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This is a history of the Enlightenment--the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing, freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern Western law. But rather than members of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, its principal protagonists are non-literate, poor, and enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic world's contributions to Enlightenment science, the writing of history, and statecraft, the region is conventionally believed to have taken an alternate route to modernity. This book grapples with the contradiction between this legacy and eighteenth-century Spanish Americans' active...
In a pioneering study of childhood in colonial Spanish America, Bianca Premo examines the lives of youths in the homes, schools, and institutions of the capital city of Lima, Peru. Situating these young lives within the framework of law and intellectual history from 1650 to 1820, Premo brings to light the colonial politics of childhood and challenges readers to view patriarchy as a system of power based on age, caste, and social class as much as gender. Although Spanish laws endowed elite men with an authority over children that mirrored and reinforced the monarch's legitimacy as a colonial "Father King," Premo finds that, in practice, Lima's young often grew up in the care of adults--such as women and slaves--who were subject to the patriarchal authority of others. During the Bourbon Reforms, city inhabitants of all castes and classes began to practice a "new politics of the child," challenging men and masters by employing Enlightenment principles of childhood. Thus the social transformations and political dislocations of the late eighteenth century occurred not only in elite circles and royal palaces, Premo concludes, but also in the humble households of a colonial city.
"A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund publication"--Title page verso.
Latin American history—the stuff of wars, elections, conquests, inventions, colonization, and all those other events and processes attributed to adults—has also been lived and partially forged by children. Taking a fresh look at Latin American and Caribbean society over the course of more than half a millennium, this book explores how the omission of children from the region's historiography may in fact be no small matter. Children currently make up one-third of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean, and over the centuries they have worked, played, worshipped, committed crimes, and fought and suffered in wars. Regarded as more promising converts to the Christian faith than ad...
Each October, as the Day of the Dead draws near, Mexican marketsoverflow with decorated breads, fanciful paper cutouts, andwhimsical toy skulls and skeletons. To honor deceased relatives,Mexicans decorate graves and erect home altars. Drawing on a richarray of historical and ethnographic evidence, this volume revealsthe origin and changing character of this celebrated holiday. Itexplores the emergence of the Day of the Dead as a symbol ofMexican and Mexican-American national identity. Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead poses a serious challengeto the widespread stereotype of the morbid Mexican, unafraid ofdeath, and obsessed with dying. In fact, the Day of the Dead, asshown here, is a powerful affirmation of life and creativity.Beautifully illustrated, this book is essential for anyoneinterested in Mexican culture, art, and folklore, as well ascontemporary globalization and identity formation.
Raising an Empire takes readers on a journey into the world of children and childhood in early modern Ibero-America.
Through a thoughtful consideration of the complexity of the religious landscape of the Atlantic basin, the collection provides an enriching portrayal of the intriguing interplay between religion, gender, ethnicity, and authority in the early modern Atlantic world.
In the first decades of the 1800s, after almost three centuries of Iberian rule, former Spanish territories fragmented into more than a dozen new polities. Edge of Empire analyzes the emergence of Montevideo as a hot spot of Atlantic trade and regional center of power, often opposing Buenos Aires. By focusing on commercial and social networks in the Rio de la Plata region, the book examines how Montevideo merchant elites used transimperial connections to expand their influence and how their trade offered crucial support to Montevideo’s autonomist projects. These transimperial networks offered different political, social, and economic options to local societies and shaped the politics that emerged in the region, including the formation of Uruguay. Connecting South America to the broader Atlantic World, this book provides an excellent case study for examining the significance of cross-border interactions in shaping independence processes and political identities.
DIVExplores the profound cultural transformations triggered by Spain's efforts to colonize the Andean region, and demonstrates the continuing influence of the Inquisition to the present day./div