The three papers included here, written by Ana de Zaballa, Pilar Latasa, and Gabriela Ramos, constitute a highly professional effort within the study of canon law in colonial Spanish America. These papers allow us to perceive how closely linked pastoral concerns, legal imagination, and judicial practices were during that period. To fully appreciate the importance of these four investigations, we must first briefly lay out the current state of academic studies in canon law in “las Indias Occidentales,” what today is generally called viceregal or colonial Spanish America.

In 1787, a group of Indians from the town of Almoloya, part of Apan in the Intendancy of Mexico, aired their grievances against several prominent local leaders. The petitioners claimed that their predominantly Indian community was plagued by a group of free-colored people who were masquerading as Indian nobles, or caciques, and enjoying privileges to which only those with noble lineage were entitled. One of these was exemption from the economically onerous and socially stigmatized royal tribute that had symbolized the relationship between the Spanish monarch and free-colored subjects since the sixteenth century.

Looking over the course of my half century working in the fields of Latin American and US history, I find that from the beginning to the end I have been working in a relatively isolated area of our historical profession. I have been committed to history as a social science, and in that framework, using mostly comparative and quantitative analysis to study themes related to basic social and economic structures. In this I have been much influenced by the traditional vision of the Annales school of historical research. I have also been totally committed to working within the social sciences, having completed a minor doctoral field in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

During the eighteenth century, the Rodrigues da Cruz and the Vieira da Costa families rose to relative prominence in the comarca of Rio das Velhas, a judicial district of the captaincy of Minas Gerais (Figure 1). Both families had as their patriarch a wealthy Portuguese man whose fortune was built on the gold-mining industry that dominated the regional economy in the early part of the century. Both families were also the product of relationships between Portuguese gold miners and slave women. The second and third generations of the two families similarly comprised freed or free persons of mixed European and African descent whose own standing in society relied in part on their families' ability to manage the social and legal implications of the circumstances of their birth. The Rodrigues da Cruz and Vieira da Costa families were thus part of a large and rising population of pardos (light-skinned persons) or mulatos (persons of mixed descent) in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais—not of solely Portuguese origin or descent (brancos), solely African origin (preto), nor solely African descent but born in Brazil (crioulo). Their ambiguous social standing could lie somewhere between the elite status of most brancos and the slave status of most pretos or crioulos.

In the early eighteenth century, two Basque brothers of the Spanish Zangroniz family established a trading house in the Cuban capital. Through the expansion and diversification of their business activities over time, they created a powerful transatlantic commercial network, and in the process became important actors during a period characterized by vastly increased economic integration in the Atlantic world. Behind this growth were technological innovations. The brothers' shrewd use of them “made it possible to transport more and different kinds of items across great distances.

About 60 years after the Spanish invasion and conquest of Mexico, a group of Nahua intellectuals gathered in Tenochtitlan. On the very site of the heart of the Aztec empire stood a city of a new name: Mexico City, capital of New Spain. There the Nahuas set about compiling an extensive book of miscellanea, now known as the Codex Mexicanus. Owned by the Bibliothèque National de France, the codex includes records pertaining to the Christian and Aztec calendars, European medical astrology, a genealogy of the Tenochca royal house, and the annals of preconquest and early colonial Mexico City, among other intriguing topics.

The Catholic missionaries who first brought Christianity to New Spain (colonial Mexico) were often very creative and innovative in their teaching methods. They used various audiovisual devices and, often without realizing it, built on preconquest and pre-Christian concepts, a form of unconscious syncretism. It is widely accepted that the missionary enterprise began in 1524 with the arrival of “The Twelve,” the first Franciscan missionaries. Their initial decision that evangelization would be carried on in the native languages, not Spanish, was crucial and had become Church policy by the eighteenth century. They were aided in this by the fact that Nahuatl, the Aztec language, served as a lingua franca, especially in commerce and diplomacy, throughout the central plateau and as far south as Guatemala. The Franciscans, and later the Jesuits, produced grammars (artes), dictionaries, sermonaries, catechisms, miracle stories, and even religious drama in Nahuatl. The adaptation of Nahuatl to the Latin alphabet was enthusiastically received by the native peoples who left us chronicles, town council records, censuses (with valuable information on baptisms and polygamy), lawsuits, and other documentation. With all this, we have been able to open a new window on colonial life.

The right of persons to marry without coercion and live their marriage freely was one of the foremost and frequently mentioned topics among synod and council fathers, moralists, and canon lawyers in colonial Spanish America. Within the territory of the viceroyalty of Peru, the recommendations of the Council of Trent in this regard took the form of a new set of ecclesiastical regulations, derived from synods and councils that occurred from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century.

In the Andes, the pastoral visitation of Indian parishes usually evokes the idea of a strongly oppositional relationship between the Church and local society. This vision, lacking in nuance, has been widely disseminated both within the academy and outside it. Although it derives from a serious academic interest in discovering and analyzing the common thread of the Church's evangelization policy in Peru, this stance, centered on the problem of the “extirpation of idolatry,” has been progressively emptied of content and today tends to serve as the standard means of filling gaps in the understanding of the history of Andean peoples during the colonial period.

In 1742, a highland Andean named Juan Santos led a group of mainly Asháninka and Yanesha warriors against a handful of isolated Franciscan missions in the central high jungle of Peru. Over the next ten years the rebellion smoldered, occasionally sparking to life, as Santos's forces pushed the missionaries based out of the College of Santa Rosa de Ocopa (near Jauja, Peru) back to the highlands. The uprising culminated in a brief foray into the highlands, but never effectively reached beyond the security of the densely vegetated high jungle, known locally as the central montaña region. Despite its modest accomplishments, the rebellion secured autonomy for the combatant nations during the rest of the colonial period.

As Agent 15 of the Mexico City judicial police made his way home for lunch on a day early in December 1926, he saw a balloon floating in the breeze. He rushed to the rooftop observatorio of his apartment building, where he spotted a girl around 14 years old, wearing a lilac-colored dress, standing on a nearby roof and holding a string. Certain that the balloon had been released from this location, he ran down the stairs, and, while crossing the street, looked up to see yet another balloon. Balloons had been drifting through the sky since early morning, so many and from so many directions that police struggled to find where they were coming from. When the balloons popped, flyers came tumbling down, urging Catholics to engage in peaceful protest against government anticlericalism by adorning their houses with yellow and white stripes in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe on her upcoming feast day, December 12. Accompanied by a beat policeman, Agent 15 approached two men in the building where he had seen the girl with the string, surmising that they had aided the launch. Although a search yielded nothing more incriminating than a stick with four strings, he arrested the men. He and other balloon-chasing police officers were obeying specific orders in hunting down the perpetrators that day, but in a broader sense they had become enforcers of laws introduced in the 1917 constitution that sharply restricted the scope of religious expression and observation in public.

The late eighteenth century brought deep changes to the Atlantic World. Imperial competition, warfare, revolutions and a general increase in transatlantic commerce changed the balance of power among European empires and their overseas territories. The Spanish empire in particular faced multiple challenges, especially intermittent warfare and economic crises, which many historians regard as having paved the way for the Spanish American independence movements after 1808. Warfare in Europe and in the Atlantic weakened Spain's economy and its control over trade and administration in its American territories. Military conflicts in the 1790s and 1800s disrupted the commercial routes connecting the Peninsula and the colonies, forcing the opening of the colonial economies to foreign agents. Because of the perils faced by Spanish vessels crossing the Atlantic, the Castilian crown allowed colonial merchants to trade directly with foreign neutral nations. Apart from legal commerce, contraband trade also flourished.

Even a brief look into the historiography on Indian marriage in New Spain will reveal how infrequently scholars have devoted themselves to this topic. On the one hand, there are texts written from the perspective of canon law, such as those by Federico Aznar Gil, Paulino Castañeda, Daisy Rípodas Ardanaz, and Guillermo Floris Margadant, but these authors address canonical development in Spain as well as Spanish America and use mainly references from councils and synods, especially pastoral sources. On the other hand, there are anthropological studies, such as those of David Robichaux, Danièle Dehouve, Pierre Ragon, and Serge Gruzinski that compare pre-Hispanic marriage to Christian marriage.

In the Archivo General de Indias in Seville there exists a remarkable sample of private correspondence between two of the most powerful figures of the Bourbon Age in Spanish American history. The principal writer is Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea, marqués de la Ensenada and minister of Hacienda, War, and Indies and Marine since 1743, and subsequently holder of other posts that made him, in a contemporary opinion, “Secretary of Everything.” His correspondent is José Antonio Manso de Velasco, conde de Superunda and viceroy of Peru from 1745 to 1761, the longest serving and among the most influential of the Peruvian viceroys. The Seville correspondence consists mainly of just seven generally brief letters. The private character of these letters, however, along with the close relationship between the two men and the roles they occupied, makes them historically fascinating. Excerpts are published here for the first time, in both Spanish and English translation.

Prevalent scholarly studies of indigenous language documents from Mesoamerica's colonial times include the predominant argument that they were written by native scribes to protect community interests. The belief is that scribes performed as notaries in municipal councils to generate native language notarial documents as indemnity against possible infractions of their communities’ rights to possess property. Notarial documentation was usually extrajudicial, created by the municipal scribe for community protection and not for any specific litigation before a Spanish magistrate. Their writings represented internal municipal administration and the jurisdiction of the native cabildo (town council) within each republic of Indians. They could be utilized, if necessary, to bolster indigenous claims to their rights and privileges in litigation brought before Spanish officials.

With this lecture by Pablo Piccato, The Americas continues its collaboration with the New School for Social Research to publish its annual Lecture in Latin American History. The series features lectures by senior historians in the field of Latin American history across an array of topics. This is the fifth in the series.

This article focuses on the history of an Afro-descendant family over its seven generations in one region of Minas Gerais. Although it is notoriously difficult to trace families founded by slaves, this one is an exception: it has proved possible to trace this family over a century and a half, and with a remarkable level of detail, because its members mostly stayed in one place. The implications of their permanence go beyond mere genealogy or family reconstitution to challenge long-standing historiographical perspectives. Over the years many scholars have agreed that Brazilian colonial and early imperial society was characterized by the near-constant movement of all segments of the population. New frontiers opened by agriculture, ranching, and mining attracted some members of the elite, but also beckoned the less favored with new opportunities. This incessant movement has even been touted as an impediment to the advancement of family history in Brazil.

The editorial office has received a number of edited volumes that will be of interest to our readership. These works tend to be less suitable for unified reviews than monographs, and thus a considerable backlog has developed. To introduce these volumes, we occasionally list in this section the publication information and tables of contents entries. The five volumes selected for this issue examine archaeology and history in Latin America.