Matthew D. O'Hara

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race and ethnicity. As Imperial Subjects demonstrates, from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, understandings of race and ethnicity were fluid. In this collection, historians offer nuanced interpretations of identity as they investigate how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The contributors’ explorations of the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities historical actors presented span the entire colonial period and beyond: from early contact to the legacy of colonial identities in the new republics of the nineteenth century. The volume includes essays on the major colonial centers of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as well as the Caribbean basin and the imperial borderlands. Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were “legally” Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness that entitled the mixed-race recipients to the legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book’s contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories. Contributors . Karen D. Caplan, R. Douglas Cope, Mariana L. R. Dantas, Maria Elena Diaz, Andrew B. Fisher, Jane Mangan, Jeremy Ravi Mumford, Matthew D. O’Hara, Cynthia Radding, Sergio Serulnikov, Irene Silverblatt, David Tavarez, Ann Twinam

The Orthodox Underworld of Colonial Mexico

Excitement gripped the friars, their monastery, and the surrounding neighborhoods. An important date on the ritual calendar was quickly approaching. The year was 1794, and to conclude a novena, a nine-day cycle of devotions recognized as a particularly effective means to receive God’s grace, the Dominican Order of Mexico City planned to celebrate a mass in honor of their patriarch Saint Dominic. The friars had long organized for this special event and everything was in place, including an altar richly decorated with gilded ornaments and a commissioned sermon. The mass was for the order, but also the surrounding community. It was a public event, a private practice to be shared with the local faithful and the city as a whole. The brothers nailed announcements on their monastery door, and personally delivered invitations to the laity and other churchmen. The event would finish with a sermon preached by the Most Eminent Father and Doctor Fray Nicolás de Ortega, an Augustinian also from New Spain’s capital. These were elaborate preparations, to be sure, but such events were common in Mexico City*a city so dense with religious buildings, clergy, and devotions that many visiting Europeans called it the spiritual capital of the Americas. Novena devotions, in particular, took place throughout the city and ranged from elaborate mass cycles initiated by civil and church authorities to simple acts of piety at a home altar. This was no ordinary novena, however, and no typical monastery. It was a simulacrum of formal piety, set to unfold within a locally fashioned institution outside the control of the Church hierarchy. Simply put, it was a fake. The official monastery of Santo Domingo*an imposing complex occupying the better part of a city block*figured prominently in Mexico City’s traza or city center. The monastery was a few blocks from the broad plaza mayor, a bright public space watched over by New Spain’s seats of power, including the viceregal palace and the city’s massive cathedral. Next to the official monastery was the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the institution charged with policing religious orthodoxy in New Spain. But the unauthorized place of worship where the novena was to take place sat deep in

The Lawyer of the Church: Bishop Clemente de Jesús Munguía and the Clerical Response to the Mexican Liberal Reforma by Pablo Mijangos y González (review)

What was the impact? In the public sphere, Buffington proposes that the penny press played a considerable role in the transition from a Tocquevillian associate life, rooted in civic Catholicism, to a liberal populism (rather than a popular liberalism); and that it provided a way station on the road to a more combative, oppositional, and eventually revolutionary working class. The fiestas patrias, a favored subject for assorted scholars, made earlier associations self-consciously Mexican—and Mexican in a rowdy, popular, even rebellious way that was drawn as more patriotic than the carefully restrained celebrations of the bourgeoisie. The pejorative and racist moniker ‘pelados’ was—as with sans culottes—proudly adopted as the hallmark of a subversive, oppositional social class. In private life, meanwhile, the penny press reflected and fostered a pragmatic adaptability, a model for culture, practice, and gender relations that was an alternative— and a superior one—to that of the elites.