Search

The office of General Interpreter was a vital link in Spain's multi-ethnic American empire, bridging the jurisdictions overseen by Native lords and municipal authorities and colonial ecclesiastical and civil jurisdictions. This article analyzes the role of General Interpreters in making an empire of law and, at the same time, a distinctive regional society in Villa Alta, Oaxaca, a remote hinterland of colonial New Spain (Mexico) during the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although scholarship on General Interpreters in viceregal courts is growing, we know less about interpreters outside of colonial centers due to fragmentary evidence. This article relies upon data scattered across Oaxaca's local archives: Native-language petitions, notarial records, letters, and memoriales produced by Native scribes, and their Spanish translations penned by interpreters, as well as first-instance cases of land disputes, idolatry, murder, theft, and factional struggles over village elections. These sources and other materials allow the historian to move beyond the narrow confines of legal institutions to reconstruct how patronage, economic cooperation and exploitation, and inter-ethnic networks defined the work and translation practices of General Interpreters. Finally, they offer clues as to what the office of General Interpreter meant and how it was perceived by those who sought justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the efforts of U.S. writer Federico de Onis to work on Spanish culture. It offers information on the Spanish Cultural Heritage developed by the Spanish state agency Junta de Ampliacion de Estudios (JAE) for the promotion of higher research and international scientific relations on recovery of Spain after the loss of the colonies in the year 1898. It discusses the article "The Literary History of Spanish America" published by Onis in the year 1917. It also reflects on the role of Onis in increasing the production of specialized knowledge on Spain in the U.S.

This essay considers how Africans and their descendants may have expressed their socioreligious identities within the early modern Iberian Catholic world. The author argues that the seventeenth-century Afro-Peruvian mystic Úrsula de Jesús situates herself within both Catholic and Yorùbá orishá religious practice. In a close reading of Úrsula's spiritual diary entries, the author speculates that Úrsula intentionally inflects the meanings of the words poyto to signify a Poitou mule and pollino to refer to a little donkey. In doing so, Ursula reframes an image of mounting that may be read concurrently as a transformed representation of Catholic submission and as an image of Yorùbá ritual spirit possession. Within the transculturated religious space of colonial Lima, the author suggests that Úrsula rearticulates Catholic rhetoric to reframe her Afro-religious practice and perform the role of a spiritual authority. The essay explores how Úrsula de Jesús would have transposed an African past into her religious expression in her Catholic convent to encounter both mystic visions and orishá spiritual possession in a unified religious experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the economic passions that animate Juana Manuela Gorriti's Andean legends "La quena" (1851), "El tesoro de los incas" (1865), and "El chifle del indio" (1878). Placing the tales within the context of Peru's export boom in guano, I argue that Gorriti's colonial romances grapple with the promise and peril of natural resource wealth in the nineteenth century. By analyzing the transformation of Gorriti's tales as the guano boom turns to bust, I trace a growing fear that an economy based on the extraction of a finite natural resource may represent a repetition of Spanish colonialism, which is imagined as a curse in which greed, debt, and resource depletion supplant work-based economic production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the eighteenth-century history of Spanish Viceroyalty of New Granada, focusing particularly on Loja, considered during the period to produce the most effective medicinal Chinchona Bark, known as quina or cascarilla, which was sent to the Royal Pharmacy in Madrid, Spain for further distribution throughout the empire. The bark was used as a treatment for fever, or malaria. Topics include governor of Loja Manuel Daza y Fominaya, the creation of Magistrate of the Forests for the estanco (royal reserve) of cinchona trees in Loja, and creoles in the colonial administration.

An introduction is presented to this special issue on interdisciplinary studies of the Enlightenment in Spain and its colonies in the 18th century

The article considers the early modern history of European colonialism, especially issues of the slave and silver trades against the competing interests of Spain, England, and Holland. Topics include the Black Legend which considers the vilification of Imperial Spain by other countries, the rise of racism, and free trade, and cultural values.

The article examines the republican tradition in the context of the Catholic Spanish monarchy which is a crucial aspect that resulted to the end of the colonial system in Latin America. Topics include the role of the republic concept in the old regime's political language, the relationship between revolutionary rhetoric and Spain's political tradition, and the intellectual history of the republics and republicanism. Also discussed are the revolutions of independence in the region.

The article explores the history of independence in Spanish American countries with regard to the legacy of Spain's colonialism. Topics include the history of political independence movements in early 19th century, the relationship between Spain and its American provinces after French leader Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Spain, and Spain's colonial system. Also discussed are social relations in Latin America and American colonial social formations.

The article examines the historiography of independence in Brazil in the 19th and 20th centuries. Topics include the continuities between the colony and independent Brazil, the value of conceptual history in the historiographic revision process, and the preservation of the monarchical system. Also discussed are the basic lineages of the historiography of independence and the history of concepts in the 21st century.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue that were tackled at a symposium on Latin American revolutions including the link between revolution and nation, colonial conditions of Spanish possessions in the U.S., and Latin American historiography.

The article presents an analysis of an unpublished document that reveals an early presence of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's Spanish novel "Don Quixote" in the Philippines in the 17th century. Topics discussed include hypotheses about the popular uses of Cervantes' material in a context of colonial conflict; the story as told by a soldier from the castle of San Felipe, in the Bay of Manila, whose name was Diego de Rueda y Mendoza; and the novel as the most diagnostic diagnosis of the total crisis of the Spanish empire.

The article focuses on how English pirates' attack on the American coasts in the end of the 16th century promoted the debate on legitimacy of the Spanish presence in America beyond the borders of the Spanish Empire. Topics discussed include how it contributed, ultimately, to censorship and suppression of texts that explore the subject; speeches and writings of writers Pedro Sarmiento and Juan De Castellanos that discussed the legality of the Spanish conquest of America and the treatment of the Native Americans; and the debate over the Spanish sovereignty of the Indies that evolved as a matter of global interest.

Recent scholarship on the North American West has suggested that kinship mattered more than race in social relations through at least the mid-nineteenth century, which illustrates the longevity of indigenous power in the region. In considering interactions between Chiricahua Apaches and Spaniards in the second half of the eighteenth century, this article demonstrates that kinship was indeed of central importance, but not always as a reflection of Native dominance or in lieu of the influence of other understandings of human difference such as race. Spaniards conflated nuanced knowledge of Apache political divisions and kinship relations with ideas about the innate and unchangeable character of all "barbarous" Indians to justify efforts to subjugate them through a war targeting Chiricahua and other Apache families. Spanish interest in exploiting Native war captives ultimately worked against any fixed racialization of Apache people, however, as the Spaniards argued that Spanish families could serve as key sites through which Natives might finally be Christianized and civilized through labor. For Chiricahua Apaches, meanwhile, flexible family strategies proved their principal means of persistence through the violence and forced migrations of this period as they incorporated refugees, recovered missing kin, and adopted outsiders into new family formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violent encounters between Spanish American guarda costas and British vessels during the early decades of the eighteenth century sparked the War of Jenkins' Ear in 1739, a war that started in the Caribbean over issues of inter-imperial contraband trade. Despite the causes of the war, Spanish American guarda costas out of port cities such as Cartagena de Indias outfitted their ships through illicit British supply chains. Moreover, the maritime violence leading up to the declaration of war helped the Spanish official José Patiño push for British acquiescence to Spain's territorial designs on the Italian peninsula. Sent to the Caribbean to seek revenge for Spanish depredations against their shipping, the British Royal Navy also engaged in contraband trade so they could fully equip their vessels in the competitive environment of the eighteenth-century maritime world. Contraband trade in the circum-Caribbean served as a tool in Britain's and Spain's political economy while simultaneously producing the need for more smuggling and eventual conflict. For Spanish America, moreover, British contraband supplies in places such as Cartagena de Indias proved invaluable for its defense against invasion by British forces during the war itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1768 the colonists of Louisiana rose up in a bloodless rebellion against the Spanish royal governor. Though almost totally ignored by historians of early America and the Atlantic world, the Louisiana uprising demonstrates the complex relationship between avant-garde philosophy and popular resistance in the eighteenth century. The rebel leaders produced a series of pamphlets justifying their actions, which deployed arguments drawn from the French legal tradition, Renaissance humanism, and Enlightenment radicalism. These arguments not only aimed to persuade audiences abroad, but helped cement a popular coalition within Louisiana society. This popular coalition broke down when, in the absence of imperial authority, colonists openly discussed the notion of founding an independent republic. A comparison between the Louisiana rebellion and the American Revolution illustrates the ways in which the latter event was not unique-and more specifically, how Enlightenment universalism could help paper over class divisions within colonial society, which civic republicanism then reopened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around 1789, Mexican intellectual Antonio de Leon y Gama began writing a study that he envisioned as a brief examination of pre-Hispanic Aztec history and culture. Acquired by the Huntington Library more than eighty years ago, this incomplete manuscript study (catalogued as HM 4297) says little about the Aztec past but offers much about the evolution of Spain's dominion in greater North America. Its most striking feature is an extensive footnote that León y Gama used as an apparatus to draft a short maritime history of the Pacific Northwest coast, presented asa narrative of contested imperial space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early nineteenth century has often been cited as a crucial period of Atlantic history in which the ties that had bound together the people of the Atlantic world began to unravel, in no small part because of the Age of Revolutions. The rise of new independent states is seen as part and parcel of the decline of the Atlantic world. Another story, however, emerges from the experience of the men who sailed from the United States as privateers commissioned by the new nations of Spanish America. These privateers formed new connections between North and South America as they acquired commissions and returned to port with cargoes. In between, they also developed new loyalties. Following the actions of Spanish American privateers, therefore, shows the transformation of the Atlantic world in action as privateering encouraged people to make new ties, sometimes in spite of the emergence of new nations and, sometimes, because of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the eighteenth century thousands of poor Spaniards migrated to Buenos Aires. This article analyzes the first stage of their migratory experiences. It focuses on the extent to which Bourbon policies enforced during the eighteenth century conditioned the decision to migrate and the strategies developed to travel to the River Plate. These policies were not always consistent and involved significant contradictions. In the River Plate region the Crown fostered economic growth and transformed the River Plate into an attractive place to which to migrate. This stimulus, however, was simultaneously countered by legislation restricting the free movement of Spaniards from Spain to American colonies. Therefore, most Spaniards migrating to Buenos Aires had to resort to practices that allowed them to circumvent the existing regulations. But these illegal or quasi-legal practices were accepted as legitimate by local authorities and the River Plate society, in open opposition to the norms set by the Crown in Madrid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critiques the essay "Idearium español," by Ángel Ganivet, noting its treatment of the early modern Spanish empire and the loss of imperial ideals. It uses the notion of melancholia, taken from the works of Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud, to explain the cultural transition in Spain from an imperial position to a postimperial condition. Other topics explored include internalized aggression, the inner self, and ambivalence.

Este trabajo examina el papel que jugó Simón Bolívar en la literatura peninsular después de la pérdida de las colonias americanas. Se estudian los ensayos de Joaquín Costa y Miguel de Unamuno para analizar la inclusión del Libertador en el repertorio de héroes nacionales españoles. Sugieren estos escritores que las guerras emancipadoras fueron contra el gobierno español y no contra el pueblo español, y marcan así una separación entre las acciones del gobierno y los deseos del pueblo. Las guerras, por lo tanto, no tenían la intención de suprimir los lazos que existían entre peninsulares y americanos, sino de rescatar a ambos de la tiranía política que los afligía. Costa y Unamuno hallaron en la figura del Libertador un representante reciente de los valores que admiraban en los héroes legendarios españoles, valores que consideraban necesarios para elevar la moral y el patriotismo que suponían perdidos en España. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides poetry criticism for several works by Spanish poet Antonio Machado, including "Soledades. Galerías. Otros poemas" and "Campos de Castilla." It examines the imagery of the American colonies in both poems, as well as allusions to the construction of a Spanish national identity in the region. The author also studies the autobiographical and historical elements of the works, including Machado's idea of the Americas as a land of opportunity.

This essay examines the Dido episode in Alonso de Ercilla's "La Araucana." Set in the New World but referring to the Mediterranean context, this episode should be read together with other digressions within the poem equally critical of the Spanish Empire, such as the visions of Bellona and Fitón which feature the Old World battles of Saint Quentin and Lepanto. Ercilla not only assimilates Dido's story to that of the Araucanians, but also to that of the "infidels" in the Mediterranean world: the Arabs and the Ottomans. The geography underlying this episode where a virtuous alternative imperial model is located covers a territory problematically related to contemporary Spanish conflicts in Europe. The just empire founded by Dido in the poem—related to places such as Cyprus, Tunis, and North Africa—parallels contemporary territories under Muslim control, recently taken from Christian hands. Thus, within the frame of the third part of the "Araucana"—the part most pessimistic about the Spanish project and the one that juxtaposes American and European episodes the most—the implicit alliance suggested between Dido and Philip II's European enemies highlights the fragility of Habsburg domination on both American and Mediterranean fronts. By doing this, Ercilla subtly distances himself from the political project of his own monarch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here the author presents a commentary on Ricardo Padrón's essay concerning the Spanish representation of the Pacific, in which the connection between cartography and imperial power has been given emphasis. The author cites Spain's attempt to impose cohesion on the Spanish Empire, to shrink the Pacific to manageable dimensions, and to stake territorial claims by manipulating maplines. However, this solution failed according to Padrón.