Good Places and Non-places in Colonial Mexico

Good Places and Non-places in Colonial Mexico PDF

Author: Gómez-Herrero Gómez

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780761819240

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High state official and judge of the Supreme Court or the Segunda Audiencia, and later first bishop of the state of Michoacan, Vasco de Quiroga is still celebrated for the alternative community models he established for the Purepecha Indians in the Northwestern state of Michoacan in Mexico. This study offers the most complete approach to date to the writings directly attributed to this state official of the Spanish Empire and also to the scholarship about him. This work provides critical readings of Quiroga's texts including the Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Hospitals of Santa Fe de Mexico and Michoacan, Información en Derecho, De Debellandis Indis and the Juicio de Residencia, and relates them to more widely know figures such as Ginés de Sepúlveda, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Francisco de Vitoria among others. This book will be of interest to all those engaged in the history of literature, legal studies, utopianism, Hispanic/Spanish studies of the Early Modern Period, Colonial Latin American Studies and Golden Age Studies.

In Place of Gods and Kings

In Place of Gods and Kings PDF

Author: Cynthia L. Stone

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2017-04-19

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0806181753

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In Place of Gods and Kings presents a new reading of an important manuscript that has long been considered the foremost colonial-era source for information related to the indigenous inhabitants of the Mexican state of Michoacán. Drawing on recent trends in literary studies that call into question the universal validity of notions such as the unitary author and the primacy of alphabetic writing over oral and pictorial traditions, Cynthia L. Stone shows how this early relación (c. 1538-41) weaves together narrative strands representing the distinctive voices of four primary contributors. According to the Franciscan compiler, Jerónimo de Alcalá, the manuscript is a testament to enlightened colonial officials who recognized that some familiarity with native customs and beliefs would further the goals of evangelization and Spanish rule. This symbolic bridge between prehispanic and colonial times was articulated differently by the friar’s indigenous collaborators, however, who refused to accept their alleged cultural inferiority or fully renounce their previous allegiances. Thus, the drawings of the indigenous painters, reproduced in this volume in both color and black and white, evoke the sacred Mesoamerican tradition of “writing in pictures.” The epic history narrated by the former high priest pays tribute to the great regional culture hero, Taríacuri. And the account of the Spanish conquest provided by the indigenous governor converts the military defeat of his people into a moral victory and a paradigm for cultural survival.

Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico

Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico PDF

Author: Jennifer Jolly

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2018-01-24

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1477314202

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In the 1930s, the artistic and cultural patronage of celebrated Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas transformed a small Michoacán city, Pátzcuaro, into a popular center for national tourism. Cárdenas commissioned public monuments and archeological excavations; supported new schools, libraries, and a public theater; developed tourism sites and infrastructure, including the Museo de Artes e Industrias Populares; and hired artists to paint murals celebrating regional history, traditions, and culture. The creation of Pátzcuaro was formative for Mexico; not only did it provide an early model for regional economic and cultural development, but it also helped establish some of Mexico's most enduring national myths, rituals, and institutions. In Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico, Jennifer Jolly argues that Pátzcuaro became a microcosm of cultural power during the 1930s and that we find the foundations of modern Mexico in its creation. Her extensive historical and archival research reveals how Cárdenas and the artists and intellectuals who worked with him used cultural patronage as a guise for radical modernization in the region. Jolly demonstrates that the Pátzcuaro project helped define a new modern body politic for Mexico, in which the population was asked to emulate Cárdenas by touring the country and seeing and embracing its land, history, and people. Ultimately, by offering Mexicans a means to identify and engage with power and privilege, the creation of Pátzcuaro placed art and tourism at the center of Mexico's postrevolutionary nation building project.

Infrastructures of Race

Infrastructures of Race PDF

Author: Daniel Nemser

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2017-05-23

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1477312625

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Many scholars believe that the modern concentration camp was born during the Cuban war for independence when Spanish authorities ordered civilians living in rural areas to report to the nearest city with a garrison of Spanish troops. But the practice of spatial concentration—gathering people and things in specific ways, at specific places, and for specific purposes—has a history in Latin America that reaches back to the conquest. In this paradigm-setting book, Daniel Nemser argues that concentration projects, often tied to urbanization, laid an enduring, material groundwork, or infrastructure, for the emergence and consolidation of new forms of racial identity and theories of race. Infrastructures of Race traces the use of concentration as a technique for colonial governance by examining four case studies from Mexico under Spanish rule: centralized towns, disciplinary institutions, segregated neighborhoods, and general collections. Nemser shows how the colonial state used concentration in its attempts to build a new spatial and social order, and he explains why the technique flourished in the colonies. Although the designs for concentration were sometimes contested and short-lived, Nemser demonstrates that they provided a material foundation for ongoing processes of racialization. This finding, which challenges conventional histories of race and mestizaje (racial mixing), promises to deepen our understanding of the way race emerges from spatial politics and techniques of population management.

All Religions Are Good in Tzintzuntzan

All Religions Are Good in Tzintzuntzan PDF

Author: Peter S. Cahn

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0292783485

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Since the 1960s, evangelical Christian denominations have made converts throughout much of Roman Catholic Latin America, causing clashes of faith that sometimes escalate to violence. Yet in one Mexican town, Tzintzuntzan, the appearance of new churches has provoked only harmony. Catholics and evangelicals alike profess that "all religions are good," a sentiment not far removed from "here we are all equal," which was commonly spoken in the community before evangelicals arrived. In this paradigm-challenging study, Peter Cahn investigates why the coming of evangelical churches to Tzintzuntzan has produced neither the interfaith clashes nor the economic prosperity that evangelical conversion has brought to other communities in Mexico and Latin America. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, he demonstrates that the evangelicals' energetic brand of faith has not erupted into violence because converts continue to participate in communal life, while Catholics, in turn, participate in evangelical practices. He also underscores how Tzintzuntzan's integration into global economic networks strongly motivates the preservation of community identity and encourages this mutual borrowing. At the same time, however, Cahn concludes that the suppression of religious difference undermines the revolutionary potential of religion.

Topos in Utopia: A peregrination to early modern utopianism’s space

Topos in Utopia: A peregrination to early modern utopianism’s space PDF

Author: Sotirios Triantafyllos

Publisher: Vernon Press

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1648892868

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'Topos in Utopia' examines early modern literary utopias' and intentional communities' social and cultural conception of space. Starting from Thomas More's seminal work, published in 1516, and covering a period of three centuries until the emergence of Enlightenment's euchronia, this work provides a thorough yet concise examination of the way space was imagined and utilised in the early modern visions of a better society. Dealing with an aspect usually ignored by the scholars of early modern utopianism, this book asks us to consider if utopias' imaginary lands are based not only on abstract ideas but also on concrete spaces. Shedding new light on a period where reformation zeal, humanism's optimism, colonialism's greed and a proto-scientific discourse were combined to produce a series of alternative social and political paradigms, this work transports us from the shores of America to the search for the Terra Australis Incognita and the desire to find a new and better world for us.

The Relación de Michoacán (1539-1541) and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico

The Relación de Michoacán (1539-1541) and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico PDF

Author: Angélica Jimena Afanador-Pujol

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2015-07-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1477302395

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The Relación de Michoacán (1539–1541) is one of the earliest surviving illustrated manuscripts from colonial Mexico. Commissioned by the Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, the Relación was produced by a Franciscan friar together with indigenous noble informants and anonymous native artists who created its forty-four illustrations. To this day, the Relación remains the primary source for studying the pre-Columbian practices and history of the people known as Tarascans or P'urhépecha. However, much remains to be said about how the Relación's colonial setting shaped its final form. By looking at the Relación in its colonial context, this study reveals how it presented the indigenous collaborators a unique opportunity to shape European perceptions of them while settling conflicting agendas, outshining competing ethnic groups, and carving a place for themselves in the new colonial society. Through archival research and careful visual analysis, Angélica Afanador-Pujol provides a new and fascinating account that situates the manuscript's images within the colonial conflicts that engulfed the indigenous collaborators. These conflicts ranged from disputes over political posts among indigenous factions to labor and land disputes against Spanish newcomers. Afanador-Pujol explores how these tensions are physically expressed in the manuscript's production and in its many contradictions between text and images, as well as in numerous emendations to the images. By studying representations of justice, landscape, conquest narratives, and genealogy within the Relación, Afanador-Pujol clearly demonstrates the visual construction of identity, its malleability, and its political possibilities.

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