HIST 208: Decolonizing Colonial Latin American and Caribbean History (HC)

  It would seem unlikely that one could discover tolerant religious attitudes in Spain, Portugal, and the New World colonies during the era of the Inquisition, when enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy was widespread and brutal. Yet this groundbreaking book does exactly that. Drawing on an enormous body of historical evidence—including records of the Inquisition itself—the historian Stuart Schwartz investigates the idea of religious tolerance and its evolution in the Hispanic world from 1500 to 1820. Focusing on the attitudes and beliefs of common people rather than those of intellectual elites, the author finds that no small segment of the population believed in freedom of conscience and rejected the exclusive validity of the Church.   The book explores various sources of tolerant attitudes, the challenges that the New World presented to religious orthodoxy, the complex relations between “popular” and “learned” culture, and many related topics. The volume concludes with a discussion of the relativist ideas that were taking hold elsewhere in Europe during this era.

This book tracks New Spain's mendicant orders past their so-called golden age of missions into the ensuing centuries and demonstrates that they had equally crucial roles in what Melvin terms the "spiritual consolidation" of cities.Beginning in the late sixteenth century, cities became home to the majority of friars and to the orders' wealthiest houses, and mendicants became deeply embedded in urban social and cultural life. Friars ministered to urban residents of all races and social standings and engaged in traditional mendicant activities, serving as preachers, confessors, spiritual directors, alms collectors, educators, scholars, and sponsors of charitable works. Each order brought to this work a distinct identity that informed people's beliefs and shaped variations in the practice of Catholicism. Contrary to prevailing views, mendicant orders flourished during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and even the eighteenth-century reforms that ended this era were not as devastating as has been assumed.Even in the face of new institutional challenges, the demand for their services continued through the end of the colonial period, demonstrating the continued vitality of baroque piety.

"Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico is a cultural history of the missionary enterprise in sixteenth-century Mexico, seen primarily through the work of Catholic missionaries and the native populations, principally the Aztecs. Jaime Lara's new work addresses the inculturation of Catholic sacraments and sacramentals into an Aztec worldview in visual and material terms. He argues that the pre-Tridentine Catholic liturgy - similar in some ways to pre-Hispanic worship - effectively "conquered" the religious imagination of its new Mesoamerican practitioners, thus creating the basis for a uniquely Mexican Catholicism."--BOOK JACKET.

The decline of the native population following the Spanish conquest of New Spain in 1521, among other factors, led to an increased demand for African slaves to add to the labor force and bolster the colonial economy. Approximately two hundred thousand Africans were imported into Mexico from Spain and from West and West Central Africa during the course of the slave trade. These "Afro-Mexicans" encompassed a great variety of individuals and experiences whose ritual lives differed as much as their backgrounds. Some were Christians who took communion, confessed, and celebrated Mass. Some were blasphemers who were denounced to the Inquisition. Still others were practitioners of mystical rites meant to cure illness, attract lovers, or control owners. Focusing on the time period from the intensification of slave importation in 1580 to approximately 1700, Joan Bristol presents information from Mexican Inquisition documents.Christians, Blasphemers, and Witchesexplores how Afro-Mexicans worked within the limitations imposed on them by the Church and the Spanish Crown in order to develop relationships with peers and superiors, defend themselves against unjust treatment, make money, and gain prestige on the local level.

"City, Temple, Stage is a new interpretation of the art, architecture, and liturgy created for the conversion of Aztecs and other native peoples of central Mexico by European Franciscan missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century. Jaime Lara contends that the design of missionary centers, or so-called "fortress monasteries," can only be understood against the backdrop of the eschatological concerns of the age and the missionary techniques of the mendicant friars. Lara argues that these architectural constructions are quasi-theatrical sets for elaborate educational and liturgical events that served as rehearsals for the last age of world history." "By analyzing the iconography associated with the Aztec religion and with Euro-Christian apocalyptic texts, Lara has been able to trace a consistent thread through two distinct religious and liturgical imaginations." "Lara's narrative is supported by more than 225 images."--BOOK JACKET.

This catalogue of the exhibition of colonial Andean religious painting includes essays by Luis Enrique Tord, Teresa Gisbert, Barbara Duncan, Julia P. Herzberg, and Pedro Querejazu.

One cannot understand Latin America without understanding the history of the Catholic Church in the region. Catholicism has been predominant in Latin America and it has played a definitive role in its development. it helped to spur the conquest of the New World with its emphasis on missions To The indigenous peoples, controlled many aspects of the colonial economy, and played key roles in the struggles for Independence. The History of the Catholic Church in Latin Americaoffers a concise yet far-reaching synthesis of this institution's role from the earliest contact between the Spanish and native tribes until the modern day, The first such historical overview available in English.

In the 1740s, Sor María Magdalena, an indigenous noblewoman living in one of only three convents in New Spain that allowed Indians to profess as nuns, sent a letter to Father Juan de Altamirano asking that Creole and Spanish women be excluded from convents intended for indigenous nuns. Drawing on this and other such letters—as well as biographies, sermons, and other texts—Mónica Díaz argues that the survival of indigenous ethnic identity was effectively served by this class of noble indigenous nuns.

Joaquim Marques de Araújo ardently defended the Portuguese Inquisition for fifty years, only to find himself sidelined and forgotten. In Defence of the Faith offers an insightful examination of one man's career as a comissário of the Portuguese Inquisition in Pernambuco, Brazil, from 1770 to 1820. James Wadsworth argues that as legal extensions of the inquisitors in Lisbon, the comissários played a role guarding the orthodoxy of the Catholic flock and vetting candidates for inquisitional office.

Edited and annotated by John F. Chuchiak IV, this collection of previously untranslated and unpublished documents from the Holy Office of the Inquisition in New Spain provides a clear understanding of how the Inquisition originated, evolved, and functioned in the colonial Spanish territories of Mexico and northern Central America. The three sections of documents lay out the laws and regulations of the Inquisition, follow examples of its day-to-day operations and procedures, and detail select trial proceedings.

Mexican Karismatachronicles the life of Francisca de los Ángeles (1674–1744), the daughter of a poor Creole mother and mestizo father who became a renowned holy woman in her native city of Querétaro, Mexico, during the high Baroque period. As a precocious young visionary and later as the headmistress of an important religious institution for women, Francisca actively partook in the project to revitalize the Catholic cult in New Spain’s northern regions led by her mentors, the Spanish missionaries of the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith. Her copious correspondence, containing hundreds of unedited letters, documents the personal experience of popular Catholicism during the high Baroque period in New Spain.

Trying to understand how “civilized” people could embrace fascism, Hannah Arendt searched for a precedent in modern Western history. She found it in nineteenth-century colonialism, with its mix of bureaucratic rule, racial superiority, and appeals to rationality. Modern Inquisitions takes Arendt’s insights into the barbaric underside of Western civilization and moves them back to the sixteenth century and seventeenth, when Spanish colonialism dominated the globe. Irene Silverblatt describes how the modern world developed in tandem with Spanish imperialism and argues that key characteristics of the modern state are evident in the workings of the Inquisition.

This extraordinary book encompasses the time period from the first Christian evangelists' arrival in Latin America to the dictators of the late twentieth century. With unsurpassed knowledge of Latin American history, John Lynch sets out to explore the reception of Christianity by native peoples and how it influenced their social and religious lives as the centuries passed.

Examines in detail the murals painted on the vault walls of the Augustinian monastery at Malinalco, southwest of Mexico City, which have been progressively uncovered from layers of whitewash and restored since the 1970s. Shows how the combination of motives promoted the political and religious agendas of the Spanish conquerors, but also preserved a record of pre-Columbian rituals and imagery. - Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

William Taylor explores the use of local and regional shrines, and devotion to images of Christ and Mary, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, to get to the heart of the politics and practices of faith in Mexico before the Reforma. Each of these essays touches on methodological and conceptual matters that open out to processes and paradoxes of change and continuity, exposing the symbolic complexity behind the material representations.