In 1520, during the midst of the conquest of Mexico, Spanish conquistadors and their Native allies embarked on a massive naval project—the construction of 13 brigantines and a canal—needed to help conquer the aquatic city of Tenochtitlan. In the dominant historical literature on the war, the Spanish tend to receive most, if not all, of the credit for the success of the nautical program. The contributions of their Native allies by contrast are little-known and oft-overlooked in the historiography. Drawing on Spanish and Indigenous sources, this article highlights the vital roles that Native peoples played in the naval episode, whether it be felling timbers, carving wood, transporting logs, or excavating the canal. In addition to labor services, it also considers the importance of Indigenous ecological and hydrological expertise, and demonstrates how such knowledge played a pivotal role in the overall success of the enterprise. I argue, ultimately, that these contributions made the Native peoples, and not the Spanish, the true masters of the amphibious operation. Along the way, this essay seeks to contribute to several important strands of scholarship, chiefly the New Conquest History, environmental histories of New Spain, and the burgeoning literature on Indigenous knowledge production in Spanish America.

James D. Riley became the first lay editor of The Americas journal in 1987, leading the journal to its current status as a leading refereed academic publication of Latin American history and cultural studies. The interview addresses Riley’s formative years as a scholar, his work with the Academy of American Franciscan History and The Americas, and the transformation of the journal from 1987 to his retirement from the academy.

This article establishes the role white women played in shaping the urban labor force and the economy in late colonial times in Lima, roughly from 1790 to 1822. It focuses on the impoverished elite women who, by the end of the colonial period, had to ask for alms to avoid working with their own hands. An important part of the Limeño elites could not respond to the twofold challenge: the negative consequences of the economic and administrative reforms of the Bourbons, and the relative flexibilization of the social order in Lima by the end of the eighteenth century. Instead of adapting to new conditions, the Spanish elites generated a social discourse that reaffirmed status and ethnicity as a means to distinguish themselves from the “vicious” plebeian sectors. More than one thousand applications to Church relief programs serve as the main foundation of this article; they are made up of at least one fifth of the white female population of the city in 1806. The article enters into dialogue with studies on socio-labor practices and the history of gender and ethnicity by engaging with concrete experiences of poor elite women in a city considered to be the opulent center of the Spanish colonial power.

The Carrera de Indias, considered as a set of circuits connecting Hispanic America to world markets, does not appear as a “monopoly” reserved solely for the Spanish merchants of Cadiz, but rather as a complex commercial system, structured into three autonomous segments, each of them dominated by a mercantile corporation, more or less formalized. In the central part, which linked the two shores of the Atlantic, the merchants registered in the Consulado of the Indies of Cadiz (cargadores) obviously dominated the market. However, these were in turn dominated by the merchants from the consulates of Mexico and Lima in the inland trade (comercio de tierra adentro), which linked the great American ports and fairs with the markets of the interior of the continent, and by the foreign merchants of Cadiz, structured into “nations,” in the exchanges that linked the Andalusian port with the rest of Europe and the world. Thus, the beneficiaries of the Spanish colonial trade in the second half of the eighteenth century were neither only cargadores, nor foreign “smugglers” enjoying the weakness of the Spanish empire as the historiography of the Carrera de Indias has traditionally postulated, but those three groups of traders.

After highlighting this singular structure of colonial trade in the Spanish Atlantic, we will consider the different institutional and relational factors that could explain it. Obviously, it is because the different groups of actors involved in these exchanges had a specific social, relational, cultural, and institutional capital that they had a comparative advantage over their rivals in certain segments of the Carrera de Indias circuits, and that they were able to obtain the dominant position that we observe.

Over the past 30 years, scholarship has shifted from viewing the Haitian Revolution as largely an extension of the French Revolution to understanding it as a revolt from the perspective of Africa and Africans. Four related factors contribute to explanations of this change in perspective. First, historians trained in pre-colonial Africa began to study slavery in the Americas. The second factor is the emergence of Atlantic History as a field of study, the third is the Bicentennial commemorations of the start (1991) and the end (2004) of the Haitian Revolution, and the fourth is Michel-Rolph Trouillot's much celebrated, widely circulated, and extremely influential essay “Unthinkable History” (from Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History; 1995), in which he critiqued the entire historiography of the Haitian Revolution and called for new perspectives. Taken collectively, the confluence of these four factors, all emerging prominently in the 1990s, contributed to the historiographical shift in Haitian scholarship that David Geggus labels “Kongomania.”

The two main points of Geggus's contribution to this issue of The Americas is to challenge this recent understanding of the Haitian Revolution as essentially an African revolt in the Caribbean led by Kongos, and to give scholars reason to focus more attention on the active role of Creoles. Collectively, the responses by John Thornton, James H. Sweet, and Christina Mobley to Geggus's article emphasize that the point of their scholarship was to offer a Kongo perspective on the Haitian Revolution from their training and expertise in African history, not produce a new orthodoxy.

This article traces the professional life of Rafael Almarza, the last royal escribano (notary) of Mérida in the captaincy of Venezuela, and his role in undermining monarchical authority among the enslaved community displaced in the plains region (Los Llanos) during the war of independence in 1814-18. Despite their status as minor officials within the Spanish imperial bureaucracy, notaries, through the records they made, helped to establish legally binding truths underlying everyday actions, making them influential agents of colonial rule in the community they served, particularly among those seeking notarial documents to obtain freedom. During the battles for independence, escribanos like Almarza facilitated the transition of sovereignty and created documents that fomented the independence cause among enslaved individuals during the years of total war. By examining the manumission documents found in the notarial book Almarza kept during exile, the author of this article shows the importance of enslaved people in granting legitimacy to the emerging leadership of José Antonio Páez and the Republican project. At the same time, this study aims to provide a new look at manumission during the early stages of nation-building and the involvement of underrepresented groups in this process.

Scholars and US officials mocked Juan José Arévalo Bermejo, the first democratically elected president of Guatemala (1945–51), for the opacity and alleged incoherence of his “spiritual socialism.” He was eclipsed by his successor, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, who introduced sweeping land reform to Guatemala and whose overthrow in a CIA-orchestrated coup in 1954 launched the Latin American Cold War. But Arévalo's ideology is not only decipherable but potentially of great value—when we trace its origins back to Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, a forgotten philosopher who was Hegel's contemporary, and the Argentine intellectuals who developed Krause's abstract theories into an approach to governance that shaped Argentina's experience in social democracy under Hipólito Yrigoyen, while Arévalo was living in exile there. Arévalo's social reforms, which improved the standard of living for workers and peasants without sacrificing individual liberties or property rights, reflect a Krausean philosophical commitment to harmonious nationalism based on ethical relationships rather than hierarchies. The experiment was foreclosed by the 1954 coup and a lesser known, US-backed coup in 1963 that denied Arévalo a second term in office. This analysis of Arévalo's writings and governing practices shows their relevance to Latin America's search for a third way between revolutionary class struggle and neoliberal authoritarianism.

The article critiques the scholarly emphasis on the centrality of West-Central Africans in the Haitian Revolution. It argues that two highly influential articles published 30 years ago by John Thornton greatly exaggerated the presence of such “Congos” in the colony, and overstated that of Africans in general. Amplified in subsequent works by Thornton and others, this exaggeration has become the prevailing orthodoxy and the issue has gone entirely unnoticed down to today. To make its point, the article draws on a data set of more than 31,000 enslaved workers of known origin and it attempts to calculate population change on the eve of the revolution. It lays out the way the ethnic composition of the black population varied by crop type and region, and produces for the first time estimates for the whole of Saint Domingue. It additionally makes two excursions into African studies. The first is to investigate the ethnic/geographic origins of the “Congos.” The second relates to the nature of slavery in West-Central Africa and certain items of Kikongo vocabulary. This forms part of a critique of an ambitious article by James Sweet concerning the influence of Kongolese in Saint-Domingue that constitutes the article's final section.

Through presence or absence, indigeneity has long been at the center of Bolivian politics, culture, and nationalism.1 It carries immense social import. Yet what Indigenous means and who gets counted as part of this umbrella category has never been clear or static. Although Bolivia's racial and ethnic categories seem as etched in stone as the Andes themselves, individual classification is fluid and situational based on sociocultural markers that change over time. These markers include occupation, literacy, dress, language, surname, and residence. Individuals may move through these categories (and not only in one direction) over the course of their lives. This fluidity, combined with changing meaning and the valorization of indigeneity at the national and international levels, has led to wild fluctuations in official statistics on race since independence. The social construction of these categories came to the fore in 2012 when the census reported that Bolivians who identified as Indigenous had dropped to 40 percent of the population, down from 62 percent only eleven years earlier. International observers were left wondering, where did all the Indigenous people go?2

Over the past 40 years, no scholar has written so deeply or prolifically on the histories of Saint Domingue and the Haitian Revolution as David Geggus. Indeed, the scale of the research required to compile the population database of enslaved people in Saint Domingue across different labor sectors from 1770 to 1791 is a testament to years of work in French archives—I can think of no other scholar of Haiti who could make that heavy lift. As an outsider to the field of Haitian history, I am grateful for his intervention and to the editors of The Americas for giving me the opportunity to respond.

This article examines the migration and expropriation policies of Guatemala's revolutionary governments toward Germans present in the country during the postwar years and the start of the Cold War. It reconstructs the challenges around the domestic and international articulations of their strategy. Revolutionary governments’ concerted efforts to confiscate valuable land and condition the return of German-Guatemalans classified as ‘dangerous’ can be interpreted as part of a cohesive plan to regain control of strategic domestic resources for future redistribution. It also reflects financial policies that have both electoral and financial purposes. The article is built around newly available judicial, legislative, and consular (France) Guatemalan sources, along with personal letters from Guatemala's top politicians, and complemented by Mexican, Chilean, Argentine, British, and US diplomatic documents. In methodological terms, this article shows the importance of articulating long-term processes, here the nineteenth-century German presence in Guatemala, in the context of historical junctures such as the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. It also draws attention to the importance of analyzing events on domestic, regional and global scales to understand foreign policy-making. This article enriches an already complex set of global, regional, and domestic interactions of the postwar period, as well as the role of Guatemala during that time.

In response to two pieces I wrote in the 1990s, and a section of my book Cultural History of the Atlantic World (2012), David Geggus has charged me with fomenting “Kongomania.” I am a specialist in the history of the Kingdom of Kongo, it is true, and in both pieces, Kongo's history was an important part of the argument. In spite of my own fondness for Kongo and its role in the world, I plead not guilty.

On November 22, 1981, thousands of laypeople, along with bishops, priests, and theologians, gathered in Recife to celebrate the Eucharist. Offered during a military dictatorship in a period of popular insurgency, the Quilombos Mass mourned the death of millions in the African slave trade, sought pardon for the Church's past sins, and celebrated the resistance of Blacks in Brazil and beyond its borders. The acclaimed Black Brazilian pop star and activist Milton de Nascimento collaborated with an activist poet and three bishops to produce a multimedia performance; in the spirit of liberation theology, it was marked by striking visuals, dance, music, and the invocation of the sacred. This article draws on reportage, speeches and correspondence, military court and intelligence records, published interviews, and the author's interview with one of its composers. It offers a close textual analysis, with attention to Catholic theological debates, as well as an analysis of the performance itself, drawn from video recordings and bringing attention to aspects neglected by most commentators, who refer only to the album, as it was finally produced. Initially stifled by the Vatican, Milton's masterpiece, issued as an album on vinyl and performed in paid concerts, became a powerful cultural reference for activists, serving as a touchstone for a strategic alliance between Black activists and the liberationist Church.

In April 1802, the leaders of the Haitian Revolution faced a choice that would expose fundamental differences in their vision of liberty in post-emancipation society: join General Leclerc's army or continue the fight against French expeditionary forces. Henri Christophe, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean Jacques Dessalines agreed, whilst Kongo leader Macaya and Sans-Souci refused, the latter describing his forces as “defenders of liberty.”1 Following his arrest, Louverture famously declared: “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint Domingue only the trunk of the tree of the liberty of the blacks; it will grow back from the roots, because they are deep and numerous.”2 The most obvious roots of liberty were Sans-Souci's mainly African troops, known as the “Congos,” who continued the revolution using tactics honed in 1791. But when Christophe, Dessalines, and Alexandre Pétion defected from the French and joined the newly-united “indigenous army,” the conflict over who would lead the “defenders of liberty” persisted, culminating in Henri Christophe's assassination of Sans-Souci, after whom he would famously name his palace.3 Sans-Souci's death foreshadowed a broader discursive victory in post-revolution historiography, which celebrated the role of Creole and mixed-race leaders, and the political ideology of the French Revolution, to the exclusion of African people and ideas.4

David Geggus offers a detailed response to the three critiques of his “Kongomania” article by John Thornton, Christina Mobley, and James Sweet. Centered on demographic statistics and their link to cultural influence, the rebuttal examines evidentiary support for various assertions and hypotheses. The debate ranges over the use of certain ethnonyms (Creole, Congo, Mondongue); the creation of Vodou; the significance of Baudry des Lozières's Vocabulaire Congo; and the organization and aims of the 1791 uprising and the Haitian War of Independence.

Certain characters and their roles in the European conquest of America are well known: Christopher Columbus, Hernando Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, and a few others. Likewise, scholarly interest in the conquest has focused on the centers of great political, economic, and cultural entities such as the Aztec Empire in Mesoamerica and the Inca Empire in the Central Andes.