A fictionalized biography of a Spanish swordswoman who flees the Inquisition and takes part with Cortés in the conquest of Mexico. After which she enters politics and becomes a champion of Indian rights.

This Spanish Borderlands classic recounts Jesuit colonization of the Old California, the peninsula now known as Baja California.

"María Sabina's Selected Works introduces and enhances the understanding of one of the world's most remarkable poets. Mr. Rothenberg frames her work within the larger context of 'ethnopoetics' with no academic reductionism whatsoever, a rare and indispensable service to a 'world poet' such as Maria Sabina. The translation of Maria Sabina, her 'autobiography' and her oral poetry, is exquisite, powerful, rendered with linguistic dignity."—Howard Norman "This book transmits not only a full and rich experience with one of the most extraordinary personalities and poetic voices of our time, but also a great lesson in our understanding of the relations between religious inspiration and its artistic expression. It enriches our perceptions of the nature and possibilities of oral composition, complementing what we already know of it from the study of the Homeric and other poems in its great tradition."—George Economou "María Sabina is one of the great figures of American shamanism. Her Chants is a masterpiece of indigenous visionary poetry. Her Life is the account of a woman who transcended her own culture and its material poverty to become one of the great women of the twentieth century. The veneration of her work continues beyond her death. To read her is to embark on a journey to the world of the extrasensorial."—Homero Aridjis "In the chants of María Sabina, we can appreciate the interplay of individual invention and traditional liturgy within the oral creativity of a non-literate society. The recordings of her words that have saved them from oblivion give us the opportunity to glimpse the emergence of a genius from the soil of the communal, religious folk poetry of a native Mexican campesino people."—Henry Munn

Here is the complete history of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, one of the two most important religious groups in the Spanish empire in America, from the Conquest to Independence in the early nineteenth century. Based upon ten years of research, this study focuses on the effect if Spanish institutions on Indian life at the local level.

During the period of Aztec expansion and empire (ca. 1325–1525), scribes of high social standing used a pictographic writing system to paint hundreds of manuscripts detailing myriad aspects of life, including historical, calendric, and religious information. Following the Spanish conquest, native and mestizo tlacuiloque (artist-scribes) of the sixteenth century continued to use pre-Hispanic pictorial writing systems to record information about native culture. Three of these manuscripts—Codex Boturini, Codex Azcatitlan, and Codex Aubin—document the origin and migration of the Mexica people, one of several indigenous groups often collectively referred to as “Aztec.” In Portraying the Aztec Past, Angela Herren Rajagopalan offers a thorough study of these closely linked manuscripts, articulating their narrative and formal connections and examining differences in format, style, and communicative strategies. Through analyses that focus on the materials, stylistic traits, facture, and narrative qualities of the codices, she places these annals in their historical and social contexts. Her work adds to our understanding of the production and function of these manuscripts and explores how Mexica identity is presented and framed after the conquest.

Three generations of women in one family are the characters in this intimate historical study of what it meant to be a widow in sixteenth-century Mexico City. Shirley Cushing Flint has used archival research to tell the stories of five women in the Estrada family—a mother, three daughters, and a granddaughter—from the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1520 until the 1580s. Each was once married and when widowed chose not to remarry. Their stories illustrate the constraints placed upon them both as women and as widows by the religious, secular, and legal cultures of the time and how each refused to be bound by those constraints. Money, influence, knowledge, and connections all come into play as the widows maneuver to hold onto property. Each of their stories illustrates an aspect of Spanish life in the New World that has heretofore been largely overlooked.

"This book is an exciting, well-organized overview of the evolution of a cultural icon: the nun-ensign Catalina de Erauso. . . . It will be of interest not only to Hispanists, but also to students of gender, theater, and film." -Anne J. Cruz, Professor of Spanish, University of Illinois, Chicago Catalina de Erauso (1592-1650) was a Basque noblewoman who, just before taking final vows to become a nun, escaped from the convent at San Sebastián, dressed as a man, and, in her own words, "went hither and thither, embarked, went into port, took to roving, slew, wounded, embezzled, and roamed about." Her long service fighting for the Spanish empire in Peru and Chile won her a soldier's pension and a papal dispensation to continue dressing in men's clothing. This theoretically informed study analyzes the many ways in which the "Lieutenant Nun" has been constructed, interpreted, marketed, and consumed by both the dominant and divergent cultures in Europe, Latin America, and the United States from the seventeenth century to the present. Sherry Velasco argues that the ways in which literary, theatrical, iconographic, and cinematic productions have transformed Erauso's life experience into a public spectacle show how transgender narratives expose and manipulate spectators' fears and desires. Her book thus reveals what happens when the private experience of a transgenderist is shifted to the public sphere and thereby marketed as a hybrid spectacle for the curious gaze of the general audience.

"A collection of carefully selected genealogies and biographies of families and persons where were closely related with early Texas history."--From the preface