Tamar Herzog

Communities Becoming a Nation: Spain and Spanish America in the Wake of Modernity (and Thereafter)

Herzog challenges a traditional narrative of the emergence of the nation state in her study of Spain and the New World, arguing that citizenship in Spain and in Spanish America was rooted in the early modern period, and remained rooted thereafter, in local practices of participation and community rites, which allowed municipalities to decide who the ‘national’ citizens were. Her study reveals that it was in fact the practice of colonial expansion in the new world which first produced a legal definition of Spaniards. Herzog also focuses on the subtleties of inclusion and exclusion that remain critical to citizenship today.

Nombres y apellidos: ¿cómo se llamaban las personas en Castilla e Hispanoamérica durante la época moderna?

Abstract This article examines the regime of naming (both given and surnames) in early modern Spain and Spanish America. It summarizes the existing literature and criticizes its conclusions (that such a regime of naming did not exist) by analyzing primary documents from both the Old and the New World and by demonstrating that there were clear rules concerning the attribution of names. It ends with methodological observations regarding the relationship between history and law (and between historians and legal scholars).

Historical Rights to Land: How Latin American States Made the Past Normative and What Happened to History and Historical Education as a Result

Herzog analyzes how nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American states used and misused history to make claims to territory. Appealing to the idea that they each had “historical rights” to certain lands, these countries pretended to solve their territorial and border conflicts by recreating what they imagined was their extension during the colonial period, under Spanish or Portuguese rule. Recruiting history to what were essentially political and legal pretensions affected the way it was taught and researched. This chapter explores these important relations between past and present, history and claim making, arguing that there was a considerable discrepancy between what professional historians concluded and what politicians and teachers instructed. While the former believed the past was complex and constantly mutating and without moral lessons to offer, the latter suggested it had an unequivocal meaning and clear message.

La mosaique indienne: Mobilite, stratification sociale et metissage dans le corregimiento de Cuenca (Equateur) du XVIe au XVIIIe siecle (review)

what components were of Indian or even African origin? Are we to assume that acculturation did not figure prominently in the adoption of Spanish cultural and religious institutions? I mean to suggest, therefore, that a closer look at late colonial and early republican mestizo community leaders would have given us a glimpse of the level of acculturation the poorer element of society had undergone before 1821 and how much the republican state would use such collective perceptions. I suspect that the adoption of marriage was not just about protection of family property but also about evolving definitions of Spanish identity.