This article points to the 1820s as a crucial period that saw a great reversal in the location of sovereignty in Belize. The article employs two inflection points—first, an 1822 case of ‘Indian’ slaves from Mosquito Shore, and second, slave desertion in 1825—to point to unprecedented challenges to settler sovereignty over slavery in Belize that arose during the 1820s. While British amelioration allowed the metropolitan government to bring frontier and borderland regions within its legal purview, thus challenging settler autonomy, the concurrent event of Central American emancipation provided enslaved people in Belize additional opportunity to desert their masters at a moment when restitution of runaway slaves became increasingly difficult. Yet, this essay is about more than just the fracturing of settler sovereignty over slavery. Rather it also illuminates how settlers responded to these challenges by using force, diplomacy, and the print media. The settlers’ most potent response was in portraying Belizean slavery as ‘benign,’ creating a surprisingly robust narrative that would endure for generations. The essay illuminates how emancipation and imperialism remained inextricably linked in borderland areas such as Belize, which straddled the boundaries between Spanish America and the British Caribbean.

In January 2001, before the Conference on Latin American History decided to link its annual luncheon address to the recipient of its Distinguished Service Award, I had the honor of speaking at the CLAH luncheon, and in that previous talk I briefly discussed the circumstances that led to my becoming a Latin Americanist. Here I return to the theme of becoming a historian of Latin America, but this time I will be drawing not on my own rather unremarkable experience, but instead on my current research for an intellectual biography of the renowned Latin Americanist Frank Tannenbaum (1893–1969), whose path to specialization in Latin American history was considerably more remarkable.

This article examines baptismal naming in sixteenth-century Guatemala in the context of Indigenous adaptation to the sociopolitical upheavals of Spanish-led invasion, forced resettlement, and the imposition of Catholicism. As part of the institution of baptism—the first Catholic sacrament and one that missionaries implemented soon after their arrival in the Spanish Americas—Indigenous baptizees received a European name, as well as spiritual kin in the form of godparents. The distribution of baptismal names in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Santiago Atitlán, a predominantly Tz'utujil Maya community in highland Guatemala, suggests that Indigenous christening marked a break with precolonial onomastic practice. Instead of continuing the Indigenous tradition of naming children according to their birthdate, Maya adults in the Santiago Atitlán area developed new naming strategies that simultaneously located their children in the Spanish administrative sphere and reconstituted local social networks in the wake of colonial disruptions. Furthermore, the influence of godparents on name selection both expressed and reinforced godparenthood's rising significance as the most socially salient Catholic institution in colonial Indigenous society and one that remains vibrant into the present.

This article examines Tiburcio Campe's newspaper El Español, a brief yet concerted effort by exiled Spanish liberals in New Orleans that drew on the Cádiz constitutional experiment to demand the return of imperial rule in Mexico in the late 1820s. Exiled from Mexico as a consequence of the expulsion laws against Spaniards (españoles), Campe used his newspaper to criticize republican exclusionary policies and to militate against a possible expansion of abolitionism, ethnic conflict, and anti-white proposals in the Caribbean, promoting imperial constitutionalism as the only guarantor of the coexistence of Spaniards and Americanos and racial hierarchies in the Americas. Discussions regarding political and racial equality in Mexico and the United States, and the community's experience of exile in New Orleans, shaped these ideas, revealing how the banishment of Campe and other Spanish liberals renewed their advocacy of empire. Moreover, their exile in the United States facilitated their participation in the transatlantic public sphere and the circulation of their work, illustrating how the United States became a platform for envisioning and propagating imperial endeavors. Thus a study of El Español and Tiburcio Campe's actions allows us to comprehend the intricacies between exile and pro-monarchical discourses, as well as the nature of political and racial equality in the post-independence Americas.

This article studies the mechanics of sales taxes in the viceroyalty of New Granada (present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and western Venezuela) during the second half of the eighteenth century. Advocating a careful examination of the accounting, institutional, and fiscal practices of North Andean customs houses, it provides an extensive discussion on how tax records can be harnessed to study the scope and nature of Bourbon reforms and to measure trade flows. The article pursues three interrelated goals. First, it studies the impact of local negotiations and jurisdictional fragmentation on local rates and revenue collection, providing new insights into the concrete mechanisms of tax bargaining. Second, the study reinterprets data on the main North Andean entrepôts of trade to measure fiscal cycles, real tax pressure, and tax incidence. Proposing a new method for examining customs records, this research shows how fiscal concessions and economic cycles led to diminishing fiscal revenues. Finally, the research places the viceroyalty within the broader context of fiscal change in the Spanish Empire, arguing that the region collected fewer revenues not only because of its comparatively smaller economic activity but also because the combination of custom and reform yielded lower taxation rates and unique fiscal structures.

Until the 1980s, Catholic elements in Haitian culture tended to be interpreted exclusively in connection to the forced conversion of the enslaved population under French rule. This changed following John Thornton's groundbreaking research into the development of Christianity in early modern Africa—Kongo in particular—and the awareness that a significant number of enslaved Africans already identified as Christian before their arrival in Saint-Domingue. This article's goal is to go beyond Thornton's research by showing that we can acquire a better understanding of Catholic elements in Haitian culture if we start our analysis in late medieval Iberia. To illustrate this, the article focuses on one of Haiti's most enigmatic cultural traditions, known as Chariopié, Lwalwadi, or, most commonly, Rara. Although this performance has received abundant scholarly interest, questions relating to the origin of its Catholic elements have remained largely unanswered. This is regrettable considering that Rara parades follow the liturgical calendar of Lent and intensify in frequency during Holy Week. Moreover, a key element of Rara consists of the destruction of an effigy of Judas Iscariot, in accordance with the Biblical account of the Easter story. Using a comparative analysis, this article presents a number of remarkable parallels between Rara and late medieval Iberian Lent traditions. To explain these parallels, it claims that enslaved Africans who were familiar with Iberian practices prior to their arrival in the Caribbean established, by their own initiative, a network of mutual aid and burial societies modeled on Afro-Iberian Catholic brotherhoods.

A prevailing idea in the scholarly literature is that the New Laws of 1542 outlawed the enslavement of indios (Indigenous people of the Spanish Indies, a category invented by Europeans) in Spanish America. Many see the enactment of this legislation as emblematic of the Spanish crown's exertion of imperial authority over the conquerors who had caused irreparable damage to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. This article contests this prevailing narrative. It explores how and why the Council of the Indies (the governing council of the Spanish possessions, reporting directly to the king), the Spanish king, and viceroys (or audiencias with viceregal approval) mandated Indigenous slavery for life or for a temporary period. Mandates affected at least 15 Indigenous groups in at least ten locations throughout the Spanish-occupied Western Hemisphere in the seven decades following the passage of the New Laws. I focus on this period to explain the conditions, rationales, legal channels, and procedures used by vassals and local and imperial authorities to authorize the enslavement of targeted Indigenous peoples.

On September 28, 1673, Catalina de los Reyes declared before the Royal Tribunal Court that she refused to surrender her property in Oaxaca's provincial capital of Antequera. Her land dispute with the bishop of Oaxaca shows how African-descended women navigated the court system in colonial Mexico and negotiated their social status in this Spanish colonial society. This article examines race and gender in colonial Mexico. It focuses on the ways in which local authorities attempted to confiscate one of the most valuable properties in Antequera from an African-descended woman named Catalina, as well as the strategies she used to challenge the social hierarchy in the city. By analyzing judicial records along with parish and census data, I argue that colonial women such as Catalina contested elite expectations of gender and race to redefine or secure their social status in colonial Oaxaca. My findings show that although colonial authorities marginalized African-descended women such as Catalina, these colonial women understood the judicial system in colonial Mexico, confronted authorities, and fought to retain their properties and their place in the social order. This article thus advances our understanding of the wide range of roles, experiences, and subjectivities of African-descended women in Spanish America.

This article explores the vision, process, and reaction to the privatization of Mapuche lands in Araucanía, Chile, from 1871 to 1916. It shows how politicians developed a racial vision for Araucanía between 1871 and 1882 during the final battle with independent Mapuche forces. Chilean government officials and elite societies created land policies that targeted the removal of indigenous populations from fertile lands to expand industrial agriculture by favoring large Chilean-owned estates and partitioning small to medium-sized plots to European settler-farmers. From 1883 to 1896, the Chilean government put its vision into practice, investing in the recruitment of European farmers and reconsidering new laws regarding colonization, land rights, and indigenous settlements. However, after the 1891 civil war, the government retreated from expensive state-building projects. From 1896 to 1916, Chilean small farmers intensified land grabs and, in response, indigenous communities formed organizations to defend their lands. At the core of the conflict were the issues of land and racialized policies that defined land access. By examining laws, government reports, missionary chronicles, and indigenous writings, this article demonstrates the progression of a racialized language that excluded indigenous peoples from their lands, founded in the desire to privatize native lands and accelerate the making of a modern Europeanized nation.

In the Spanish monarchy, corporations, religious orders, and other petitioners kept procurators in Madrid to lobby the royal councils on their behalf. Drawing on an efficient network of information, the Madrid-based Jesuit procurators were known for their insistence on solving the financial and personnel needs of several missions throughout the New World. This article analyzes a series of petitions composed by Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in the late 1630s on behalf of Jesuit missions in Paraguay. These missions had been harassed by Portuguese slavers, who captured tens of thousands of natives in this region. Ruiz de Montoya's petitions reveal that the Jesuits’ lobbying actions had a much greater impact than has been assumed. Far from confining themselves to asking for material and human resources for the missions, the Jesuits proposed that the Spanish crown make a large-scale intervention in the administration of Portuguese domains in the South Atlantic, a program that Madrid would have implemented were it not for Portuguese independence in 1640.

In February and March of 1812, Indigenous, mestizo, and creole rebels led an uprising in and around the colonial city of Huánuco in the viceroyalty of Peru. The diversity of the insurgent army reflected, to an extent, the vision of bilingual friars who, in the months preceding the uprising, had written, translated, and distributed pasquinades that called on residents to unite and drive out the Spanish. Although the insurgent army had two initial victories, Spanish authorities quickly put down the movement and began an investigation into the motives and leaders of the rebellion. Their interrogations led them to the subversive friars and the “papeles seductivos” (seductive papers) that these men of the cloth had been circulating. Using a collection of digitized documents from the uprising, which includes several examples of these seditious verses, this paper examines the significance of the Huánuco Rebellion in Peruvian and Latin American history. The rebellion demonstrates the potential of friars in their role as mediators of information to destabilize colonial relations. Additionally, the diverse army of insurgents complicates, at least to a degree, historians’ frequent characterization of Peru in the independence era as a bastion of royalism beset by ethnic tension.

In 1899, municipal officials throughout Mexico sent tables of agricultural statistics to Mexico City to assist in the preparation of a special publication for the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, where the Mexican government hoped it would impress the world with Mexico's modernity and potential. Though the activity was nothing new, the ways in which municipal officials provided the requested information confounded the national project of both understanding and representing the Mexican countryside. The statistics were never published. This article serves as an introduction to a new dataset and collection of maps built from transcriptions of the manuscript tables. It also demonstrates that regular participation in statistical undertakings served as a means for provincial Mexicans to complicate and confound the process of state consolidation. Here I see, rather than refusal or rebellion, ready participation in state knowledge projects as another way in which those beyond Mexico City managed their relationships with President Porfirio Díaz's technocratic government. Engaging with conceptions of governmentality on one side and data management on the other, I use the 1899 agricultural statistics to highlight how unruly participation in data collection frustrated the practice's centralizing and standardizing project.

During the 1980s, more than 20,000 Salvadorans fleeing the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War entered the neighboring country of Nicaragua. Their flight was part of a larger multidirectional migration out of El Salvador in which Salvadorans sought refuge across Central and North America. In response to this unprecedented influx of Salvadoran refugee men, women, and children, the Nicaraguan government—newly under the control of the revolutionary Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)—declared that all refugees would be permitted “the opportunity to survive and produce.” This article argues that the timing of the refugees’ arrival proved mutually beneficial for both the Salvadorans and the FSLN by illustrating how Sandinista officials sought to further agrarian reform projects via refugee integration into agricultural cooperatives. As such, Nicaraguan refugee policy functioned as an integral part of Sandinista statecraft. Through an analysis of refugee-produced sources, government and UNHCR documents, and news reports, this article sheds new light on the entwined histories of Salvadoran refugees and the Sandinista state in the transnational context of the late Cold War period in Central America.

Lillian: Let's start with you telling a little about yourself.

Franklin: I was born in 1942 in Jamaica. I went to elementary school, of course, and took the mandatory “Eleven-Plus” general examination in 1953. I then left elementary school and for a year attended a small private high school with my two older brothers. The school system was a little different from the United States. I know that well, because when I came here and told a group of Wisconsin school kids that I had spent six years in high school, they said, “You must have been very dumb.” To which I replied that “that was not the opinion of my teachers.” I didn't realize then that in the United States students spend four years in high school. In Jamaica we spend six, combining middle and high school years. You get in at age 12 or 13 and graduate at 18 or 19.

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's 1616 El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno stands as the author's staggering attempt to obtain by privilege that which he could not secure through justice: status as a native lord and title to lands. Indeed, the last 20 years of the native chronicler's life as we know it, roughly from 1595 to 1615, are marked by the usual milestones of an ascending clerical career in the service of provincial priests, inspectors, and administrators from the south central Andean region stretching between Jauja and Huamanga.1