Colonial Latin American History

Promoting a better understanding of the phenomenon of colonization and its connection with environmental knowledge and technology, this article proposes a reframing of research agendas to take into account the municipal character of colonization in the Hispanic realm and to ask new questions. Questions should address what human– ecosystem relations, and the ways of knowing and techniques for transforming the physical realm, can tell us about colonization itself; who the historical agents involved were, and what these actors knew, learned, and did in their environments. Using the Basin of Mexico's drainage and the agency of commoners, this article proposes that colonization depends on the massive deployment and generation of tacit knowledge about how to harness matter, energy, and time for the reproduction of human societies; the quotidian appropriation and reworking of autochthonous knowledge, techniques, and technology by the colonizing groups; the collaboration of the local populations in whom these are vested; and the agency of commoners with practical skills, environmental knowledge, and technological savvy derived from and honed in the realm of material production. In the Ibero-American realm, these agents were primarily commoners with skills in agropastoral production and the building trades; race, ethnicity, language, and gender were secondary conditions.

BARRIERA, Darío y DALLA CORTE, Gabriela (compiladores) Espacios de familia: ¿tejidos de lealtades o campos de confrontación? Tomo I, España y América, siglos XVI-XX Jitanjafora, México, marzo de 2003, 324 pp. (co-compilador) - ISBN 968-5709-02-5
Incluye trabajos de Jean-Paul Zúñiga, Santiago de Llobet Masachs, Estrella Figueres Valles, Andrea Reguera y los compiladores.

This dissertation examines the participation of indigenous workers in the colonial mining industry of the Guanajuato-Michoacán region and the impact that this industry had on those workers and their communities of origin. In the present-day states of Guanajuato and Michoacán, Mexico, there existed a vibrant and lucrative mining economy throughout the colonial period (1521-1810). Michoacán’s mining industry produced a steady supply of copper and silver, and Guanajuato is best known for its extremely wealthy silver mines, especially after the mid-eighteenth century, when it became the world’s greatest producer of silver. The region’s mining industry created a very competitive labor market in which mine owners used different strategies to recruit and retain a labor force. Although mine owners paid many workers for their labor, the industry also relied on coerced forms of labor, including slavery, encomienda, repartimiento, and debt peonage.
Many scholars who have studied the economic significance of the mining industry in the region, and its impact on the world economy, have not adequately examined the composition of the labor force. Those who have studied the labor force have focused on particular mining centers, overlooking the regional context within which the mines operated. Miners competed with one another and with other industries for workers. This competition put considerable pressure on the region’s indigenous communities to provide the bulk of the labor force. Also, labor demands led many people to migrate, altering the demographic composition of the region. Using a regional history approach and ethnohistorical methodologies, the dissertation examines the nature of the labor institutions that were utilized to recruit workers to the mines, and the impact of the mining industry on indigenous workers and their communities. Ultimately, this dissertation uses a variety of original sources to highlight the important role that indigenous men and women played in the mining industry of Guanajuato, and the persistence of an indigenous identity in this mining town. My findings contribute to the fields of labor history, ethnohistory, and mining history.

For 300 years, Franciscans were at the forefront of the spread of Catholicism in the New World. In the late seventeenth century, Franciscans developed a far-reaching, systematic missionary program in Spain and the Americas. After founding the first college of propaganda fide in the Mexican city of Querétaro, the Franciscan Order established six additional colleges in New Spain, ten in South America, and twelve in Spain. From these colleges Franciscans proselytized Indians in frontier territories as well as Catholics in rural and urban areas in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America.

To Sin No More is the first book to study these colleges, their missionaries, and their multifaceted, sweeping missionary programs. By focusing on the recruitment of non-Catholics to Catholicism as well as the deepening of religious fervor among Catholics, David Rex Galindo shows how the Franciscan colleges expanded and shaped popular Catholicism in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. This book explores the motivations driving Franciscan friars, their lives inside the colleges, their training, and their ministry among Catholics, an often-overlooked duty that paralleled missionary deployments. Rex Galindo argues that Franciscan missionaries aimed to reform or "reawaken" Catholic parishioners just as much as they sought to convert non-Christian Indians.

In this article, I explore the parallel responses of two groups of colonial subjects who were confronted with the institutional changes that occurred in the context of Enlightenment ideas in eighteenth-century Mexico: Creole clerics headed by the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero; and native religious men who petitioned to colonial authorities and the crown for additional spaces for the education of indigenous men.

Winner of the 2022 Edmund Keeley Prize
https://mgsasymposium.org/anno-kb.html

In the middle of the fifteenth century, ominous portents like columns of fire and dense fog were seen above the skies of Constantinople as the Byzantine capital fell under siege by the Ottomans. Allegedly, similar signs appeared a few decades later and seven thousand miles away, forecasting the fall of the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan—Tlatelolco to the Spanish and their indigenous allies. After both cities had fallen, some Greeks and Mexica turned to poetry and song to express their anguish at the birth of what has come to be called the “modern” era.

This study probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems, the “Lament for Constantinople,” the “Huexotzinca Piece,” and the “Tlaxcala Piece.” Composed by anonymous authors soon after the conquest of the two cities, these texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic. They are the workings of creators who draw on tradition and historical particulars to articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered.

An inquiry into the ethnic and linguistic composition of the Late Postclassic and Colonial peoples of the Cotzumalhuapa region of the Pacific Coast of Guatemala. Documentary and archeological research provides a basis to locate Colonial towns in the area, and to identify their inhabitants as Pipil and Kaqchikel speakers. The latter were politically dominant, and their presence derived from the Late Postclassic expansion of the highland kingdom centered at Iximche, seeking the valuable cacao-producing territories of the Pacific piedmont. Excavations at a household compound near the site of Bilbao allow a preliminary glimpse at the Postclassic peoples of the area.

Who was Catalina de Erauso, the Lieutenant Nun? Swashbuckler, brawler, hard-headed businessperson, soldier, gallant, celebrity, transvestite, nun? How can one fail to be fascinated by her? A woman, yet a man; a soldier, yet a nun; Spanish, yet Basque. Catalina de Erauso embodied the contradictions and conflicts of the Early Modern Period, but she also transcended them in her own way. She became a stage on which we see how tensions between different identities played out in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Spain, particularly the tensions between two sexual identities, male and female, and between the competing and multiple national "identities" already defined and being defined within that new thing that was "Spain." This book explores the different facets of Erauso's persona: her sexual identity and the factors that determined her choice of gender roles; and her Basque origin and its impact on her life and her self-image.

How did Spain rule over an immense global empire for more than three centuries given the absence of a standing army and the presence of stark inequalities? In this course students will learn how historians have answered this enduring question, and will analyze a range of primary sources such as wills, artworks, and petitions to develop theories of their own. We explore the experience of empire from the perspectives of diverse groups of people including free and enslaved Africans, indigenous men and women, mestizo soldiers, nuns, and colonial elites. By studying the writings of Andean intellectuals and the testimonies of slaves who took their masters to court or rose up in violent rebellions against the colonial order, students will develop a deeper understanding of the complexity of Spanish rule and its variations across time and place. We also consider the legacies of this global empire, and controversies about how we tell its history.
This course is chronologically and thematically organized. It begins in 1491, on the eve of the Iberian invasion of the Americas and the Caribbean, and ends in 1898, when Spain lost the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.  The semester is structured around four myths about the global Spanish empire that persist in historiography and popular culture: the myth of colonial rule by coercion; the ‘commercial revolution’ and the myth of mobility; and the myth of imperial collapse. Key themes include the development of racial ideologies in the Iberian world, and their impact on the evolution of racial slavery.

This article will show the role of free women in the San Benito de Palermo sisterhood founded in 1646. This research paper explores the social role in such a corporation: the composition by gender, the organizational structure in the system’s positions, the contribution of its female members -“cofradas”- in alms collection, their attitude and pious, festive and ludic behaviours in festivities, solemn parades and processions. This work is founded on their accounting books, registries and election meeting acts performed during the XVIIIth century. It is its goal to evaluate the role of women in brotherhoods and sisterhoods established by blacks and mulattoes, specifically those ones devoted to San Benito de Palermo, whose main feature is having a larger female membership as in those other found in most of the Hispanic world, where San Miguel el Grande, in New Spain’s Bajío, was not an exception. Current historiography requires more case studies to confront the established premises and give new insights to evaluate, as in this case, the importance of women in the operation of a religious corporation during the Ancien Regime.

Architecture  and  urbanism  have  been  developed  in  Mexico  during millennia  as  demonstrated  by  the  archaeological  record.  During  colonial times,  such  constructive  tradition  was  enriched  by  colonial  contributions. As a result, a great number of new foundations appeared over an almost 2
million square km territory. This way, great capitals such as Mexico City, Puebla, Monterrey and Guadalajara arose. Smaller urban centres and towns also appeared, frequently associated to specific economic activities such as mining or agriculture.

Desde o início da colonização, o trabalho compulsório dos indígenas esteve entre as questões mais debatidas na Espanha e em suas possessões americanas. Nos anos finais do século XVI, os repartimientos, instituição de recrutamento de mão-de-obra nativa, estiveram sob o julgamento de franciscanos e jesuítas. Teólogos dessas duas ordens religiosas foram chamados a dar seus pareceres a respeito da licitude e legitimidade do repartimiento no México. O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar e confrontar as duas visões sobre aquela instituição, avaliando e enumerando os seus respectivos argumentos.

Depuis le début de la colonisation, le travail forcé des indigènes a été largement discuté en Espagne et ses possessions américaines. Dans les dernières années du XVIe siècle, les repartimientos, institution de recruter la main-d’oeuvre indigène, ont été examiné et jugés par les jésuites et franciscains. Les théologiens de ces deux ordres religieux ont été invités à donner leurs avis sur la légalité et la légitimité des repartimientos dans le Mexique. L’objectif de cet article est d’analyser et de comparer les deux points de vue sur cette institution, en train d’évaluer et d’énumérer leurs arguments respectifs.

The Spanish conquistadores' capture of the Inka emperor, Atawallpa, and massacre of many of his people in Cajamarca on November 16, 1532, was a tremendously consequential event. How does our view of such an event change, however, when viewed at a distance and from different places? Relying on Indigenous testimony, this article threads together the stories and actions of provincial folk, Andean lords, female intermediaries, fugitive Inka royalty, runner-messengers, porters, and slaves maneuvering beyond Caja-marca during this chaotic and confusing time. Reconstructing and mapping their activity demonstrates how Andean diplomacy, mobility, politics, and history made the conquistadores' survival in Cajamarca-and subsequent advance to Cuzco-possible. It also presents glimpses into how and why Andeans made the decisions they did and serves as a useful reminder that, to these actors in 1532 and 1533, nothing was inevitable. Cajamarca, November 1532 T he Sapa Inka, or peerless ruler, set out from the royal baths of Qonoq for Cajamarca on November 16, 1532. Atawallpa, the leader of the largest Indigenous empire in the Americas, traveled with such a large entourage that, when he arrived at the plaza of Cajamarca, some members of his procession had not yet left Qonoq, six kilometers behind. As the procession entered the plaza (see figure 1), Francisco Pizarro and some 167 compatriots waited in hiding in adjacent buildings. Friar Vicente de Valverde emerged from one of the buildings and approached the emperor. Eyewitness accounts differ about what happened next. The picture presented by the scribe Francisco de Xerez and other Spanish witnesses is one of a devastating yet carefully orchestrated attack.

The document here presented is one of the first accounts made by Europeans about the Indians in the New World, just a few years after the arrival of Christopher Columbus. The author, Ramón Pané, was a hieronymite friar and stayed for a couple of
years among the Taino Indians, producing the first account made by a religious writer about these people. Besides presenting some notices about the author and his work, we
offer a key to the reading of the document.

Arqueológicamente se diagnostica las luchas indígenas por el territorio en el sur del Tolima; genealógicamente, se analizan formas de resistencia emergentes, especialmente, del «Gran Resguardo de Ortega y Chaparral», como prácticas y formas discursivas fundadas en reivindicaciones de Manuel Quintín Lame, que propiciaron la conformación de un movimiento social. Como metodologías, la arqueología describe y muestra lo efectivamente dicho por Quintín Lame y sus difusores; la genealogía permite análisis críticos, alternativos –no autorizados, ilegítimos– de múltiples fuerzas que atraviesan y tensionan los discursos, para visibilizar aquello que tendenciosamente se procura que no sea visto, por los implicados en el hecho. Palabras clave. prácticas y formas discursivas; movimiento social de resistencia; territorialidades indígenas; fuerzas que tensionan discursos.

Los objetivos planteados  este libro, partieron de la necesidad de reconstruir históricamente las relaciones familia- escuela,  en el proceso de transición de la educación doméstica colonial a la educación pública republicana en Colombia; se buscó establecer las características fundamentales del período desde finales de la Colonia y de 1819 a 1830; explicar el proceso de la apertura  a la modernidad colombiana en cuanto a la nueva organización republicana y sus consecuencias en  la educación pública; reconstruir el papel desempeñado por padres y madres de familia frente a su función educadora durante este período inicial de transición de la educación familiar a la educación pública; analizar las nuevas formas relacionales entabladas entre la familia  y la escuela, caracterizando los tipos de problemas suscitados entre unos y otros con respecto a la nueva organización del sistema educativo; indagar sobre los principales métodos pedagógicos que se implementaron en el período y su impacto en la relación con  la vida familiar y, finalmente analizar la legislación en el campo educativo y el lugar asignado a las familias, para contextualizar la relación familia-escuela en el período de estudio.

Este trabajo se inscribe por su contenido en el campo de la Historia Social de la Educación, utilizando el análisis documental y el análisis de contenido.  En el vértice de la Historia Social y en convergencia con la Sociología de la Familia y de la Educación, se quiso explicar el origen y desarrollo de la relación de la familia y la educación, en una mirada que abarca desde finales del siglo XVIII hasta las tres primeras décadas del siglo XIX en Colombia. Para la realización del trabajo se revisó la base bibliográfica de la Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia y el Archivo General de la Nación y las fuentes secundarias disponibles sobre el período de estudio en la Biblioteca del Colegio de México y la Biblioteca Luís Ángel Arango. En fuentes primarias se rastreó exhaustivamente la legislación, la prensa, la correspondencia, manuales de enseñanza, manuales de padres y madres, discursos, memorias, catecismos políticos y de moral, reglamentos de policía, quejas, representaciones, actas y libros de familia. Para el caso de la prensa, se consultaron 151 periódicos de la época. En las fuentes secundarias se consultaron biografías, artículos y libros sobre Educación, Familia, Historia de Colombia y de América Latina, Pensamiento Colombiano y Latinoamericano, Padres de Familia e Instituciones Educativas, Ilustración, entre otros temas. 

Este estudio pretende hacer aportes historiográficos a la comprensión del sistema educativo colombiano en el contexto nacional en torno a los orígenes de la relación de la familia con la institución escolar, mostrando cómo muchas de las contradicciones iniciales se mantienen entre los dos actores educativos, padres y maestros, lo que obstaculiza la comunicación familia/escuela, los tipos de vinculación entre ambas e incide negativamente en los procesos de socialización de la infancia.

Está planteado en dos partes y cuatro capítulos; la primera parte contempla la educación colonial tanto pública como doméstica y la segunda, la educación republicana ofrecida por el Estado y las relaciones que los padres de familia generaron ante el nuevo sistema educativo.

The assimilation of chocolate into the Spanish colonial structure, specifically the process in colonial Mexico, mirrors the subsuming of indigenous women within the domestic sphere of Spanish households.  Far from disappearing, both women and chocolate transformed the appearance and culture of colonial Spain from something that strove to be wholly European to something mestizo or “mixed”.

This article examines a series of proposals for improving silver refining methods presented to the municipal council of Potosí (in current-day Bolivia) in the late sixteenth century as a means of nuancing current understandings of the Iberian state’s pursuit of “useful” knowledge. Historians have argued that the sixteenth century saw the fostering of an empirical culture, one based on experiential and collaborative practices, in the Iberian world. They have stressed that as artisanal experts and royal officials developed a mutually beneficial relationship, this empirical culture became institutionalized in administrative bodies for the pursuit of useful knowledge. This article focuses on the textual production that resulted from the relationship between artisanal experts and royal officials. It probes the motivations of local officials in generating a textual record of artisanal knowledge. Historians have tended to interpret and actors at the time often stated an interest in inscribing, artisanal knowledge as expertise and experience. However, this article demonstrates that what often motivated municipal officials’ inscription of such knowledge was an emphasis on administrative knowledge as rule-following, in particular, a desire to demonstrate one’s competency as an administrator. This conclusion suggests historians should expand their conception of “useful” to better reflect how early modern actors in the Iberian world viewed their pursuit of scientific and technical knowledge. It also indicates the importance of paying attention to the process of bureaucratic knowledge production when interpreting the written traces of the scientific and technical culture of the early modern Iberian world.

Los estudios andinos, en amplio sentido, han atribuido a Juan de Matienzo –oidor de la audiencia de Charcas entre 1561 y 1579– la elaboración argumentada de la legitimidad del dominio español, a partir de la consideración jurídica de signar a los incas de tiranos. Como correlato a esta clásica apreciación historiográfica sobre las sentencias del licenciado, sostenemos que paralelamente a la construcción de una tiranía inca prehispánica, aquel propone un diseño de gobierno que sugiere la recuperación de ciertos aspectos de esta civilización, que facilitaron –por cierto– el control de la fuerza laboral nativa y el disciplinamiento de sus prácticas de vida cotidiana. Ponemos en evidencia el hecho de que la tiranía fue un ejercicio retórico paralelo a la elaboración de una imagen española del imperio incaico, en tanto garante de formas modernas de control de la población y disposición de su mano de obra.