Kendall W. Brown

The curious insanity of Juan de Alasta and Antonio de Ulloa's governorship of Huancavelica

In late 1765 Antonio de Ulloa, the great Spanish writer and scientist, received two strange letters from friends in Lima. They gave him the latest news about another friend, Juan de Alasta, and the travails he had suffered since Ulloa departed Peru aboard the Soledad on 19 November 1764 (Archivo General de Indias [AGI], Lima 775, Ulloa, 3 February 1765). Ulloa had made Alasta’s acquaintance while serving as governor of Huancavelica and superintendent of the royal mercury mines located there (1758–64). He learned from his correspondents that Alasta had gone mad. Now, insanity and mercury have a long relationship. Mercury poisoning can attack the nervous system. During her visit to Wonderland, for example, Alice met the Mad Hatter, who twitched uncontrollably because of the pernicious effect of the mercuric nitrate he used to treat furs to make felt (Goldwater 1972, 267, 273–74). For over a decade Alasta had worked in Huancavelica as a mercury producer, undoubtedly exposing himself to some degree of mercury intoxification. Nonetheless Alasta’s insanity seemed to be psychological rather than physiological in origin, as the letters told Ulloa when they caught up with him in Havana. Dated 22 May 1765, the first letter came from Joseph de Jussieu, a French medical botanist visiting Peru. He and Ulloa had known each other for many years, having arrived in South America together in 1735 with Charles-Marie de La Condamine’s expedition to Quito for the purpose of measuring a degree of latitude at the equator and thus testing Sir Isaac Newton’s contention that the Earth was a sphere flattened at its poles and bulging at the equator. Ulloa eventually returned to Europe, arriving in Spain in 1746 to undertake other missions for the crown before receiving his commission to go back to South America as governor of Huancavelica (Guillén 1936, 157). Meanwhile, Jussieu stayed on in South America, collecting botanical specimens. He and Ulloa had undoubtedly become friends because of their mutual interest in the natural history of the New World and perhaps from their shared disdain for the colonists living in Peru. At any rate, Jussieu wrote to Ulloa about Alasta. After Ulloa’s departure, Jussieu told him, Alasta suffered ‘blows upon blows,

Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru by Moisés Arce (review)

not all punks were mere victims of the state’s failure to distinguish between punk and “subversión.” Some did become involved with either Sendero Luminoso or the MRTA. Greene also discusses an anonymous “Text X,” a utopian political tract as he terms it, which appears to suggest ways in which the subte political aesthetic could evolve into an anarcho-communist project. It is an example of how, for some at least, punk could form the basis of social and political change.

The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador (review)

Cynthia Milton examines the nuances of poverty in colonial Ecuador. She skillfully analyzes what it meant to be poor in a society where the term was applied to many people of apparently different economic circumstances. Building on the work of scholars such as Silvia Arrom, who has studied similar issues in Mexico, Milton also discusses how attitudes towards the poor changed in the eighteenth century after the Bourbons replaced the Habsburg dynasty.

The Gold and Silver of Spanish America (review)

These nuanced, sophisticated analyses offer a refreshing advance on past efforts to incorporate race into the standard bibliography on Latin America for several reasons: they emphasize the modern era and they demonstrate how a rich body of state records in each country allows for illustration of race and racialization. They also offer ample evidence that the desire of the state uniquely to define itself offers the most fruitful place to begin a rigorous revision of the historical meaning of race in modern Latin America. These are but a few of the many ways this volume challenges old conceptions of this elusive subject.

Reformismo y sociedad en la America borbonica. In memoriam Ronald Escobedo (review)

Ronald Escobedo, born in Arequipa, Peru in 1945, earned a doctorate in history in 1973 from the Pontificia Catolica University of Lima and then obtained a second doctoral degree four years later from the University of Navarre, under the direction of Ismael Sanchez Bella. He taught at several Basque universities before his death in 2000 and became an established expert on institutional dimensions of Spanish colonialism. Escobedos books analyzing indigenous tribute in the Andes (1979) and the Peruvian Tribunal of Accounts (1986) are particularly notable. The present volume, compiled and edited by Pilar Latasa Vassallo, contains one of Escobedos unpublished articles plus papers presented by some of his former students and several Spanish colleagues at a posthumous conference given in his honor in 2001.

Oppression and opportunity: Migration and markets in the colonial Andes

The Kingdom of Quito, 1690–1830: The State and Regional Development. By KENNETH J. ANDRIEN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xi, 255. Power and Violence in the Colonial City: Oruro from the Mining Renaissance to the Rebellion of Tupac Amaru (1740–1782). By OSCAR CORNBLIT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xii, 227. Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology. Edited by BROOKE LARSON and OLIVIA HARRIS with ENRIQUE TANDETER. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. 428. Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito. By KAREN VIERA POWERS. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Pp. xii, 236. Comercio y fraude en el Peru colonial. Las estrategias mercantiles de un banquero. By MARGARITA SUAREZ. Lima: IEP‐BCR, 1995. Pp. 137. They Eat from Their Labor: Works and Social Change in Colonial Bolivia. By ANN ZULAWSKI. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 283.