1st Edition
Overlooked Places and Peoples Indigenous and African Resistance in Colonial Spanish America, 1500-1800
This book examines the hemispheric histories of overlooked peoples and places that shaped colonial Spanish America.
This volume focuses on the experiences of Native peoples, Africans and Afro-descended peoples, and castas (individuals of mixed ancestry) living in regions perceived as fringe, marginal, or peripheral. It covers a comprehensive geographic range including northern Mexico, Central America, the Circum-Caribbean, and South America, as well as a sweeping chronological period, from the earliest colonization episodes of the sixteenth century to the twilight of Spanish rule in the late eighteenth century. The chapters highlight the diverse peoples, from semisedentary and nonsedentary Native groups and Mosquito captains to free African governors—who lived, labored, fought, ruled, and formed communities across Spanish America. The volume examines how these overlooked peoples navigated colonial processes of conquest, displacement, and relocation, while drawing attention to local factors that influenced these experiences including ecological change, rivalries, diplomacy, contraband, time and distance, and geography. Through their analysis of the local and temporal contexts, the studies in this volume offer new insight into why the protagonists of these places responded contentiously—through resistance or flight—or cooperatively—by accepting treaties or alliances.
Non-specialists-undergraduate students, booksellers, and librarians will be drawn to the individuals case studies, while scholars will find this collection to be an indispensable research tool.
1. Introduction: Filling in Overlooked Places, Magnifying Overlooked Peoples
Dana Velasco Murillo
2. The Spanish Conquest of Panama and the Creation of Maroon Landscapes, 1513-1590
Robert C. Schwaller
3. Inconvenient Voices in the Archives: Indios de Campana, Indios Idólatras and the Maya Dilemma of the Spanish Concept of the “Pagan Frontier,” 1565-1700
John F. Chuchiak IV
4. Native-Spanish Frontier Conflict and the Politics of Empire: Don Luis de Velasco in New Spain and Peru
John F. Schwaller
5. Taking on Sedentary Life: Reducción and the Reorganization of Chichimeca Lifeways, New Spain, 1590 – 1596
Dana Velasco Murillo
6. "Free Though They Are Yanaconas": Spanish Frontier Policy and the Conflict over Indigenous Labor in the Audiencia of Charcas
Chad McCutchen
7. Spanish Colonialism, The Mosquito Confederation, and Territorial Expansion in Eighteenth-Century Central America
Daniel Mendiola
8. “… Usted manda en la Plaza de Cartagena…el manda en el Palenque hasta la puerta de la Media Luna….” Geographies of Freedom and the Governance of Space in Colonial Colombia
Renée Soulodre-La France
9. Problematizing the Peoples and Places Without Historiography
Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez
Biography
Dana Velasco Murillo is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Urban Indians in a Colonial Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546-1810 (2016) and co-editor of City Indians in Spain’s American Empire (with Lentz and Ochoa 2012).
Robert C. Schwaller is Associate Professor of History at the University of Kansas. He is the author of African Maroons in Sixteenth-Century Panama: A History in Documents (2021) and Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference (2016).
