In the summer of 1924, townspeople recount, 14-year-old Manuel Chávez built models of colonial New Mexico mission churches in the dirt outside Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in the village of Peña Blanca. He was staying with the Franciscan friars after expressing his desire to enter the seminary, where he would become the first native New Mexico Hispano to be ordained a Franciscan priest in the centuries since the Spanish colonization. Still a boy, but one who was about to embark on a life-changing path, the small missions he playfully constructed in the dirt and staunchly protected foretold the strategy of rematerialization that would characterize his future: he would become a pioneering Franciscan historian who organized and interpreted the vast collection of Catholic Church documents from the colonial period in New Mexico through the twentieth century. The author of two dozen books and over 600 shorter works, Fray Angélico Chávez (1910–1996) was a visual artist, literary figure, historian, genealogist, translator, and church restorer—one of New Mexico's foremost twentieth-century intellectuals.

Whether they be the painted walls and highly ‘dressed’ altars of Andean churches, or the collective knotted strings and litigation proceedings housed in locked chests in local Indian municipal councils, artifacts conjure up cultural interstices instrumental for discerning the “fine grain” of Spanish colonialism in the Andes. After the early years of the Spanish presence, the Andes became a mosaic of multifarious articulations of indigenous, European, and African ways of thinking, living, and weaving a social order that continued to change over time and across the geographical space of the viceroyalty of Peru.

Let me begin by thanking you for this honor. Like most of you I belong to many professional organizations and all of them have provided me with the opportunity to grow intellectually as well as forge the enduring professional associations that have so enriched my life. From the beginning of my career, however, CLAH has always served as my professional home. It is because I consider myself fortunate to be one of you that this award means so much to me. I am grateful indeed.

No rhetorical flourishes: this work-in-progress is intended to provoke a long-overdue public dialogue on an ugly topic that refuses to stay disappeared. It treats a hidden battleground of Argentina's Dirty War (1976–1983), a ‘petite war,’ a war within the war, directed by a military-appointed doctor against the mentally deficient inmates concentrated at the national psychiatric hospital, the Colonia Nacional Dr. Manuel A. Montes de Oca in Torres, and its sister institution, the Colonia Psiquiátrica Domingo Cabred, in Lujan, both in Buenos Aires province. Buried in the historical, statistical, legal, and archival records, along with the key informant interviews, ethnographic observations, and photos is shattering evidence of medical human rights abuses committed under the necropolitics of the Dirty War against an abandoned population of mental “defectives” who were condemned to gratuitous suffering and early deaths at the psychiatric colony (see Figure 1). In the worst instances, the abuses were crimes against humanity.

In recent years, scholars from a variety of fields have advanced the idea that native legal activism worked as one of the most widespread and effective strategies for the defense of communal assets, political autonomy, and customary law in early colonial Peru. Indigenous claimants, petitioners, and legal intermediaries begin to appear in the historical record just ten years after the initial encounter at Cajamarca in 1532. After embracing Iberian legal culture in the early 1540s, individuals of noble Inca descent began to engage with local and metropolitan courts, preparing letters, reports, petitions, and proofs of services and merit aimed at securing their status within the new order. Native lords (caciques) and communities of non-Inca origin joined as active litigants and petitioners in the late 1540s, hiring advocates and solicitors and sending their own delegations to tend to their legal affairs in Lima, seat of a royal court of appeal. During the two decades that followed the promulgation of the New Laws (1542), which granted these courts of appeal or audiencias in the Americas the right to assess and revise Indian tributary quotas, Lima experienced an explosion of litigation by native polities requesting a reduction of their fiscal burdens and caciques seeking confirmation of their chiefly rank. Lawsuits pertaining to lands and pastures, town boundaries, and lordship (cacicazgo) rights soon ensued. In the early 1560s, the first Andean caciques crossed the Atlantic on behalf of their communities and reached the still-itinerant Habsburg court. Indigenous groups quickly became expert litigators in secular and ecclesiastical courts. Their legal activism continued unabated throughout the Habsburg era.

On January 14, 1982, residents of Tula, Hidalgo, discovered the bodies of nine murdered men floating in a sewage drain emanating from Mexico City. All bore signs of gruesome torture. Red Cross workers soon located three more bodies, leading one reporter to describe the homicides as “the crime of the century.” Detectives initially asserted that the victims were drug traffickers who had been murdered by a rival gang. Manuel Buendía, in his weekday political column Red Privada, described the scene as “bloodcurdling,” employing his signature hard-boiled prose. Yet, the nation's most prominent journalist was referring not only to the gore, but also to his suspicions that police had committed the crime.

On May 1, 1989, María, a high school teacher from Buenos Aires, wrote a letter to President Raúl Alfonsín as he began his final months in office. The country was in the midst of a hyperinflation crisis and elections were set for just two weeks away. Earlier in the day, María had heard the president's last address to the congress, and she felt compelled to write him. “My friend,” she began, as she recounted how she and her husband, an adjunct university instructor, had worked hard over two decades of marriage, weathering continuous financial difficulties and the sensation of “always having to start over.” María emphasized that she had no political affiliations that would cloud her judgment, lest the president think she was writing to ask for political favors.

In April 1975, indigenous youth in Mexico occupied regional development centers throughout the southern state of Oaxaca. From the Sierra Sur town of Miahuatlán, to the arid highlands of the Mixteca Alta, to the valley of the Papaloapan Dam project, these youth took control of Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) coordinating centers and held them for more than a month. Trained as promotores bilingües (bilingual agents of education and development projects) by a separate regional development agency (the Instituto de Investigación y Integración Social del Estado de Oaxaca, or IIISEO), they demanded professional training and the creation of positions for themselves as federal teachers. Their banners accused the Mexican government of ethnocide against native peoples, denouncing the government's celebration of indigenous culture as a mask for continued exploitation.

In 1556 Franciscan missionaries from the city of Mexico arrived in the then remote area of Zacatecas to begin what was expected to be a crucial but difficult evangelization of the area. They had been preceded by several other brothers who had not settled there despite having spent several years in catechizing the indigenous. The intention of these four missionaries was to stay and found a convent. Along with Fr. Pedro de Espinareda and Fr. Diego de la Cadena came one lay brother, Fr. Jacinto de San Francisco, and one donado simply called Lucas. Fr. Joseph Arlegui, chronicler of the order, assumed the presence of those friars would lay the foundation for the difficult task of evangelizing such distant lands and such unwilling peoples.

Upon leaving office in 1716, the Duke of Linares, the viceroy of New Spain, warned his successor of a particularly vexing issue: the question of what to do about Mexico City's Baratillo marketplace. “There is in the Plaza of Mexico,” he wrote, “a traffic prohibited by law or decree that is so problematic that ending it has been a great challenge for me, being that what is stolen [in the city] is sold there, only disguised.” Hipólito Villarroel, writing his treatise about the decadence of Mexico City more than a half-century later, was no more sparing in his description of the market. He referred to it as the “cave or depository for the thieving committed by artisans, maids, and servants, and, in sum, all the plebeians—Indians, mulattos, and the other castas—that are permitted to inhabit this city.” The market was even the subject of a book-length satirical manuscript, written in 1754. Pedro Anselmo Chreslos Jache's unpublished “Ordenanzas del Baratillo” is a legal code for a world turned upside down, where the mixed-race castas reigned and Spaniards were ostracized, and where “four thousand vagabonds” congregated every day to be instructed by “doctors in the faculty of trickery.”

In 1620, almost a hundred years after the Virgin of Guadalupe is said to have appeared to Juan Diego on the Hill of Tepeyac, a small group of Spanish nuns paid a visit to the chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Like many others before and after them they stopped at the shrine on their way to Mexico City. The Franciscan nuns were traveling from Toledo to Manila and were about to cross Mexico to board the yearly Manila Galleon at the port of Acapulco.

In building its early modern empire across the Atlantic, Spain deployed an army of legal bureaucrats who were rooted in the Iberian culture of letters and inherited Roman law. To rule their possessions in the New World, the Habsburgs attempted a wholesale incorporation of indigenous peoples into a Hispanicized legal culture. They redistributed the native population, introduced new forms of communication, and implemented their notions of justice and social order to counter the authority of kurakas (ethnic lords) in the Andes. Over time, the establishment of Spanish legal and political institutions encouraged new supra-ayllu (community) loyalties among Andeans, while in the newly created reducciones or Indian towns, native literate officials became the immediate brokers between the colonial state and the República de Indios, a colonial reordering of indigenous worlds. Working closely with one another, indigenous escribanos, alcaldes ordinarios, procuradores de cabildo (legal advocates of the Indians’ council), along with interpreters and fiscales de iglesia (overseers of Indian conversion), performed their jobs in local office in both expected and unanticipated ways. They interwove alphabetic literacy with their experience as servants of the state and the church, creating alternative legal practices and interpretations.

In his epic poem Paradise Regained (1671), John Milton has Satan observe that “The childhood shows the man/As morning shows the day/ Be famous then/ By wisdom. As the empire must extend/ So let extend thy mind o’er all the world.” As parents and as patriots, the leaders of Latin America's revolutions for independence wanted bright futures for both their children and their young nations. In many ways, the goals they set for each were the same: enhanced commercial opportunities, a political arena marked by greater freedom of speech and open debate, the rule of law, government with a strong moral center in which the privileged members of society had a responsibility to set a good example, and, perhaps most cherished of all, access to modern scientific and secular education. As figurative parents of emerging nations, and as biological parents of impressionable youth, these creole founding fathers wished to instill useful patriotic values in their national and personal families alike. Bridging the Enlightenment and Romantic eras, Latin American independence rhetoric blurred the distinction between nation-building and paternity, indicating that its leaders saw themselves as parents in more than one sense.

The following pages present an important scholarly exchange on a central sociocultural issue in Latin American history. First, we present J. Lorand Matory's review of Luis Nicolau Parés's 2013 book The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil. Second, we present Parés's response to the review.

On February 25, 1937, Mexico's ruling political party, then called the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), announced that for the first time it would permit “organized” women to vote in internal party elections. “Organized” was code for members of labor unions, agrarian leagues, or other groups supportive of the government. The decision reveals that the PNR, under the leadership of revolutionary general and president Lázaro Cárdenas, had found itself in a situation similar to that of other progressive parties throughout the hemisphere. Although many PNR leaders, including the president, had come to support women's suffrage in principle, their shared conviction regarding the essential conservatism of most Mexican women put them in a tight spot. If universally enfranchised, women might thank the party by voting them right out of office, or force them to employ unmanageable levels of electoral fraud to prevent such an outcome. The 1937 ruling conveniently allowed them to be for and against women's suffrage at the same time. Suffragists, however, were not satisfied.

The first Christian churches were built in the Andes soon after Spaniards arrived. Initially simple structures, they were later remodeled into large stone monuments. Aside from their architectural construction, the furnishing and decoration of these churches was an ongoing project that involved many participants, often under the watchful eye of a parish priest. Art historians have uncovered fascinating cases in which native artists exercised agency in creating works to be displayed in church interiors, many of which expressed Andean as well as Christian beliefs. This scholarship has focused primarily on the art forms of painting and sculpture, which were very visible within the church, especially in cases such as the baptism murals discussed by Ananda Cohen Suarez in this issue. An underappreciated yet equally notable aspect of church decoration was textiles. Throughout the colonial period churches were abundantly adorned with “church clothing,” textile ornaments meant to cover floors, walls, and altars as well as clothe church functionaries and religious statuary. The purchase and maintenance of church textiles consumed the lion's share of annual church budgets.

The Atlantic slave trade extracted kidnapped populations from the entirety of the western African coast between what are now Senegal and Angola, as well as parts of the east African coast in what is now Mozambique. Western slave traders and buyers regularly classified their human merchandise in terms of the African region, coastal town, or commercial fortress from which they had embarked, or in terms of an ethnic group that presumably derived from that place. With such presumptions, ethnic groupings such as Congo, Angola, Carabalí, Ibo, Nagô, Lucumí, Mina, Arará, Koromantee, and so forth were called “nations.”

The arts of the colonial Andes bear witness to a complex and contested story of evangelization that involved a variety of actors, including priests, artists, indigenous congregations, and confraternities. Sculptures of saints, sumptuous retablos (altarpieces), canvas paintings with elaborate gilded frames, and mural cycles devoted to a variety of biblical themes were employed in the religious instruction of indigenous communities, and as catalysts for sensorial modes of communication. The visual arts provided a tangible analogue to sermons and printed catechisms, offering parishioners a lens through which to envision the sacred. Adapted from European iconographic models and infused with local references and symbolism, religious art throughout the colonial Americas introduced new visual vocabularies to indigenous congregations, who quickly became conversant in these images of conversion.

Alfred W. Crosby is the author of such influential works as The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1973). He lives in retirement on Nantucket Island with his wife Frances Karttunen, noted in her own right for important works in linguistics and history. In September, 2013, I had the opportunity to carry on a long conversation with Crosby about his work, American Studies, and the future for environmental history. Crosby suffers from Parkinson's disease. His mind is sharp and his insights are keen. The Columbian exchange is the phenomenon of the contact period in which European crops and animals were imported into the New World, while New World crops and animals were introduced into Europe.