Leslie S. Offutt

From Settler to Citizen: New Mexican Economic Development and the Creation of Vecino Society, 1750-1820 (review)

consistent with most of the specific examples described in the book. These examples, to my mind, are King’s major contribution: from the fragmentary evidence found in notarial records, he imaginatively reconstructs the economic and family strategies of several dozen individuals representative of two distinct types within the free colored elite. His analysis of status markers, using the ways in which free persons of color were identified in the records, is particularly perceptive. It reveals, for example, cases in which the same individual capable of signing his name to family documents instead made a mark in documents for transactions with whites. This finding is troubling, but has important implications for the use of signatures to study literacy. Disconcerting as the monograph is in its statistical reasoning, it does merit close reading for such details and insights.

Puro tlaxcalteca?: Ethnic Integrity and Consciousness in Late Seventeenth-Century Northern New Spain

“The pueblo of San Estevan de Tlaxcala is inhabited by pure blood Tlaxcaltecan Indians who founded it during the conquest of this country. . . . These Indians speak Spanish and are civilized.” So observed don Nicolás de Lafora, a military engineer accompanying the Marqués de Rubí’s inspection tour of New Spains northern presidios, as he approached San Esteban and the adjoining Spanish town of Saltillo, in present-day Coahuila, in June 1767. A decade later, fray Agustín de Morfi, chaplain to newly appointed commander general of the Provincias Internas don Teodoro de Croix, echoed Laforas assessment, linking San Estebans ability to preserve its privileges for the better part of two centuries to the communitys pureza de sangre, preserved through the great care its residents took to avoid “mixing” with the castas (mixed races) that “infected” Saltillo.

Colonial Era. Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico. Edited by Javier Villa-Flores and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. Pp. ix, 257. Illustrations. Glossary. References. Index.

This fascinating collection explores early Mexico’s emotional landscape, looking at how emotions weremanifested, channeled, andmanipulated within the ideational framework of colonialism. The editors divide the anthology into two parts: the first treats emotions at a personal level, the second the role of institutions and officials in shaping emotional culture. The sections share certain themes, notably the important roles of Church and state in establishing standards and assumptions that, though modified over time, created a framework within which colonial Mexicans “experienced, evaluated, and expressed their emotions” in a number of distinct and often overlapping “emotional communities” (7).

29.95 paper.

This is quite unexpected for, while Robins is not a Cuba expert, he is the founder of the Cuban Studies Institute at Tulane University and apparently spent some years organizing the school’s study abroad effort to Cuba. Suffice it to say that the tone taken is shrill despite the poor effort to give the work a literary flair. Too many times the reader is forced to wince through passages such as, “After a last swig of my coffee, black and sweet as a Haitian friend of mine likes his women, we headed outside” (pp. 61-62). Robins can find no Cubans of any character—outside of a few dissidents and special friends like “Felipe” and “Hernando.” Otherwise, with the proviso that all Cubans live in fear, we are introduced to a cast of pimps, prostitutes, snitches, parrots, and arrogant drunks – the last one being an out-of-control official from the University of Havana whom Robins had to contain on a visit to the Tulane campus. To be fair, in the first chapter Robins does attempt an unfortunately too compressed and undocumented history of the island and attempts to employ the concept of monism to explain Cuba’s historical bent towards authoritarianism, but all this is not enough to make the volume worthwhile.