came to be known by the general name Moors, conquered almost all of Spain, except for the northern mountainous regions. In the north of Spain in the IX–XI centuries, Christian kingdoms arose – Castile, Leon, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal. Christian kingdoms in the VIII century began the Reconquest – the reconquest of the Iberian territory from the Arabs. It ended in 1492 when the troops of Castile and Aragon conquered the Emirate of Granada – the last state of the Arabs in Spain. During the Reconquista, four Christian kingdoms united into the modern state of Spain. Portugal remained independent. During the period from the VIII to the XV centuries, in the territory of the Iberian Peninsula there was a mutual influence of the cultures of the West and the East. It touched all spheres of life, in particular the economy and the monetary and weight system. The monetary weight of the Moors was borrowed from Spain and Portugal. In turn, the structure of the systems of weight measures of Spain and Portugal was created on the model of the measures of Ancient Rome and the measures of the countries of medieval Western Europe. However, the norm of the mass of units of these systems was influenced by Arab weight measures. In the XVI–XVII centuries, the era of Great Geographical Discoveries, in which Spain and Portugal played a leading role, began. Numerous Spanish and Portuguese colonies were established in the territory of North and South America, Africa, and Asia, where metropolitan weights were used for centuries. For a long time in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, which later became independent states, weight measures gradually changed and acquired local characteristics. This process conti­nued until the introduction of the international metric system in their territory.

Hearing Faith: Music as Theology in the Spanish Empire. Andrew A. Cashner. Studies in the History of Christian Traditions 194. Leiden: Brill, 2020. xvi + 244 pp. €107.

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Entre dos majestades: los mayas del Suroriente de la península de Yucatán ante el conflicto anglo-español (siglos XVII-XVIII)

The Southeast of the Yucatan Peninsula transformed from a territory of emancipation for the Mayans in the 17th century to a disputed region between the British and Spanish empires during the 18th century. In this conflict, stands out the role of the Mayans as historical actors.

Bourbon Reforms and State Capacity in the Spanish Empire

Bourbon Reforms and State Capacity in the Spanish Empire

Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West by Blake Allmendinger

Reviewed by: Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West by Blake Allmendinger Christine Bold Blake Allmendinger, Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 215 pp. Hardcover, $55; e-book, $55. The more stories of settlers going west to transform their identities emerge, the clearer the link between acts of “personal reinvention” (10) and the systemic dispossession of Indigenous lands becomes. This is not exactly the thesis of Blake Allmendinger’s Geographic Personas, but it is, to my mind, the volume’s most consequential implication. [End Page 430] Allmendinger brings together nine stories of self-transforming performance from the mid-nineteenth- to the early twentieth-century US West. Among the transnational array of figures some are familiar (Willa Cather, German author Karl May, mixed-race actor Sylvester Long / Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, French-Canadian cowboy artist and writer Will James / Joseph Dufault), some less so (con man James Addison Reavis, Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, Polish actor Helena Modjeska), and some surprising to find in this company (geologist and nature writer Clarence King, dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan). What this diverse group has in common is their reworkings of identity in western lands and social spaces. Allmendinger closely reads their stories for traces of performance, in his subjects’ maps, archival documents, autobiographies, fiction, visual art, theatrical style, and social relationships. Some stories bear directly on the land. Clarence King led the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, mapping boundary lines onto western lands that dispossessed and erased Indigenous peoples; back east he secretly straddled the color line, living as a member of an exclusive New York white men’s club and as a light-skinned Black man residing with his African American family in a segregated area of the city. James Addison Reavis invented an aristocratic Spanish lineage for himself, undergirded by forged archives and masqueraded relationships, in order to claim one of the “floating” land grants issued by Spanish colonizers (12), in this case 18,6000 square miles in New Mexico and Arizona Territories. When Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault of Montreal, Quebec, made himself over into Will James, cowboy, artist, writer, and Hollywood stuntman, the transformation depended both on his fictional autobiography and his larger rewriting of “the West into a fictional space bearing little resemblance to the settled territory” (51). Other stories carry different relationships to power, and the stakes in their impersonations seem quite different. Sylvester Long carried a complex lineage of Indigenous, Black, white, and Kainai (Blood) adoption; his self-identification as Buffalo Child Long Lance (naming himself first Cherokee then Blackfoot) and the fictions he performed on and off camera can be read as strategies [End Page 431] of survival, as he navigated the lines and fantasies laid down by dominant forces. Yone Noguchi arrived in California as “an educated member of the Japanese middle class” (97), but in pursuit of a career as poet and writer found himself navigating very different social structures. Employed first as hotel dishwasher, then as poet Joaquin Miller’s houseboy, he worked his way into patron-ship by members of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, for whom he performed identities crossing classes, sexualities, and Orientalist fantasies, including authoring The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902). After his return to Japan, Noguchi reflected on his identity performance: “two people, the Oriental and the Occidental, on one pair of shoulders are too painful to carry about” (106). In 1876 actor Helena Modjeska fled her own multiple and fractured identities, as well as the oppression of Poland under partition, to found an agricultural commune in California. When the experiment failed, she went on the American stage as a “self-styled Polish countess” (112), a layering of identities novelized in Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy (1926) and Susan Sontag’s In America (1999). Allmendinger starts in a familiar place, with Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis, rereading it as a parade of westward-moving actors changing costume as they encounter different landscapes. It’s a nice conceit and can work well—for example, when he parses the movement work of Isadora Duncan, the California-born “creator of modern American...

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

Questioning the Role of Anti-Blackness in Quijano’s Theory of Coloniality of Power

The author argues that Quijano’s conceptualization of race within the theory of coloniality of power is limited and theoretically insufficient given its lack of elaboration regarding the role of anti-Blackness in Spanish colonization. This article contrasts the idea of coloniality of power with Cedric Robinson’s elaboration of racial capitalism to demonstrates how Robinson has a more complex and historically rich analysis of race that centers the expansion of racial capitalism with the invention of the Negro subject. The article closes with an attempt to bridge the history of anti-Blackness and the idea of coloniality using Sylvia Wynter’s adaptation of the idea of coloniality, which is attentive to the Portuguese expeditions prior to Columbus and how coloniality disproportionally affected people of African descent in the Américas.

Baptism Between Empires: A Coast Miwok Family in the Pacific World

Scholarship has documented in detail how Spanish colonists forced California Indians to convert to Catholicism, but some Indigenous converts managed to avoid confinement in the mission system, particularly those who resided in the borderlands between Spanish and Russian settlements. This contribution to the roundtable considers the travels of one Coast Miwok family who avoided confinement and preserved local control over tribal homelands by assiduously cultivating links with Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches while holding colonial newcomers at arm's length.

Circumnavigation of the XVI century as a tool in the struggle for maritime dominance in the era of trade and colonial expansion

The article is devoted to the circumnavigations of the XVIth century as the most visible manifestation of the struggle of the leading maritime powers for supremacy at sea in the Age of Discovery and beginning of trade and colonial expansion. The first expeditions of Magellan and Drake were not initially planned as round-the-world, but circumstances forced their participants to undertake such a difficult and dangerous journey. Magellan's expedition was carried out in the context of the struggle between Portugal and Spain for the Spice Islands, and Drake's expedition was possible against the background of the aggravation of Anglo-Spanish relations, almost half a century after the completion of the first circumnavigation. Despite the dangers of the Strait of Magellan and the considerable losses on the long voyages, the profitability of the expeditions in the last third part of the XVIth century encouraged new attempts to replicate Drake's successes, particularly against the backdrop of the Anglo-Spanish War that began in 1585. The successful outcome of the Cavendish expedition spurred new English expeditions to the Straits. However, strengthening the defence capabilities of the Spanish colonies in the New World and harsh conditions for crossing the Strait lade to their failure. These circumstances have forced the English at the end of the century to focus on using the Portuguese route around the Cape of Good Hope in an attempt to reach the richest countries of Asia. At the turn of the XVI-XVII centuries Dutch navigators, adopting the experience of the English sailors, made several attempts to repeat Drake's expedition. Despite the success of Olivier van Noort, already in the first half of the XVII century, against the background of the end of the conflict with Spain, the Dutch, following the English, preferred to abandon the route through the Strait of Magellan in favour of the Portuguese route.

TACTICAL AND STRATEGIC LANDSCAPES: A STUDY OF MAYA FORTIFICATION AT TZUNUN, CHIAPAS, MEXICO

AbstractAlthough studies of warfare are now common in Maya archaeology, much remains to be learned about strategy, tactics, and various other practical factors in the process of making war. An emphasis on the concrete and practical is necessary to both acknowledge agency and understand how conflict relates to the human experience. Through an examination of documentary and archaeological data in a comparative framework, I elaborate on practices of Maya fortification construction and how the creation of a martial landscape ties into relations of power during the Late Postclassic/Early Spanish Colonial period (a.d. 1200–1600). During this period, in the region of Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico, Maya peoples fortified a peninsula according to principles of defense-in-depth. In other words, they created layers of fortification to slow and stall an attack. My analysis reveals how the creation of a martial landscape shaped local culture by incorporating elements of sacred geography and ritual landscape to perpetuate social inequality.

Centring Blackness: Towards a New Public History of the Spanish Empire

Centring Blackness: Towards a New Public History of the Spanish Empire

Генезис борьбы за колонии в северотихоокеанском регионе

The article is devoted to the origins of the struggle for colonies in the north of the Pacific Ocean in the context of the interaction between Russia, Great Britain and Spain in the 18th century, up to the voyage of J. Cook to the shores of Alaska. The activity of the European powers, which was associated with the discovery and colonization in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean, is considered. The history of the colonization of these territories is shown, as well as expeditions are studied. The article proves that the North Pacific has long attracted the attention of the powers of Europe. The factors that contributed to the development of the North-West of America are revealed. The researchers underline the value of the initiative of private commercial companies and also show that the expansion of the Spanish Empire became possible due to Madrid's fears about the strengthening of Russia in the North Pacific. In turn, Great Britain, taking a generally wait-and-see position, accumulated significant factual material about the colonies. It is concluded that, in general, the policy of Spain and Great Britain was aimed at curbing the Russian advance in the Pacific. Russian-Anglo-Spanish relations in the North-West of the Pacific Ocean at the end of the 17th - the first half of the 18th century made a significant contribution to the subsequent active colonization of the Pacific North. The authors used resources obtained from domestic and foreign archives.

Studying Indigenous Labor and Coercion on the Frontiers of the Spanish Empire: An Introduction

Studying Indigenous Labor and Coercion on the Frontiers of the Spanish Empire: An Introduction

Science, Medicine, and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish Empire

Science, Medicine, and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish Empire

Aggravation of the Colonial Struggle in the Pacific Ocean in 1760—1770s

The article is devoted to the struggle for colonies in the North Pacific in the context of the interaction between Russia, Great Britain and Spain in the second half of the 18th century, with an emphasis on the voyage of J. Cook to the coast of Alaska. The activity of Russia and the Western European powers related to the intensification of efforts in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean is considered. The article notes that the region studied by us has long attracted the attention of European countries. The factors that contributed to the development of the North-West of America are revealed. The authors show that it was a very complex and multifaceted process, in which various levels of state power, up to the emperors, participated. The importance of the initiative of private commercial companies in the colonization of territories is noted. The authors of the article draw attention to the fact that the expansion of the Spanish Empire became possible due to Madrid’s fears about the strengthening of Russia in the North Pacific. In turn, Great Britain carried out active intelligence activities, which resulted in a phase of military conflict at the end of the 18th century. On the basis of Russian and foreign documents introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, the authors of the article try to show the validity of the fears of the Madrid court regarding Russian colonization, as well as the ambitions of London in this region. Promotion of Russia to the northwest of America was due to economic and political reasons. The access to the Pacific Ocean of Russian private structures was caused by the desire to collect yasak from the indigenous peoples, as well as to obtain furs, which were highly valued in world markets. The article notes the changes in the position of Great Britain, Spain and Russia in relation to the colonies in the 18th century. It is concluded that, in general, the policy of Spain and Great Britain was aimed at curbing the Russian advance in the Pacific Ocean. Russian-Anglo-Spanish relations in the Northwest Pacific at the end of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th century made a significant contribution to the subsequent active colonization of the North Pacific. The article was written using an interdisciplinary approach based on a wide range of sources from domestic and foreign archives.

Social and Demographic Prerequisites for Mass Migration in Italy and Spain in the XIX Century

In this study the author analyses the causes of mass emigration from Southern Europe in the nineteenth century, which had a profound influence on the formation of the modern composition of the population of several Latin American countries. The study is based on the push/pull migration model proposed by Everett S. Lee, as well as on the model of interrelation of migration and employment diversification by sector of economic activity developed by Gustavo Cabrera, where the mono-industry specialisation of employment in a region stimulates the population outflow. Despite slow demographic growth, lagging industrialisation in Italy and Spain could not cope with the surplus labour force that emerged in the agrarian regions. The gap between the agrarian South and the industrialising North, characteristic of these two countries, had an important impact on the formation of internal mobility. Political upheavals – the unification of Italy, the dynastic confrontation in Spain – also increased the outflow of population. Unresolved agrarian issues, population growth and lagging modernisation increased the push-factor effect. The author notes the structural similarity of the internal causes of mass migration but, on the basis of statistical data, emphasises the geographical diversity of the resettlement areas chosen. The collapse of the Spanish Empire brought an end to the colonial type of migration, which had its greatest impact on the situation in Cuba in the period indicated. Further dynamics were determined by the socio-economic motivations and policies of the host countries, especially in Latin America and the USA, where migrants found new opportunities.

“In Honorable Remembrance to All Generations”: Commemoration and the Making of Mormon Battalion Memory, 1921–2021

“In Honorable Remembrance to All Generations”: Commemoration and the Making of Mormon Battalion Memory, 1921–2021

José F. Aranda Jr., The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948

Reviewed by: The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948 by José F. Aranda Jr John Alba Cutler (bio) José F. Aranda Jr., The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948. University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. 272. While Latinx and Chicanx literary studies have made little impression on modernist scholarship, José F. Aranda Jr.’s new book, The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948, shows what a vital contribution Mexican American literature can make to our collective understanding of modernity. Aranda argues that early Mexican American writing illuminates what Walter Mignolo calls “colonial difference,” which Aranda defines as “the space where those who are the targets of colonialism create strategies to [diagnose] and resist their own subjugation” (2). Because “these versions of colonial difference are de-linked from the nation-state,” they make visible what Aranda terms “modernities of subtraction,” or “a peculiar mode of modernity whose darker side, coloniality, operates at a greater distance from the rationalizations and promises of Enlightenment ideology” (2). Modernities of subtraction, Aranda contends, offer a distinct and challenging paradigm for understanding early Mexican American literature; at the same time, they emblematize the challenge that Mexican American literature poses to American studies. Without fully reckoning with the colonial difference of Mexican American literature, Aranda argues, we cannot hope to understand the nature of American modernity. Aranda’s book unfolds over five chapters, each of which examines a set of texts from a different site or “place” of Mexican American modernity. The first two chapters examine the legacy of the Vallejo family and the transition to US modernity in California; the third chapter looks at New Mexico via the autobiography of the Apache warrior Geronimo alongside Miguel Antonio Otero Jr.’s tendentious biography The Real Billy the Kid (1998); the fourth chapter reconsiders Jovita González’s writings about Tejano folklore; and the fifth chapter analyzes the barrio [End Page 136] through a newly recovered novel by Mexican writer Jorge Ainslie, first serialized in La Prensa in 1934–35. Place is crucial to Aranda’s analysis because it allows us to see the uneven and differential modernities depicted in Mexican American writing. Each of these places has its particular history of Spanish colonization, and Mexican American writing shows the imbrication of US colonization over that prior colonial moment. Taking up the framework of the philosophy of liberation from thinkers such as Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, and others, Aranda equates this imbricated coloniality with the very condition of modernity. For Mexican Americans, it is subtractive because US modernity has meant deterritorialization, disenfranchisement, proletarianization, and cultural marginalization. Aranda’s approach allows him to wrestle with a persistent difficulty in Chicanx and Mexican American literary history, namely, how to interpret the work of early Mexican Americans who professed political attitudes that seem retrograde or reactionary by the standards of later generations. In these cases, Aranda argues that it is important not to allow the nation-state to overdetermine our reading. In the case of Francisca Vallejo, for example—whose early twentieth-century poetry and radio broadcasts Aranda analyzes in chapter 2—pastoral nostalgia does not represent accommodation to the racial and cultural norms of US modernity, even though it dovetails with many of those norms, including the presumed superiority of whiteness and the importance of European civilization in cultivating the land. Aranda maintains that we should understand Vallejo’s nostalgia instead as evidence of what Carey McWilliams famously termed “fantasy Spanish heritage,” but not in the service of accommodating US racial norms. Instead, Vallejo’s nostalgia attempts to resist the encroachment of US modernity by asserting a prior moment of Spanish modernity/coloniality. The value of these early texts emerges from both the critiques they make of US modernity and the contradictory terms their critiques employ. They should not be dismissed for failing to anticipate the radical politics of the Chicano Movement, nor should they be uncritically celebrated as proto-political precursors to the Movement. Rather, they exemplify, among other things, the conflicts and contradictions in the passage from one settler-colonial regime to another. As this discussion implies, one of the book’s notable features...

Contingent Colonialities

This work in progress report presents the bilingual mapping project “Decolonizing The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca/Descolonizar La relación de Cabeza de Vaca,” an interdisciplinary undergraduate, graduate, and faculty digital humanities collaboration that aims to educate users about the impacts of Spanish colonization and its ramifications on the creation and evolution of latinidades in the Americas by (1) recovering the history of that colonization within Latin America as well as what became the United States, (2) analyzing how and by whom that history has been narrated, and (2) considering what impact those narratives have on society today. 
 Written in Spanish, La relación precedes English-language accounts that describe what is now the United States, providing necessary historical context for the centuries-long development of transborder latinidades throughout the hemisphere. At the same time, the fact that La relación was not written in English does not mean the text is not Eurocentric. On the contrary, fully apprehending La relación and its impact requires a decolonial approach that decenters Cabeza de Vaca and his limited perspective. By visualizing this Spanish colonial narrative, this project provides not just a window into what became the pre-Anglophone Southern and Southwestern United States, but also brings into sharp relief the complexities of the overlapping colonialities these lands have experienced, as well as the way the interplay among those colonialities has shaped U.S. Latinx communities and their relationship to hemispheric latinidades.

Chinese Religions and the Cuban Revolution

The issue of religious practices within the Chinese diaspora in Cuba is increasingly debated within Chinese studies in Latin America. As the Chinese and African diasporas in Cuba have intermingled ethnically, their religious practices have historically also intermingled. While the rise of Afro-Cuban religions in recent decades is primarily understood as a response to centuries of Spanish colonialism and perceived as a resistance to Eurocentric hegemonic power, this article aims to examine the efforts of the Chinese diaspora to re-evaluate their religions from the same decolonial perspective. This article aims to determine the tendencies of interactions between Chinese religious beliefs and Cuba’s religions before and after the Cuban Revolution, including after the fall of the socialist bloc. Specifically, it examines whether post-revolution state atheism had an impact on the religious beliefs and ethnic heritage of members of the Chinese diaspora. In the 1990s there was a revival of the Guan Yu (关羽) cult which has been often interpreted as a consequence of the economic interests of the Chinese and Afro-Chinese diaspora or as a consequence of the interests of the Cuban government. However, we must also be aware of the broader historical, social and political context at play here.