This 2002 book, the second in a three-volume history of Mexico, covers the period 1521 to 1821.

The first in a three-volume history, covering the period 25,000 BC to the sixteenth century.

From secular and ecclesiastical court records, Bennett reconstructs the lives of slave and free blacks, their regulation by the government and by the Church, the impact of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects.

A prominent scholar of Mexican and Latin American history challenges the field’s focus on historical memory to instead examine colonial-era conceptions of the future Going against the grain of most existing scholarship, Matthew D. O’Hara explores the archives of colonial Mexico to uncover a history of "futuremaking." While historians and historical anthropologists of Latin America have long focused on historical memory, O’Hara—a Rockefeller Foundation grantee and the award-winning author of A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico—rejects this approach and its assumptions about time experience. Ranging widely across economic, political, and cultural practices, O’Hara demonstrates how colonial subjects used the resources of tradition and Catholicism to craft new futures. An intriguing, innovative work, this volume will be widely read by scholars of Latin American history, religious studies, and historical methodology.

In their efforts to impose colonial rule on Nueva Vizcaya from the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, Spaniards established missions among the principal Indian groups of present-day eastern Sinaloa, northern Durango, and southern Chihuahua, Mexico—the Xiximes, Acaxees, Conchos, Tepehuanes, and Tarahumaras. Yet, when the colonial era ended two centuries later, only the Tepehuanes and Tarahumaras remained as distinct peoples, the other groups having disappeared or blended into the emerging mestizo culture of the northern frontier. Why were these two indigenous peoples able to maintain their group identity under conditions of conquest, while the others could not? In this book, Susan Deeds constructs authoritative ethnohistories of the Xiximes, Acaxees, Conchos, Tepehuanes, and Tarahumaras to explain why only two of the five groups successfully resisted Spanish conquest and colonization. Drawing on extensive research in colonial-era archives, Deeds provides a multifaceted analysis of each group's past from the time the Spaniards first attempted to settle them in missions up to the middle of the eighteenth century, when secular pressures had wrought momentous changes. Her masterful explanations of how ethnic identities, subsistence patterns, cultural beliefs, and gender relations were forged and changed over time on Mexico's northern frontier offer important new ways of understanding the struggle between resistance and adaptation in which Mexico's indigenous peoples are still engaged, five centuries after the "Spanish Conquest."

Asking readers to imagine a history of Mexico narrated through the experiences of Africans and their descendants, this book offers a radical reconfiguration of Latin American history. Using ecclesiastical and inquisitorial records, Herman L. Bennett frames the history of Mexico around the private lives and liberty that Catholicism engendered among enslaved Africans and free blacks, who became majority populations soon after the Spanish conquest. The resulting history of 17th-century Mexico brings forth tantalizing personal and family dramas, body politics, and stories of lost virtue and sullen honor. By focusing on these phenomena among peoples of African descent, rather than the conventional history of Mexico with the narrative of slavery to freedom figured in, Colonial Blackness presents the colonial drama in all its untidy detail.

Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History is a sourcebook of primary texts and images intended for students and teachers as well as for scholars and general readers. The book centers upon people-people from different parts of the world who came together to form societies by chance and by design in the years after 1492. This text is designed to encourage a detailed exploration of the cultural development of colonial Latin America through a wide variety of documents and visual materials, most of which have been translated and presented originally for this collection. Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History is a revision of SR Books' popular Colonial Spanish America. The new edition welcomes a third co-editor and, most significantly, embraces Portuguese and Brazilian materials. Other fundamental changes include new documents from Spanish South America, the addition of some key color images, plus six reference maps, and a decision to concentrate entirely upon primary sources. The book is meant to enrich, not repeat, the work of existing texts on this period, and its use of primary sources to focus upon people makes it stand out from other books that have concentrated on the political and economic aspects. The book's illustrations and documents are accompanied by introductions which provide context and invite discussion. These sources feature social changes, puzzling developments, and the experience of living in Spanish and Portuguese American colonial societies. Religion and society are the integral themes of Colonial Latin America. Religion becomes the nexus for much of what has been treated as political, social, economic, and cultural history during this period. Society is just as inclusive, allowing students to meet a variety of individuals-not faceless social groups. While some familiar names and voices are included-conquerors, chroniclers, sculptors, and preachers-other, far less familiar points of view complement and complicate the better-known narratives of this history. In treating Iberia and America, before as well as after their meeting, apparent contradictions emerge as opportunities for understanding; different perspectives become prompts for wider discussion. Other themes include exploration and contact; religious and cultural change; slavery and society, miscegenation, and the formation, consolidation, reform, and collapse of colonial institutions of government and the Church, as well as accompanying changes in economies and labor. This sourcebook allows students and teachers to consider the thoughts and actions of a wide range of people who were making choices and decisions, pursuing ideals, misperceiving each other, experiencing disenchantment, absorbing new pressures, breaking rules as well as following them, and employing strategies of survival which might involve both reconciliation and opposition. Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History has been assembled with teaching and class discussion in mind. The book will be an excellent tool for Latin American history survey courses and for seminars on the colonial period.

"A valuable and logical step in the progression of critical studies on convent writing. . . . We have moved from seeing women writers as working at the margins to seeing them as writing subjects."—Latin American Research Review "Consider[s] nuns not as merely secular or religious writers, but through the lens of interdisciplinary study, as multifaceted historical agents. . . . The importance of the kind of innovative theoretical work undertaken by this text . . . cannot be over-emphasized, and will offer a both provocative and illuminating read to scholars in a broad range of disciplines."—Journal of International Women’s Studies "Kirk reconstructs aspects of the lives of colonial nuns through close-up readings of select manuscripts and, additionally, of published primary sources. . . . A lively and provocative addition to the literature on colonial Mexico that offers new insights into the dynamics of religious community."—Bulletin of Latin American Research "A thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of community-building among colonial Latin American women."—A Contracorriente "A timely scholarly contribution to the field of gender and religion. . . . Presents a fresh look at convent literature by specifically analyzing alliances, friendships, and communities."—Colonial Latin American Historical Review "An interesting and ambitious study of the discourses associated with convent life in Mexico."—Catholic Historical Review

In 1761 Ilarione da Bergamo, a Capuchin friar, journeyed to Mexico to gather alms for foreign missions. After harrowing voyages across the Mediterranean and Atlantic, he reached Mexico City in 1763. His account reveals the squalor, crime, and other perils in the viceregal capital, and details daily life: food, public hygiene, sexual morality, medical practices, and popular diversions. His observations about religious life are particularly valuable. Ilarione also describes mining and refining techniques, recounts a bitter and bloody miners' strike, and recalls traveling across bandit-infested wilderness to Guadalajara. After his return to Italy, Ilarione wrote an account of his journey, published here for the first time in English. The editors have liberally annotated the text, written an introduction about Ilarione's life and the historical context of his journey, and included more than a dozen of Fra Ilarione's original drawings, including maps and sketches of Mexican flora. Daily Life in Colonial Mexico is a welcome addition to the firsthand literature of New Spain.

Through an examination of caste in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico, Hall of Mirrors explores the construction of hierarchy and difference in a Spanish colonial setting. Laura A. Lewis describes how the meanings attached to the categories of Spanish, Indian, black, mulatto, and mestizo were generated within that setting, as she shows how the cultural politics of caste produced a system of fluid and relational designations that simultaneously facilitated and undermined Spanish governance. Using judicial records from a variety of colonial courts, Lewis highlights the ethnographic details of legal proceedings as she demonstrates how Indians, in particular, came to be the masters of witchcraft, a domain of power that drew on gendered and hegemonic caste distinctions to complicate the colonial hierarchy. She also reveals the ways in which blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos mediated between Spaniards and Indians, alternatively reinforcing Spanish authority and challenging it through alliances with Indians. Bringing to life colonial subjects as they testified about their experiences, Hall of Mirrors discloses a series of contradictions that complicate easy distinctions between subalterns and elites, resistance and power.