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Reseña del libro Patrimonio efímero: Memorias, cultura popular y vida cotidiana, coordinado por Jennifer L. Jenkins y Adriana Corral Bustos y publicado por la Editorial de El Colegio de San Luis, A.C.

This special issue of The Public Historian examines the nature and scope of the historian’s role as a consultant and expert witness in natural resource litigation. The introductory essay identifies the major issues and challenges that historians face when they bring their knowledge, skills, and professional best standards into law offices and courtrooms, while also positing a conceptual framework for public history practitioners to better understand and appreciate the larger stakes in conducting research for environmental litigation. The author delineates his own experience as an expert in certain water rights cases in the American Southwest where knowledge of the Spanish and Mexican civil law of property is essential.

This special issue of The Public Historian examines the nature and scope of the historian's role as a consultant and expert witness in natural resource litigation. The introductory essay identifies the major issues and challenges that historians face when they bring their knowledge, skills, and professional best standards into law offices and courtrooms, while also positing a conceptual framework for public history practitioners to better understand and appreciate the larger stakes in conducting research for environmental litigation. The author delineates his own experience as an expert in certain water rights cases in the American Southwest where knowledge of the Spanish and Mexican civil law of property is essential.

When the Minister of Culture for the State of Puebla, Hector Azar, organized the 350th anniversary festivities for the Biblioteca Palafoxiana in 1996, he included a concert of epigraphs and sonnets set to classical music in the city's cathedral. Employing an ancient form of the Church's liturgical psalmody,1 Azar replaced scriptural psalms with several lines taken from poetry written by the seventeenth-century bishop of Puebla, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, whose donation of books to the city in 1646 established the first public library in colonial Mexico. With a full accompaniment of string, percussion, woodwind, and brass instruments to provide music for the Salmodia Palafoxiana, Azar and the Coro del Benemerito Institute Normal del Estado transformed a few lines of the bishop's poetry into quasi-liturgy. Perhaps Bishop Palafox would have disapproved of substituting his poetic metaphors for biblical verse, but this probably never crossed the minds of the city's residents and visitors who gathered around the bishop's cenotaph to attend the concert. The first antiphon, however, evokes quite nicely Palafox's liturgical sensibilities: "Today the sun of wounded love, the new shepherd comes to be."2 The new shepherd is the resurrected, triumphant Christ who gives light to his flock. And, to the shepherd of Puebla and his seventeenth-century flock, Christ's real presence in the bread and wine was instituted each time a priest celebrated the Mass. Liturgy as a sacramental rite imbued with cultural meaning has escaped the scholarly purview of most historians of colonial Latin America. Deciphering discrete portions of ecclesiastical texts in Latin or italicized scriptural citations located in the margins of ceremonials appears more suited to the canon lawyer or liturgist. Moreover, despite the historical centrality of the Mass, as well as of the seven sacraments, to Catholic culture, historians have examined almost every other dimension of the colonial Catholic experience except liturgy and prayer.3 Perhaps scholars view the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, or Hoc Est Enim Corpus Meum4 as officiai prayers of the institutional Church, whose significance remained hidden behind complicated Latin syntax that parishioners (and not a few clergymen too) failed to grasp. Even Bishop Palafox might have agreed in part with this view. Moreover, the mundane features of the Mass, rosary, and other liturgical rites and rituals, with their scripted formulas and responses, seem to demonstrate, on the surface, something less spectacular, less ideological than the extravagant religious and civic processions of Corpus Christi or Holy Week, for example, that so marked urban society in colonial Mexico. Recent contributions to the new cultural history of Mexico provide theoretical and conceptual frameworks that interpret rituals and ceremonies within the context of power relations, popular culture, and resistance.5 Some historians have demonstrated how Spaniards used rituals to help establish their authority and legitimize colonial rule through language and ceremony. Ritual is seen as the medium for rulers to act out the drama of their power, while daily life itself is suffused with ritual performances that reinforce social hierarchies.6 The festival of Corpus Christi in seventeenth-century Mexico City has received some scholarly attention in recent years, and illustrates this turn to cultural history in Mexican studies. Indians and Spaniards, guilds and cofradias (confraternities), parishioners and priests, participated in festivities that expressed political as well as religious sentiment. The principal focus of such studies, however, tends to emphasize "procession-as-spectacle" and its uses as a tool of hegemonic control and institutional legitimization.7 The centrality of the Blessed Sacrament in Catholic worship and the liturgical dimensions of the procession are less evident. When, in 1692, the celebrations turned riotous, two Franciscan friars hoisted the Blessed Sacrament in the air, presumably in its sacred container, the monstrance, in an effort to calm passions and return tranquility to the city. …

Four Square Leagues: Pueblo Indian Land in New Mexico . By Malcolm Ebright, Rick Hendricks, and Richard W. Hughes. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. xii + 452 pp. Illustrations, maps, glossary, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $65.00.) With longtime practicing water rights attorney Richard W. Hughes, noted scholars of New Mexico Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks have written what can only be described as an exhaustingly researched book that examines the history of Pueblo land tenure in light of Spanish and later Mexican and American dominion. Inspired by Emlen Hall’s call some years ago to tackle the Pueblo square league, the authors bring their own substantial archival and courtroom experience to bear on the topic. With access to documents unavailable to scholars until very recently—specifically, primary source materials from Santa Ana Pueblo—as well as a careful reading of known sources, Ebright, Hendricks, … brescia{at}email.arizona.edu

Latin American Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajio and Spanish North America. By John lutino. (Durham: Duke University Press. 2011. Pp. ix, 699- $99-95 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-822-34974-7; $29.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0-822-34989-1.) Despite the intense specialization that has fashioned historical research over the last four decades, which has often produced monographs narrow in scope and timid in conceptual reach, historians still relish big history that is empirically sound, theoretically innovative, and lyrically rendered. For historians of colonial Mexico, John lutino 's long-awaited book on the foundations of early-modern capitalism in Spanish North America is precisely the kind of big history that shifts the paradigm to such a degree that historians in other fields- particularly world historians- will take notice and revisit the conventional wisdom that has shaped the direction of their own research. Tutino's book is that good. The author argues that the world became whole in the sixteenth century just about the time Hernan Cortes had toppled the Aztec confederation and Ming China developed a ferocious appetite for silver. Trade expansion linked Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, while European colonization of the Western Hemisphere, coupled with the rise of the African slave trade, initiated a global dynamic that facilitated capitalism. American silver- especially that which was mined in the Bajio region of Mexico, what Spaniards called New Spain- was key to global trade between 1550 and 1810; the vast quantities of the metal fashioned a protean capitalist society in Spanish North America composed of merchants, entrepreneurs, investors, miners, ranchers, and farmers- an ethnically and racially diverse lot, to be sure- most of whom looked to the Catholic Church for sanctifying power and grace. As lutino makes quite clear in his tome, Catholicism provided an ample arena where religious piety comingled with debate and dissent, paving various pathways for these social groups to adapt, modify, alter, or discard what disrupted production, exchange, and social relations. In short, lutino 's colonial Mexico is the corrective to an older Weberian model that explained change from an Anglo-Protestant-capitalist perspective. Tutino's work also complements quite nicely a larger body of knowledge that shows us that the Spanish colonial enterprise functioned primarily as a judicial mediator, one that sought to resolve disputes and soften the impact of colonialism on the indigenous and racially mixed populations, with an eye toward fostering equity and the common good among local communities and, in the process, maximize the revenues that come from stable commercial relationships. …

Introduction: The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de ColombiaEjercito del Pueblo (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army-FARC-EP) is the most powerful and successful guerrilla army in the world confronting neoliberal regimes and their U.S. backers. It is the dominant political force in over 50 percent of the country's municipalities, fielding a guerrilla army of approximately 18,000 mostly peasant fighters. In addition, it has urban militia units in most major cities and towns and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers throughout the country. Led by Manuel Marulanda, it has been battling the Colombian oligarchy and its authoritarian two-party political system for over three decades. The FARC emerged in 1964 from a peasant movement that had sought five years earlier to establish rural self-governing communities in Marquetalia. The military invaded the peasant communities, destroying their villages and razing their crops. The peasants regrouped and, under the leadership of Marulanda, formed the nucleus of what is today the FARC. The FARC, which retains fraternal relations with the Colombian Communist party, has built its support by supporting agrarian reform (redistribution of land), nationalism (opposition to foreign control of strategic sectors of the economy), democratization (the end of the Liberal-Conservative monopoly of political power), and human rights (the dismantling of the military-landlord-controlled paramilitary groups that terrorize the countryside and the cities). It has taken a principled position against the narco-capitalist politicians and military officials. It protects cocagrowing peasants and taxes the dealers who purchase the leaf in their zones of influence. Contrary to the U.S. State Department propaganda, however, the FARC neither produces nor sells coca or drugs, as the present president of Colombia, Andres Pastrana, admits. From early 1998 to the end of 1999, the FARC has extended its field of operations and the size and scope of those operations: military confron