Susan Elizabeth Ramírez

To Serve God and King: The Origins of Public Schools for Native Children in Eighteenth-century Northern Peru

The Spanish eighteenth century dawned under a new dynasty, which strove to reorder its realms. These sometimes precipitous and always top-down efforts to centralize power and increase revenues backfired among some American subjects. Written protests and negotiated responses failed particularly among the native populations, resulting in local protests and, occasionally, in massive multi-ethnic, armed rebellions. Natives rose to the forefront of resistance. The depredations of the followers of Túpac Amaru and Tomás Catari in the southern Andes gave rise to a great fear amongst the intelligentsia and urban masses based on powerful stereotypes of the native population as poor, backward, slow, and inferior. Few countered such claims. The Chilean, Miguel de Eyzaguirre, was one who published a defense of the native in 1809, arguing that the natives, once free of exploitative practices, could better themselves and become productive. Another was an enlightened bishop, Baltazar Jaime Martı́nez Compañón, of the northern half of Peru, who believed that education was a means to turn potentially rebellious native subjects into dutiful and productive citizens. He envisioned and put into practice a regional educational project without precedents in colonial Peru, with goals that went beyond the traditional instruction to Christianize and Hispanicize native students. His efforts proved remarkable at the time because education in colonial Spanish America had been largely elite, male, private, and humanistic. Scholars such as Daniel Valcárcel and others have shown that upper class families prepared boys for careers in the royal bureaucracy or the Church by contracting tutors for home-schooling or sending sons to private classes in basic reading, writing, and counting offered by individual teachers in major urban areas. Fewer adolescents continued their education at seminaries or clergy-run middle schools, called colegios, which opened

Amores Prohibidos: The Consequences of the Clash of Juridical Norms in Sixteenth Century Peru

Laws make criminals. Lao-tzu, Chinese Philosopher (circa sixth century B.C.E.) Fundamental to the establishment of Spanish colonial power in America was the formation of a system of laws and the invention or extension of institutions needed to implement them. In Peru, a more systematic imposition of Spanish regulation began in the 1540s with the introduction of the New Laws (1542), which were directed to the west coast of South America in 1543 by the first appointed Viceroy, the ill-fated peninsular noble, the caballero (gentleman) Blasco Nuñez Vela.

Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes by Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins (review)

Pizzigoni complicates this chronological progression in a number of ways. She shows, for example, that by the eighteenth century testators had discarded gender-neutral words for spouses and small children in favor of gender-specific Nahuatl terms that more closely resembled Spanish usage. Pizzigoni observes that this phenomenon “could be a special development intermediate between retention of traditional vocabulary and the adoption of Spanish loanwords” (p. 235) and invites other researchers to examine this hypothesis. The wills also indicate that devotion to household saints became firmly entrenched in Toluca only at the very end of the seventeenth century and not during “Stage 2” (before 1650), as other studies have concluded. The many subregional variations within the Toluca Valley further bolster Pizzigoni’s assertion that assumed chronologies require further testing and deeper contextualization.

Reading Inca History (review)

Likewise, the bibliographical essays at the end of each chapter are models that provide much information for those readers who want to delve more deeply into a particular issue, people, or region. That is not to say that there aren’t some problems, but they are minor. There is considerable overlap from essay to essay, especially in the second volume, in terms of both time frames and geography. However, I suspect that few people (other than reviewers) will read these volumes from beginning to end, and so certain repetition is necessary. Claude Lévi-Strauss recently argued that these volumes did not take sufficiently into account the victimization that the European invasion into the continent brought about. I disagree with him; it is clear from the thousands of pages that the native peoples often were victims, but they also were actors in their own right who made decisions and tried (and often succeeded) in shaping their own destinies despite great restraints. These volumes represent some of the best of the new indigenous history, and that is a great achievement in itself.

Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito.

A quantitative assessment of the impact of Spanish conquest and colonization on Andean population migration from 1535-1700.