For a half-century, the historiography on Spanish Habsburg rule suggested that the crown envisioned Indies society as best divided into two segregated sociolegal groups: the republic of the Spaniards and the republic of the Indians. This model was popularized by the eminent mid twentieth century Swedish historian Magnus Mörner and has since become a foundational concept in the field. However, using

This article examines a back-to-Africa movement from early twentieth-century Cuba. The leader, William George Emanuel, arrived in Cuba from Antigua in 1894, and over the next several years, he worked to unite the cabildos de nación and sociedades de color on the island. After independence in 1898, Emanuel and his followers rejected Cuban citizenship and began petitioning Britain, the United States

This article examines a much cited but little understood aspect of the Latin American intellectual and cultural ferment of the 1910s and 1920s: the frequency with which intellectuals from the southeastern Brazilian state of São Paulo referred to developments in post Sáenz Peña Argentina, and to a lesser extent in Uruguay and Chile. In books, pamphlets, speeches, and the pages of a vibrant periodical

The article examines the ideological character of Juan Carlos Onganía's dictatorship by exploring its ties and dialogue with Francisco Franco's Spain. Known as the “Argentine Revolution,” Onganía's regime (1966-70) was, the article shows, one of the first Cold War Latin American dictatorship to overtly use Francoist ideology as its point of reference. While building on the conventional wisdom that

The article analyzes political conflict in Mexico through a powerful social movement that erupted in the massive shantytown of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl between 1969 and 1973. In the summer of 1969, after decades of abysmal living conditions, the residents of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl (Neza) launched a payment strike to demand the federal government expropriate the land from private land developers, with the

This article aims to analyze traces of Aztec cultural memory recorded in sixteenth-century cultural sources of Central Mexico. It is a study of the particular case of an Aztec hero named Tlacahuepan, whose glorious death was commemorated in many songs and chronicles. The texts in question reveal highly symbolic language, as well as clearly established narrative patterns. The study of their discursive

This article examines the early history of the Hospital de San Hipólito in Mexico City, which delivered charitable care and basic medical services to a vulnerable category of colonial subjects known as “pobres dementes,” or mad paupers. In spite of the vast and robust literature on the history of madness and its institutions, surprisingly little is known about this institution, which, founded in 1567

Founded in 1947 by a Catholic priest, Acción Cultural Popular (ACPO) was a pioneer in radio education. Offering a radio station (Radio Sutatenza), study manuals, and a newspaper, ACPO provided basic education and encouraged campesinos to seek personal development and to “vivir mejor”--to live better. From 1947 to 1994, it attracted over four million subscribers and became a model in 13 Latin American

The year 1976 was a violent one in Nicaragua. In an effort to quash the Sandinista guerrillas, the dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle had declared a state of siege, suspending constitutional guarantees, muzzling the press, and unleashing the Guardia Nacional. Despite the dangers of dissent, thousands of students across the country walked off their secondary school campuses that year to protest poor

Many historians have chronicled the trajectory of missionaries and their activities in colonial Latin America. Jones’s book on the attempts to convert natives in the tropical lowlands on the eastern flanks of the Andes adds insights on one religious organization that was active in that under-studied frontier mission field. The missionaries of Santa Rosa de Ocopa traced their origins back to a reform

This article analyzes in depth the history of Petrona, an enslaved woman sold in Santa Fe (Argentina), sent to Buenos Aires and later possibly to Montevideo (Uruguay). By reconstructing her case, the article demonstrates how the legal status of enslaved persons was affected by the redefinitions of jurisdictions and by the forced or voluntary crossings between political units. This study also shows

The Cartilla para ensenar a leer (1569), attributed to Flemish Franciscan Pedro de Gante, was one of the most important primers from the early years of the viceroyalty of New Spain. Nevertheless, the primer's importance during the process of cultural contact has been largely ignored. As did other primers of the period, the Cartilla contained the most important prayers, but what sets the Cartilla aside

This article discusses the role played by the production of sugar and cane liquor (aguardente) in the seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Amazon region. It shows how the development of sugar production had a double significance: sugar plantations had to produce a commodity that could be exported so as to generate revenues for the Royal Treasury, but they also had to produce aguardente for domestic

This article examines the sylvan political ecology of late colonial New Spain and the colonial government's attempt to address deforestation through the Council on Forests, the first body in the kingdom's history dedicated to the conservation of natural resources. Drawing primarily from the corpus of documents produced by and remitted to the council, this article gives a trans-regional perspective

In 1657, the marquis of Villagarcia was appointed as president of the Audiencia of Charcas. Although, he eventually declined the post, his nomination generated an unusual trail of private documents. Using my study of this correspondence as a base, I will discuss how the networks of patronage were built and sustained, how they operated, and how they impacted the global mobility of imperial officials

This article examines criminal court cases about conflicts related to the electoral process at all stages from determining how elections would be administered to disputes about results. It argues that contemporary allegations of fraud, corruption, and misconduct during elections can inform us not only of the anomalies but also of the ways in which elections worked as expected, according to the laws

Juana Tapia did not know how to sign her own name. Yet, on September 12, 1900, Tapia successfully initiated a suit in federal district court for her son's release from military service. Her son, Miguel Alvarez, had been imprisoned by a local prefect during the recent municipal elections in the city of Hermosillo, Sonora, for alleged criminal activities. Instead of consigning Alvarez to a criminal judge

Dorr aims to make critical interventions into a number of cutting-edge academic discussions regarding race, gender, sexuality, nation, and diaspora. She does so with a remarkable cogency that demands and rewards multiple re-readings. But this very intellectual ambitiousness works against the book’s stated intention to provide “an experience with rather than an account of South American musical transits”

Claudia Leal addresses the Afro-descendant population and its communities in western Colombia, a forested area on the Pacific Ocean, the rainiest area in the Western Hemisphere and with the highest black population in Latin America. She studies its “extractivist economy” and social history based on the “racialization of the landscape,” for which she offers an environmentalist approach that deals with

Local history at its best usually includes more than the immediate vicinity. Lisa Pinley Covert’s study of San Miguel de Allende is a prime example. The author integrates history in three dimensions—local, national, and international—to examine the evolution of this small city in the hills of Mexico, 200 miles north of Mexico City and about 550 miles from the border with the United States. San Miguel

The influenza of 1918, the disastrous global pandemic known to many as the Spanish Flu, could not have come at a worse time for Mexico. The nation was eight years into its decade-long revolutionary struggle, a conflict that claimed the lives of well over a million citizens. Of those lost, several hundred thousand perished due to the influenza alone, usually from secondary complications such as pneumonia

En conclusión, Raúl Asensio nos sumerge en un aspecto del debate cultural y periodístico cusqueño que se desarrolló en una época marcada por grandes expectativas de cambio social y, al mismo tiempo, de reivindicación y recreación de la conciencia nacional y de las identidades locales y étnicas. En este sentido, en vísperas de la conmemoración de los cincuenta años del inicio de la revolución velasquista

the tropics so long as they practiced “moral hygiene,”which Martin explores in chapter 4, “Wandering Foci of Infection.” Through a careful study of the UFC’s medical discourse, Martin demonstrates how the company used the technology of medicine to prescribe behaviors and habits that it deemed moral. These habits were racialized, with UFC doctors advising white employees to stay away from black and

The second half of the book deals more with the aesthetics of the era and also with Serra’s reception in later periods. In the first part, Clara Bargelini and Pamela Huckins look at the aesthetics of churches with which Serra would have been familiar; then they consider how he adopted and adapted that vision in the missions that he created in California. The essay by Cynthia Neri Lewis considers Serra’s

As young medical students at Guanabara State University, Luiz Roberto Tenorio and Ricardo Agnese Fayad received some of the best medical education offered in 1960s Brazil. For six years, the peers in the same entering class had studied the principles of the healing arts and practiced their application at the university's teaching hospital. They had also witnessed the Brazilian military oust a democratically

A comprehensive synthesis, almost encyclopedic, of everything we know of the ItzaMaya, this volume, edited and mostly written by two archaeologists heavily engaged for decades in research in the Petén, Prudence Rice and Don Rice, scrutinizes social, political, environmental, and linguistic evidence from archaeological and historical studies on the Petén. In this truly interdisciplinary work, the focus

Durante la eṕoca colonial, Cartagena de Indias era el puerto principal en la Carrera de Indias y servía de entrada para esclavos y mercancías en su camino hacia el interior del Nuevo Reino de Granada y hacia el Perú vía Panama.́ Por consiguiente la ciudad se convirtio ́ en una plataforma para comerciantes, pero tambień para contrabandistas y corsarios. Todavía a principios del siglo XIX estos diferentes

Michel Gobat’s extensively researched and well-argued interrogation of William Walker’s failed imperial venture in Nicaragua, seeks to place this often overlooked historical episode into the broader narrative of US imperial expansion. Gobat examines a myriad of primary sources, most importantly the pro-Walker newspaper El Nicaragüense, which allows him to reconsider slavery’s role in defining Walker’s

OnJanuary 13, 1803, the French notaryDerieux visited the first of several estates owned by Domingo Rodríguez, recently deceased. Rodríguez’s property lay in the environs of Santiago de los Caballeros, a town in the north-central valley of Santo Domingo on eastern Hispaniola (today, the Dominican Republic). Over a three-week period, Derieux traveled with a team of witnesses and assessors to properties

The 1950s stand out as the “Golden Years” in the collective memory of many Brazilians. Sandwiched between the authoritarian periods of the Estado Novo dictatorship led by Getúlio Vargas (1937–45) and a military dictatorship (1964–85), the decade was a time of great optimism for the country’s future. Many hoped that the country would enjoy a lasting democratic system accompanied by the ever-increasing

In her study on the configuration of difference in colonial New Granada, Joanne Rappaport contends that many studies “tend to ignore how different practices of distinguishing one individual from another came into play in concrete situations,” and as a result they “end up labeling as ‘race’ something that was much more multifaceted.” Subsequently, she urges scholars to interpret colonial subjects and

The chapters vary in their levels of clarity, accessibility, and theoretical contribution. Some offer sharp and clearly written essays with new evidence and analytical insights; in others, high levels of abstraction render the theoretical points rather opaque. Several authors acknowledge the complexity and ambiguity of such concepts as “collective memory” itself (190), while others use that term and

Who controls access to water remains a deeply contentious issue across the world. From legal questions originating in the mid to late nineteenth century to the political impact of the Mexican Revolution and postrevolutionary period, Mikael D. Wolfe examines the historical context of this subject in Mexico. Wolfe focuses on how the Mexican state made sense of water rights and regulated access, particularly

The renewed interest in extractivism in Latin America has opened up an intriguing set of possibilities, moving beyond its initial concern with the political economy of mining, oil, and gas to consider activities like soy agriculture, dams, and oil palm plantations. These issues are often grasped socially in terms of opposition and defense of land and livelihood. The text offers a welcome focus on creation

John Bawden investigates the entrenched military culture andmindset that marked Chile’s “Pinochet generation” of officers, the cohort that carried out the 1973 coup against socialist president Salvador Allende. Augusto Pinochet and his allies instituted a 17-year dictatorship that used state violence and terror, combined with neoliberal restructuring, to “change the mentality” and destiny of Chileans

Born in 1900 to a lower middle-class Lima family, Magda Portal sneaked into university classes as a youngwoman. She soonwon critical praise for poetry that scandalizedmany of her contemporaries, with its considerations of female sexuality and agency. Her personal choices were no less shocking. Portal’s daughter Gloria was born eight months before Portal married the child’s father, Federico Bolaños

Christopher Church’s well-researched and innovative book is based on extensive archival sleuthing and covers a period of Caribbean history that has received relatively scant attention from scholars: the late nineteenth century through to the outbreak of World War I. With its principal geographic foci being Guadeloupe and Martinique, the study seeks to answer “two central questions: How did modern France

La última parte del libro se ocupa del declive y de la paulatina crisis hegemonial de España. Para Cuba fue de suma importancia, ya que esta crisis se agudizó con la pérdida de la flota entera cerca de Matanzas en 1628 después del ataque del holandés Piet Heyn. En la Paz de Westfalia de 1640 España tuvo que reconocer finalmente la independencia de Holanda y en 1659 la supremacía de Francia en la Paz

Las Casas wanted the act of absolution to be a healing activity in which penitents expressed real contrition and sought pardon of the indigenous people they had injured. This permitted the reconciliation of the aggrieved parties. The penitents had to confess all of their sins to the priest and then restore what had been lost. Las Casas understood that restitution (that is, making whole again) was not

One element of García’s book that needs further clarification is his references to an “ideal reader” (27). Though he admits that no ideal reader exists (38), García frames discussion around the bodies of knowledge that an ideal reader would have to be familiar with in order to understand the complexities of the works that he analyses. The diversity and longevity of this particular comic universe, however

John Tutino has long been one of the premier historians of Mexico’s agrarian past, and in this sweeping book he continues to explicate that past through deep research in primary sources, theoretical thinking, and historical synthesis. Focusing on areas of Mexico’s core that are now located in the Federal District and the states of Hidalgo, Mexico, and Morelos, Tutino shows how Mexico’s rural population

dedicated to his memory. Interestingly, Flinter’s own writings portray Simón Bolívar’s actions with a very gothic tone. Continuing in the study of fascinating brokers across imperial divides, Cameron B. Strang’s essay discusses George J. F. Clarke, an elite Florida patriot who was strongly loyal to Spanish understandings of race and miscegenation. Although Clarke probably did not marry their freedwoman

pharmacists’ reluctance to incorporate local materia medica and how the state and Catholic Church curbed scientific innovation in Peru. This rich social history promises to make Spanish colonial pharmacies both comprehensible and engaging. Students of history, science, technology, and medicine will appreciate its premodern perspective and the complex layers connecting religion, society, and medical

In late September 2016, the Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) hosted a symposium on regionalism in Brazilian history to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Professor Joseph L. Love's arrival at Illinois. Organized by the Institute's director, Professor Jerry Davila, the symposium brought together historians from the United States and Brazil

Bartolomé de las Casas’s famous 1552 Confesionario sought to employ the power of the Church and the confessional to wrest some small measure of justice for the native peoples who suffered from the Spaniards’ rapacious greed. In doing so, Las Casas articulated an innovative theology that declared that all Spaniards who had participated in, or benefited from, the conquest and exploitation of native peoples

In the 1840s, John L. Stephens traveled through northern Yucatan. While staying at the hacienda of San Francisco, he had locals dig into a square building at the ruins nearby. After six hours, a burial appeared below a flat stone. Everybody wondered whose bones these were. Stephens collected the skeletal remains and brought them back to the States where he carried them one night to the then-famous

The history of water has long been a subject of interest for scholars ofMexico.Wolfe builds on pioneering studies by Luis Aboites and engages more recent histories by Christopher Boyer and EmilyWakild, among others. One of the chief contributions of his book to this broader historiography is its diverse use of sources from national, state, and local archives in Mexico alongside foreign collections

Taking off from this stance, this is a book of scholarly erudition that draws on more than 30 years of research on missions across Spanish America. The author convincingly argues that successful evangelizing strategies were due to a combination of the natives’ pre-existing social organization and the ability of missionaries to adapt their organizational structures to that social environment. Jackson

As one of many handbooks published by Oxford University Press to provide valuable reference material for scholars and libraries, this volume is an impressive undertaking. It consists of 49 articles that cover the breadth of Aztec culture from a variety of perspectives. Overwhelmingly, the authors of these articles are archeologists and anthropologists. But experts from related fields, such as Anthony

In March 1855, a literary newspaper in Rio de Janeiro printed the first installment of Nisia Floresta's “Paginas de uma vida obscura,” a serialized short story inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Seven more chapters followed, keeping “Paginas” in the public eye for months. The Jornal do Commercio , arguably the national paper of record, mentioned the story in its announcements

The histories of state formation and capitalism in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil are interwoven into the meteoric rise and fall of slavery in these countries after 1780. Very early in the history of the professionalization of the historian’s craft, locally based scholars of the US South, Brazil, and Cuba had to explain slavery to provide a national narrative. Thus, the largest and oldest cumulative

It was in January 1950 that Guatemalan Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, a rather unfamiliar figure at the time, headed for El Salvador, giving no sign that he would eventually become one of the most notorious antagonists in the destruction of the 1944-54 Guatemalan Revolution. Late in 1950, he and some 70 compatriots attacked Guatemala City’s Base Militar, hoping to overthrow Juan José Arévalo’s government

Robert D. Aguirre, a professor of English at Wayne State University, has written an incisive cultural history of US and British perceptions of nineteenth-century Panama. Drawing principally on close readings of travel writers, poets, and photographers, he examines how Anglo-American assumptions about the isthmus permeated popular discourse. Such assumptions supported US and British neocolonial policies

On March 10, 1910, Pío Coronel informed his readers that he was abandoning his home in the western province of Pinar del Río and saddling up his horse to set out on an important journalistic and political assignment. The black press journalist noted that once he got wind of Cuban president José Miguel Gómez’s plans to set off from the presidential palace on a political campaign across the island, he

John Belohlavek offers an engaging study of women in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. His goal is “to explore and recognize the courage, spirit, and influence of women heralded and unheralded” (2). The book’s core is a series of narratives detailing the activities of individual women. He introduces women whose collective participation in the war does not typically receive as much attention as do

Enrique García’s study of the long-running comic book worlds created by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez is an eminently digestible introduction to a body of work that continues to be hugely influential within both Latino cultural production and the world of comics. García states that his book is targeted at both non-readers of comics and staunch fans, and there is more than enough material to satisfy both

The three editors of this work have created an essential textbook for students and teachers of the history of Latin America. The book is arranged chronologically in 26 chapters, each containing an introductory timeline, an exemplary primary source, and up-to-date suggestions for further reading. It includes an epilogue, glossary, and engaging maps and images to help students. As the preface explains

Golden Kingdoms is the catalogue of a joint exhibition of the J. Paul Getty Museum (September 2017 to January 2018) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (February to May, 2018). The book discusses the role and legacy of luxury items in the ancient Americas from a wide range of perspectives, addressing regions from Mexico to Peru and a chronology from 2000 BC to the Spanish colonial period. Despite this

“Mercy,” preached Fray Casimiro Díaz, “is the legitimate daughter of compassion. And the indigent exclaims, the widows, orphans, and destitute women broadcast, even the religious communities acclaim, that mercy is the distinctive virtue of this Holy Board, for your pious gifts reach all of them.” The Augustinian friar was addressing the guardians and members of Manila’s Hermandad de la Misericordia

Alas, two fundamental claims of the text are problematic. The author asserts that his exploration of the major theme, surviving slavery, is disconnected from “the enslaved people’s efforts to rebel, resist and wrest some measure of autonomy from their enslavers” (4). Yet he repeatedly underscores that they were frequently compelled to disobey and run away to lodge complaints because their masters “did