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This book reframes our understanding of single women and religious culture in colonial and nineteenth-century Latin America. Most works on women and early modern religion examine nuns, holy women, or religious “deviants,” and emphasize rising hostility towards female autonomy as officials moved to enclose unmarried women and intensive female religiosity (e.g. mysticism, asceticism). This study takes a different approach and examines ordinary laywomen, particularly the broad population of non-elite women living outside of both marriage and convent. Much like other Spanish American cities, Guatemala’s colonial capital was a city of women due to labor and migration patterns with many single and widowed women heading households. Alone at the Altar argues that laboring single women forged complex alliances with the Church, which shaped local religion and the spiritual economy, late colonial reform efforts, and post-Independence politics in Guatemala. Through an analysis of approximately 550 wills, as well as a variety of other sources such as hagiographies, religious chronicles, and ecclesiastical records, this study moves beyond anecdotal evidence and exemplary case studies, to consider broader patterns and the ways in which gender, social, and marital status shaped early modern devotional networks. By extending its analysis to 1870, the book also illuminates how the alliances between laboring women and the Catholic Church became politicized in the Independence era and influenced the successful rise of popular conservatism in Guatemala.

This book reconstructs the world of eighteenth-century Amazonia to argue that indigenous mobility did not undermine settlement or community. In doing so, it revises long-standing views of native Amazonians as perpetual wanderers, lacking attachment to place and likely to flee at the slightest provocation. Instead, native Amazonians used traditional as well as new, colonial forms of spatial mobility to build enduring communities under the constraints of Portuguese colonialism. Canoeing and trekking through the interior to collect forest products or to contact independent native groups, Indians expanded their social networks, found economic opportunities, and brought new people and resources back to the colonial villages. When they were not participating in these state-sponsored expeditions, many Indians migrated between colonial settlements, seeking to be incorporated as productive members of their chosen communities. Drawing on largely untapped village-level sources, the book shows that mobile people remained attached to their home communities and committed to the preservation of their lands and assets. This argument still matters today, and not just to scholars, as rural communities in the Brazilian Amazon find themselves threatened by powerful outsiders who argue that their mobility invalidates their claims to territory.

From 1980 to 1992, Maoist Shining Path rebels, Peruvian state forces, and Andean peasants waged a bitter civil war that left some 69,000 people dead. Using archival research and oral interviews, this book is a long-term historical examination of the Shining Path's political, economic, and social antecedents in Ayacucho, the department where the Shining Path initiated its war. This study uncovers rural Ayacucho's vibrant, but largely unstudied twentieth-century political history and contends that the Shining Path was the last and most extreme of a series of radical political movements that indigenous peasants pursued. The Shining Path's violence against rural indigenous populations exposed the tight hold of anti-Indian prejudice inside Peru, as rebels reproduced the same hatreds they aimed to defeat. But, this was nothing new. The book reveals that minute divides inside rural indigenous communities repeatedly led to violent conflict across the twentieth century.

This book presents a social history of the National Steel Company (CSN), Brazil's foremost state-owned company and largest industrial enterprise in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on the role the steelworkers played in Brazil's social and economic development under the country's import substitution policies from the early 1940s to the 1964 military coup. Counter to prevalent interpretations of industrial labor in Latin America, where workers figure above all as victims of capitalist exploitation, the book shows that CSN workers held strategic power and used it to reshape the company's labor regime, extracting impressive wage gains and benefits. The book argues that these workers, and their peers in similarly strategic industries, had the power to undermine the state capitalist development model prevalent in the large economies of postwar Latin America.

This book invites the modern reader to follow the histories of colonial Mexican nuns inside the cloisters where they pursued a religious vocation or sought shelter from the world. It provides a complete overview of conventual life, including the early signs of vocation, the decision to enter a convent, profession, spiritual guidelines and devotional practices, governance, ceremonials, relations with male authorities and confessors, living arrangements, servants, sickness, and death rituals. Individual chapters deal with issues such as sexuality and the challenges to chastity in the cloisters, and the little-known subject of the nuns' own writings as expressions of their spirituality. The foundation of convents for indigenous women receives special attention, because such religious communities existed nowhere else in the Spanish empire.

Between 1889 and 1919, Weetman Pearson became one of the world's most important engineering contractors, a pioneer in the international oil industry, and one of Britain's wealthiest men. At the center of his global business empire were his interests in Mexico. While Pearson's extraordinary success in Mexico took place within the context of unprecedented levels of British trade with and investment in Latin America, the book argues that Pearson should be understood less as an agent of British imperialism than as an agent of Porfirian state building and modernization. Pearson was able to secure contracts for some of nineteenth-century Mexico's most important public works projects in large part because of his reliability, his empathy with the developmentalist project of Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, and his assiduous cultivation of a clientelist network within the Mexican political elite. His success thus provides an opportunity to reappraise the role played by overseas interests in the national development of Mexico.

This book tracks New Spain's mendicant orders past their so-called golden age of missions into the ensuing centuries and demonstrates that they had equally crucial roles in what the book terms the “spiritual consolidation” of cities. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, cities became home to the majority of friars and to the orders' wealthiest houses, and mendicants became deeply embedded in urban social and cultural life. Friars ministered to urban residents of all races and social standings and engaged in traditional mendicant activities, serving as preachers, confessors, spiritual directors, alms collectors, educators, scholars, and sponsors of charitable works. Each order brought to this work a distinct identity that informed people's beliefs and shaped variations in the practice of Catholicism. Contrary to prevailing views, mendicant orders flourished during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and even the eighteenth-century reforms that ended this era were not as devastating as has been assumed. Even in the face of new institutional challenges, the demand for their services continued through the end of the colonial period, demonstrating the continued vitality of baroque piety.

This volume presents the story of Hernando Cortés' conquest of Mexico, as recounted by a contemporary Spanish historian and edited by Mexico's premier Nahua historian. Francisco López de Gómara's monumental Historia de las Indias y Conquista de México was published in 1552 to instant success. Despite being banned from the Americas by Prince Philip of Spain, La conquista fell into the hands of the seventeenth-century Nahua historian Chimalpahin, who took it upon himself to make a copy of the tome. As he copied, Chimalpahin rewrote large sections of La conquista, adding information about Emperor Moctezuma and other key indigenous people who participated in those first encounters. This book is thus not only the first complete modern English translation of López de Gómara's La conquista, an invaluable source in itself of information about the conquest and native peoples; it also adds Chimalpahin's unique perspective of Nahua culture to what has traditionally been a very Hispanic portrayal of the conquest.

This book offers a critical reinterpretation of male violence, patriarchy, and machismo in rural Latin America. It focuses on the lives of lower-class men and women, known as sertanejo/as, in the hinterlands of the northeastern Brazilian province of Ceará between 1845 and 1889. Challenging the widely accepted depiction of sertanejos as conditioned to violence by nature, culture, and climate, the book argues that their concern with maintaining an honorable manly reputation and the use of violence were historically contingent strategies employed to resolve conflicts over scant resources and to establish power over women and other men. It also traces a shift in the functioning of patriarchy that coincided with changes in the material fortunes of sertanejo families. As economic dislocation, environmental calamity, and family separation led to greater female autonomy and an erosion of patriarchal authority in the home, public—and often violent—enforcement.

This book traces the social, cultural, and political history of the Brazilian empire (1822-89) through the official and popular celebrations on the days of national festivity (national holidays) instituted soon after independence in 1822. The focus is on Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s largest city and national capital. As Latin America’s only long-lasting monarchy, Brazil’s civic ritual drew on many old-regime forms, but married them to modern elements such as the 1824 constitution. Based on newspaper coverage, travelers’ accounts, and descriptions of these national holidays, this book analyzes the changing debate about the political institutions (independent empire, monarchy, and constitution) celebrated year after year. Rather than invoking an abstract nationalism, these celebrations were the occasion for extensive debate about the empire’s political institutions: the constitution on 25 March, independence on 7 September, and the monarchy on the emperors’ birthdays. This book is, furthermore, a social and cultural history of these civic rituals, which frequently mobilized large proportions of Rio de Janeiro’s population. The often extensive popular festivals on national holidays reveals that political participation extended more broadly into the urban population than historians have assumed. This book also examines the theater galas held on these days, as well as the emperors’ ceremonial entries into Rio de Janeiro after their travels and the inaugurations of the two monuments that celebrated independence. Each of these civic rituals was the occasion for extensive debate about the nature of the empire’s political institutions.

Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery examines how distance was conceptualized in an empire that at its height spanned four continents, stretching from Europe to the Philippines. Distance mediated most aspects of how the Spanish empire functioned, but we know little about how it was envisioned and understood. This book argues that documents, particularly official documents, were crucial to overcoming long distances. Focusing on Guatemala, a part of the empire that has long been considered “peripheral,” the book examines how the creation, movement, and storage of documents reflect particular conceptions of distance. The travelers and officials who wrote documents, the mailmen who carried documents hundreds of leagues across the isthmus, and the scribes who stored documents in local archives shed light on how both spatial and temporal distance were understood and overcome. Various segments of the population viewed space and distance in different ways: the official view of space, which cast long distances as “dangerous” and areas off the route as “Indian,” was not shared by all. Conceptions of distance in Guatemala changed in the late eighteenth century, as Spanish Bourbon reforms created a more rapid, integrated communication system and the weight of document production and storage was re-distributed. As a result of these changes, local places that had been considered “distant” within Guatemala were perceived to be “closer,” and new locations – notably Mexico and Spain – that had once been closely linked to Guatemala came to be considered “distant.”

Dolores del Río's enormously successful career in Hollywood, in Mexico, and internationally illuminates issues of race, ethnicity, and gender through the lenses of beauty and celebrity. She and her husband left Mexico in 1925, as both their well-to-do families suffered from the economic downturn that followed the Mexican Revolution. Far from being stigmatized as a woman of color, this Mexican star was acknowledged as the epitome of beauty in the Hollywood of the 1920s and early 1930s. While she insisted upon her ethnicity, she was nevertheless coded white by the film industry and its fans, and she appeared for more than a decade as a romantic lead opposite white actors. Returning to Mexico in the early 1940s, she brought enthusiasm and prestige to the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, becoming one of the great divas of Mexican film. With struggle and perseverance, she overcame the influence of men in both countries who hoped to dominate her, ultimately controlling her own life professionally and personally.

Tracing the long history of one of the most complex drainage projects in the early modern world, this book aims to explain what colonization looked like on the ground and how it affected land, water, ecosystems, and humans, as well as the relationships among them. Through the Desagüe de Huehuetoca, as the drainage project was called, Spanish settlers and urban elites in the City of Mexico sought to desiccate the enclosed lake system that surrounded their capital and periodically flooded it. Involving thousands of indigenous laborers, as well as requiring huge amounts of money, materials, and mechanical energy at great human and environmental costs, the Desagüe project took more than three centuries to complete, yet it did not entirely achieve its goals. The book explains what the Desagüe looked like over time, why Hispanics thought desiccation was a good idea in the first place, how they chose the technology to achieve it, and what the implications of their decisions were for populations and environments in the region, for technology and science, and ultimately for the welfare of the city itself. Through its examination of the historical roots of the present environmental crisis of this particular megacity, the book offers methods that can be broadly applied to understand how our built and unbuilt landscapes came to be.

This volume is the continuation of an earlier study of colonial and imperial São Paulo and covers the period 1850-1950. These volumes are the first full scale survey of the economy and society of the state of São Paulo in this two century period in any language. Today São Paulo is the most populated state of Brazil and also the richest and most industrialized one. It is also the world leader in the production of sugar cane and orange juice and houses one of the world’s major airplane manufacturers. Its GDP today is almost double the size of Portugal or Finland and close to the size of the entire economy of Colombia or Venezuela and its capital city is one of the top five metropolitan centers in the world. This volume shows how the region of São Paulo went from being one of the more marginal and backward areas of the nation to its leading agricultural, industrial and financial center. Special emphasis is given to the creation of a modern state government and finances in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as the evolution of tis coffee economy and its internal market as well as its leading role it played in the integration of over two million European and Asian immigrants into Brazilian society.

This book presents an intellectual and career biography of Emilio Rabasa, the eminent Mexican jurist, politician, novelist, diplomat, journalist, and historian who opposed the Revolution of 1910–20, spent the years 1914 to 1920 in exile, but returned and was reintegrated into Mexican life until his death in 1930. Though he is still idolized by the juridical community of Mexico City, little is known about Rabasa beyond his principal publications. He was a reserved, enigmatic man who kept no personal archive and sought a low public profile. The book reveals unknown aspects of his life, career, and personality from two extensive bodies of correspondence—with Jos Yves Limantour, finance minister from 1893 to 1911; and William F. Buckley, Sr., American lawyer and petroleum entrepreneur. It also analyzes Rabasa's political, juridical, and social ideas, arguing that they demonstrate continuity and even survival of late nineteenth-century liberalism through the revolutionary years and beyond. Rabasa's was a transformed liberalism, based on scientific politics drawn from European positivism and historical constitutionalism—an elitist rejection of abstract doctrines of natural rights and egalitarian democracy, emphasizing strong centralized yet constitutionally limited authority and empirically-based economic development.

A history of epidemics and disease prevention in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Mexico, Enlightened Immunity focuses on the multiethnic and multimedia production of medical knowledge in a time when the governance of healthy populations was central to the pursuits of absolutist monarchies. The book reconstructs the cultural, ritual, and political background of Mexico’s early experiments with childhood vaccines, tracing how the public health response to epidemic disease was thoroughly enmeshed with religion and the church, the spread of Enlightenment ideas about medicine and the body, and the customs and healing practices of indigenous villages. It was not only educated urban elites—doctors and men of science—whose response to outbreaks of disease mattered. Rather, the cast of protagonists crossed ethnic, gender, and class lines: local officials who decided if and how to execute plans that came from Mexico City, rural priests who influenced local practices, peasants and artisans who reckoned with the consequences of quarantine, and Indian tributaries who decided if they would hand their children to vaccinators. By following the public response to anticontagion measures and smallpox vaccine in colonial Mexico, Enlightened Immunity sheds light on fundamental questions about trust, uncertainty, and the role of religion in a period of medical discovery, innovation, and modernization.

Fatal Pacts examines comparatively the history of over two hundred examples of spousal murder in the late colonial Spanish Atlantic. It deals with murders occurring during the last decades of colonial rule, between 1750 and 1820, on both sides of the ocean (in Mexico, Colombia, and Spain). The book explores not only the social circumstances of the crimes themselves but also the interplay between cultural practices–such as ethnicity, patriarchal authority, and honor–and a variety of legal issues, including the applicable legal norms and doctrines, criminal procedures, legal understandings of what constituted sufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing; and, most important, reasons for and varieties of acquittal, pardon or punishment. All of this speaks directly to the understanding of royal justice and royal domination (hegemony) at the time. The work thus relies not only on actual criminal records but also on a wide array of legal texts and manuals widely used and cited in their decisions by contemporary justice officials. It looks too at legal customs and traditions. This is critical since the historical rise in domestic violence has been attributed to factors such as the reluctance of the state to interfere in “private conflicts,” social tolerance, prevailing honor codes and legal discourses and practices.

This book examines the development of the state, the nation, and the economy on the far western frontier of Brazil during the period of the Brazilian Empire. The author argues that the province of Goiás, although physically in the center of Brazil, was effectively the far edge of the Empire, thanks to poverty and poor communications. It thus provides a test case of the limits and effectiveness of nation-building and state-building, and of economic integration into national and international economies during these years. The inhabitants of Goiás successfully struggled to develop an interprovincial “export” trade in cattle at the same time as local elites negotiated a durable and largely peaceful political compromise with the central government. Smuggling and tax evasion were key to the development of the economy, yet politics remained “pro-government” and largely unruffled by partisan strife until the last decade of the Empire.

Under Jesuit management, the Guaraní missions of the Río de la Plata region of South America were the largest and most prosperous of all the Catholic missions established to convert, acculturate, and incorporate indigenous peoples and their lands into the Spanish and Portuguese empires. The book is a socioeconomic history of the Guaraní and their missions. It makes three central contributions. First, rather than studying cultural change like previous scholarship, it focuses on economic and social change to provide an understanding of the material changes experienced by the Guaraní in their day-to-day lives. Second, it shows that while the Guaraní missions were prosperous under Jesuit management, they were not run efficiently. Third, it is the first work to provide a detailed and comprehensive explanation about why the missions declined. The book contends that the missions declined not because of the corruption and incapacity of the Jesuits’ replacements but rather due to Crown reforms meant to push the Río de la Plata region and the Guaraní into the global economy.

Despite the inherent brutality of slavery, some slaves could find small but important opportunities to act decisively. This book explores such moments of opportunity and resistance in Santos, a Southeastern township in Imperial Brazil. It argues that slavery in Brazil was hierarchical: slaves' fleeting chances to form families, work jobs that would not kill or maim, avoid debilitating diseases, or find a (legal or illegal) pathway out of slavery were highly influenced by their demographic background and their owners' social position. By tracing the lives of slaves and owners through multiple records, the author is able to show that the cruelties which slaves faced were not equally shared. One important implication is that internal stratification likely helped perpetuate slavery because there was the belief, however illusionary, that escaping captivity was not necessary for social mobility.