A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Although Obregón’s role in the Ibarra expedition was that of soldier-explorer, and despite his lacking an advanced education, he would go on to compose Historia de los descubrimientos de Nueva España twenty years later, expanding his narrative to include the years before and after his own firsthand experiences with Ibarra. Obregón depicts the storied landscape of the northern borderlands with vivid imagery, fusing setting and situation, constructing a new reality of what was, is, and should be, and presenting it as truth.
In Capturing the Landscape of New Spain, Rebecca A. Carte explains how landscape performs a primary role in Obregón’s retelling, emerging at times as protagonist and others as antagonist. Carte argues that Obregón’s textualization offers one of the first renderings of the region through the Occidental cultural lens, offering insight into Spanish cultural perceptions of landscape during a period of important social and political shifts.
By examining mapping and landscape discourse, Carte shows how history and geography, past and present, people and land, come together to fashion the landscape of northern New Spain.
Winner, Roland H. Bainton Book Prize, The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, 2019
Some sixty years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, a group of Nahua intellectuals in Mexico City set about compiling an extensive book of miscellanea, which was recorded in pictorial form with alphabetic texts in Nahuatl clarifying some imagery or adding new information altogether. This manuscript, known as the Codex Mexicanus, includes records pertaining to the Aztec and Christian calendars, European medical astrology, a genealogy of the Tenochca royal house, and an annals history of pre-conquest Tenochtitlan and early colonial Mexico City, among other topics. Though filled with intriguing information, the Mexicanus has long defied a comprehensive scholarly analysis, surely due to its disparate contents.
In this pathfinding volume, Lori Boornazian Diel presents the first thorough study of the entire Codex Mexicanus that considers its varied contents in a holistic manner. She provides an authoritative reading of the Mexicanus’s contents and explains what its creation and use reveal about native reactions to and negotiations of colonial rule in Mexico City. Diel makes sense of the codex by revealing how its miscellaneous contents find counterparts in Spanish books called Reportorios de los tiempos. Based on the medieval almanac tradition, Reportorios contain vast assortments of information related to the issue of time, as does the Mexicanus. Diel masterfully demonstrates that, just as Reportorios were used as guides to living in early modern Spain, likewise the Codex Mexicanus provided its Nahua audience a guide to living in colonial New Spain.
Compound Remedies examines the equipment, books, and remedies of colonial Mexico City’s Herrera pharmacy—natural substances with known healing powers that formed part of the basis for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico. Paula S. De Vos traces the evolution of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition from its foundations in ancient Greece to the physician-philosophers of medieval Islamic empires and the Latin West and eventually through the Spanish Empire to Mexico, offering a global history of the transmission of these materials, knowledges, and techniques. Her detailed inventory of the Herrera pharmacy reveals the many layers of this tradition and how it developed over centuries, providing new perspectives and insight into the development of Western science and medicine: its varied origins, its engagement with and inclusion of multiple knowledge traditions, the ways in which these traditions moved and circulated in relation to imperialism, and its long-term continuities and dramatic transformations. De Vos ultimately reveals the great significance of pharmacy, and of artisanal pursuits more generally, as a cornerstone of ancient, medieval, and early modern epistemologies and philosophies of nature.
The variety of sources uncovered in the authors’ original archival research suggests the wide diversity of topics and approaches they employ: Nahua annals, Spanish chronicles, Inquisition case records, documents on land disputes, sermons, images, and death registers. Geographically, the range of research focuses on the viceroyalties of New Spain, Peru, and New Granada.
The resulting records—both documentary and archaeological—offer us a variety of vantage points from which to view each of these cultural groups as they came into contact with others. Much less tied to modern national boundaries or old imperial ones, the many facets of the new historical research exploring the topic of death demonstrate that no attitudes or practices can be considered either “Western” or universal.
In each chapter a particular document is transcribed exactly as it appears in the original manuscript or colonial printed document, with the editor placing it in historical context and considering the degree of European influence. These texts show the nobility through documents they themselves produced or caused to be produced—such as wills, land deeds, and petitions—and prioritize indigenous ways of expression, perspectives, and concepts. Together, the chapters demonstrate that native elites were independent actors as well as agents of social change and indigenous sustainability in colonial society. Additionally, the volume diversifies the commonly homogenous term “cacique” and recognizes the differences in elites throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes.
Showcasing important and varied colonial genres of indigenous writing, Dialogue with Europe, Dialogue with the Past reveals some of the realities, needs, strategies, behaviors, and attitudes associated with the lives of the elites. Each document and its accompanying commentary provide additional insight into how the nobility negotiated everyday life. The book will be of great interest to students and researchers of Mesoamerican and Andean history, as well as those interested in indigenous colonial societies in the Spanish Empire.
Contributors: Agnieszka Brylak, Maria Castañeda de la Paz, Katarzyna Granicka, Gregory Haimovich, Anastasia Kalyuta, Julia Madajczak, Patrycja Prządka-Giersz
While the Spanish conquistadors have been stereotyped as rapacious treasure seekers, many firstcomers to the New World realized that its greatest wealth lay in the native populations whose labor could be harnessed to build a new Spain. Hence, the early arrivals in Mexico sought encomiendas—"a grant of the Indians of a prescribed indigenous polity, who were to provide the grantee (the encomendero) tribute in the form of commoditiesand service in return for protection and religious instruction."
This study profiles the 506 known encomenderos in New Spain (present-day Mexico) during the years 1521-1555, using their life histories to chart the rise, florescence, and decline of the encomienda system. The first part draws general conclusions about the actual workings of the encomienda system. The second part provides concise biographies of the encomenderos themselves.
Essays featured in this issue analyze the use of cartography to communicate the urban form of early colonial Mexico City and the application of botanical and protochemical knowledge to make ink for native maps from Oaxaca. Other essays address the representation of ethnicity and space in seventeenth-century Manila, the construction of spatial boundaries through the use of word and image in central Mexico, and the survival of Nahua place names and social ordering in eighteenth-century Mexico City.
Alexander Hidalgo is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Texas Christian University. John F. López is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago.
The founding of la Villa Rica de la Veracruz (the rich town of the True Cross) is prominently mentioned in histories of the conquest of Mexico, but scant primary documentation of the provocative act exists. During a research session at the Spanish archives, when John Schwaller discovered an early-sixteenth-century letter from Veracruz signed by the members of Cortés’s company, he knew he had found a trove of historical details. Providing an accessible, accurate translation of this pivotal correspondence, along with in-depth examinations of its context and significance, The First Letter from New Spain gives all readers access to the first document written from the mainland of North America by any European, and the only surviving original document from the first months of the conquest.
The timing of Cortés’s Good Friday landing, immediately before the initial assault on the Aztec Empire, enhances the significance of this work. Though the expedition was conducted under the authority of Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba, the letter reflects an attempt to break ties with Velázquez and form a strategic alliance with Carlos V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. Brimming with details about the events surrounding Veracruz’s inception and accompanied by mini-biographies of 318 signers of the document—socially competitive men who risked charges of treason by renouncing Velázquez—The First Letter from New Spain gives evidence of entrepreneurship and other overlooked traits that fueled the conquest.
In Foundational Arts Michael K. Schuessler asserts that the literature of New Spain begins with missionary theater and its intimate relationship to mural painting. In particular, he examines the relationships between texts and visual images that emerged in Mexico at two Augustinian monasteries in Hidalgo, Mexico, during the century following the Spanish Conquest. The forced combination of the ideographical tradition of Nahuatl with Latin-based language alphabets led to a fascinating array of new cultural expressions.
Missionary theater was organized by ingenious friars with the intent to convert and catechize indigenous populations. Often performed in Nahuatl or other local languages, the actors combined Latin-based language texts with visual contexts that corresponded to indigenous ways of knowing: murals, architectural ornamentation, statuary, altars, and other modes of visual representation. By concentrating on the interrelationship between mural painting and missionary theater, Foundational Arts explores the artistic and ideological origins of Mexican plastic arts and literature.
An international team of specialists in classical scholarship and Mesoamerican studies engage in an interdisciplinary discussion involving ideas from history, anthropology, archaeology, art history, iconography, and philology. Key themes include the role of religion in processes of imperial domination; religion’s use as an instrument of resistance or the imposition, appropriation, incorporation, and adaptation of various elements of religious systems by hegemonic groups and subaltern peoples; the creative misunderstandings that can arise on the “middle ground”; and Christianity’s rejection of ritual violence and its use of this rejection as a pretext for inflicting other kinds of violence against peoples classified as “barbarian,” “pagan,” or “diabolical.”
From Ancient Rome to Colonial Mexico presents a sympathetic vantage point for discussing and attempting to decipher past processes of social communication in multicultural contexts of present-day realities. It will be significant for scholars and specialists in the history of religions, ethnohistory, classical antiquity, and Mesoamerican studies.
Publication supported, in part, by Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.
Contributors: Sergio Botta,Maria Celia Fontana Calvo, Martin Devecka, György Németh, Guilhem Olivier, Francisco Marco Simón, Paolo Taviani, Greg Woolf, David Charles Wright-Carr, Lorenzo Pérez Yarza
Translators: Emma Chesterman, Benjamin Adam Jerue, Layla Wright-Contreras
Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and casta paintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized.
Winner, Book Award, Association of Latin American Art, 2004
Reacting to the rising numbers of mixed-blood (Spanish-Indian-Black African) people in its New Spain colony, the eighteenth-century Bourbon government of Spain attempted to categorize and control its colonial subjects through increasing social regulation of their bodies and the spaces they inhabited. The discourse of calidad (status) and raza (lineage) on which the regulations were based also found expression in the visual culture of New Spain, particularly in the unique genre of casta paintings, which purported to portray discrete categories of mixed-blood plebeians.
Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and casta paintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized. She explains how these visual practices emphasized a seeming realism that constructed colonial bodies—elite and non-elite—as knowable and visible. At the same time, however, she argues that the chaotic specificity of the lives and lived conditions in eighteenth-century New Spain belied the illusion of social orderliness and totality narrated in its visual art. Ultimately, she concludes, the inherent ambiguity of the colonial body and its spaces brought chaos to all dreams of order.
"Its contribution to its specific field is both significant and original. . . . It is a pure pleasure to read." —Sabine MacCormack, Isis
"Mundy has done a fine job of balancing the artistic interpretation of the maps with the larger historical context within which they were drawn. . . . This is an important work." —John F. Schwaller, Sixteenth Century Journal
"This beautiful book opens a Pandora's box in the most positive sense, for it provokes the reconsideration of several long-held opinions about Spanish colonialism and its effects on Native American culture." —Susan Schroeder, American Historical Review
The Motions Beneath is a social history of the encounter of these thousands of indigenous peoples representing ten linguistic groups. Using baptism and marriage records, Laurent Corbeil creates a demographic image of the town’s population. He studies two generations of highly mobile individuals, revealing their agency and subjectivity when facing colonial structures of exploitation on a daily basis.
Corbeil’s study depicts the variety of paths on which indigenous peoples migrated north to build this diverse urban society. Breaking new ground by bridging stories of migration, labor relations, sexuality, legal culture, and identity construction, Corbeil challenges the assumption that urban indigenous communities were organized along ethnic lines. He posits instead that indigenous peoples developed extensive networks and organized themselves according to labor, trade, and social connections.
Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain—the first modern regional economic and political geography—covers his travels across today’s Mexico in 1803–1804. The work canvases natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony.
To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to be open-minded when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies.
This two-volume critical edition—the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.
Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain—the first modern regional economic and political geography—covers his travels across today’s Mexico in 1803–1804. The work canvases natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony.
To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to be open-minded when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies.
This two-volume critical edition—the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series—is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.
Honorable Mention, Bandelier/Lavrin Book Award in Colonial Latin America, Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies (RMCLAS), 2019
Honorable Mention, The Alfred B. Thomas Book Award, Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS), 2019
Scholars have written reams on the conquest of Mexico, from the grand designs of kings, viceroys, conquistadors, and inquisitors to the myriad ways that indigenous peoples contested imperial authority. But the actual work of establishing the Spanish empire in Mexico fell to a host of local agents—magistrates, bureaucrats, parish priests, ranchers, miners, sugar producers, and many others—who knew little and cared less about the goals of their superiors in Mexico City and Madrid. Through a case study of the province of Michoacán in western Mexico, Promiscuous Power focuses on the prosaic agents of colonialism to offer a paradigm-shifting view of the complexities of making empire at the ground level.
Presenting rowdy, raunchy, and violent life histories from the archives, Martin Austin Nesvig reveals that the local colonizers of Michoacán were primarily motivated by personal gain, emboldened by the lack of oversight from the upper echelons of power, and thoroughly committed to their own corporate memberships. His findings challenge some of the most deeply held views of the Spanish colonization of Mexico, including the Black Legend, which asserts that the royal state and the institutional church colluded to produce a powerful Catholicism that crushed heterodoxy, punished cultural difference, and ruined indigenous worlds. Instead, Nesvig finds that Michoacán—typical of many frontier provinces of the empire—became a region of refuge from imperial and juridical control and formal Catholicism, where the ordinary rules of law, jurisprudence, and royal oversight collapsed in the entropy of decentralized rule.
From the sixteenth century until the early nineteenth, Europeans had envisioned New Spain (colonial Mexico) in texts, maps, and other images. In the first decades of the 1800s, ideas about Mexican, rather than Spanish, national character and identity began to cohere in written and illustrated narratives produced by foreign travelers. During the nineteenth century, technologies and processes of visual reproduction expanded to include lithography, daguerreotype, and photography. New methods of display—such as albums, museums, exhibitions, and world fairs—signaled new ideas about spectatorship. García Cubas participated in this emerging visual culture as he reconfigured geographic and cultural imagery culled from previous mapping practices and travel writing. In works such as the Atlas geográfico (1858) and the Atlas pintoresco é historico (1885), he presented independent Mexico to Mexican citizens and the world.
When Antonio María Bucareli took up his duties in 1771 as the forty-sixth viceroy of New Spain, he assumed command of a magnificent complexity of land areas, large and small, whose people constituted a cultural and social entity ranging from the traditional Apache to the European gentleman of the Enlightenment.
He governed a key area at a significant time. Shortly before Bucareli's arrival in Mexico, José de Gálvez had completed an intensive inspection of the country, had instituted many reforms, and was ready to present the new viceroy with progressive policies for administrative reorganization.
How Bucareli, a loyal, indefatigable Spanish aristocrat, reacted to the new order is the particular concern of this book. It examines the actions and reflections of this cautious and conservative man as they relate to certain major problems of his administration: defense, the colonization of the Californias, mining, the Roman Catholic Church, the interior provinces, and—above all—filling Spanish coffers with Mexican pesos as resurgent Spain strove to regain her former position in world affairs.
The period of Bucareli's viceregency is seen as a transitional one, during which the seeds of the Enlightenment, of change, even of rebellion, were sown but had not yet begun to sprout. Bucareli, conservative by nature and training, continued to administer New Spain on the basis of a well-established and traditional system, although he supported changes of mere modification or those offering greater efficiency. Evidence of his dual success is the fact that revenues climbed steadily during his tenure and that Charles III was exceptionally pleased with his performance, while at the same time he won from people of all stations a degree of respect and affection far beyond that usually accorded to a viceroy.
Prior to the publication of Bucareli, only two other full-scale studies of Spanish viceroys existed, and both of them were concerned with sixteenth-century officials. The appearance of this book, providing at once a study of an important figure and of the system of viceregal administration as it had developed by the latter part of the eighteenth century, filled a long-existing gap in Latin American literature.
The heart of this study comes from the prodigious correspondence that passed between the Viceroy and Madrid. Authority for most statements was found in the thousands of documents that the author perused in the Archivo General de Indies in Seville and in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City.
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