"Beyond Black and Red" is the first book to deal primarily and specifically with relations between Africans and native peoples in colonial Latin America. Matthew Restall has collected nine essays that represent contributions to the larger fields of colonial Latin American history, African diaspora studies, and ethnohistory. Among the subjects addressed are marriage and miscegenation, identity and nomenclature, cultural exchanges, labor, and cooperation in resisting colonialism versus collaboration.

The authors examine core areas such as Mesoamerica, the Andes, and Brazil, and peripheral...

This study of disease among the native peoples of the New World before and after 1492 challenges many widely held notions about encounters between European and native peoples. Whereas many late twentieth century scholars blamed the catastrophic decline of postconquest native populations on the introduction of previously unknown infections from the Old World, Alchon argues that the experiences of native peoples in the New World closely resembled those of other human populations. Exposure to lethal new infections resulted in rates of morbidity and mortality among native Americans comparable...

This innovative work of cultural history examines the function of public rituals in colonial Mexico City. Festivals were a defining characteristic of life in the capital. For most of the colonial period, inhabitants could witness as many as 100 religious and civil celebrations in a year. The largest of these events, both civil and religious, were sponsored by the authorities and were crucial means to embody political and social concepts.

The first European public rituals were introduced immediately after the conquest of the Aztec capital. Spanish priests seeking to evangelize the...

The ten essays in "Local Religion in Colonial Mexico" provide information about the religious culture in colonial Mexico. Carlos Eire's essay begins the study with the meaning of "popular religion" in colonial Mexico. Antonio Rubial Garcia looks at the use of icons.

Martin Austin Nesvig's essay discusses Tlatelolco, a city near Tenochtitlan and the site of Mexico's college for Indian education where the Indians studied classical Latin, Spanish grammar, and Catholic theology in preparation for the priesthood. William Taylor's writing uses an eighteenth-century Franciscan friar to...

The relation of slavery to Brazil's economic and social history has long fascinated researchers. Zephyr Frank focuses on nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, where almost half of the city's residents labored as slaves of diverse owners in a complex urban setting. Slavery persisted in the Brazilian city, in part, because it was entrenched among upwardly mobile entrepreneurs who hired their slaves out for wages, employed them in family businesses, and bought and sold them for profit. Changes in the institution of slavery and the economy of the city gradually limited access to slaves,...

From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Spain and Portugal raised and nurtured vast American empires, both metaphorically and literally. From the very beginning, conquerors and settler elites engaged in colonial enterprises as they considered the New World through traditional Iberian ideas about childhood and as they established institutions for educating youths, sheltering infants, and extracting labor from children. Inevitably, Iberian concepts of childhood were transformed by everyday confrontations with the practices and norms of indigenous, African, and mixed-race...

The evidence of women in the Americas is conspicuously absent from most historical syntheses of the Spanish invasion and early colonization of the New World. Karen Powers's ethnohistoric account is the first to focus on non-military incidents during this transformative period. As she shows, native women's lives were changed dramatically.

"Women in the Crucible of Conquest" uncovers the activities and experiences of women, shows how the intersection of gender, race, and class shaped their lives, and reveals the sometimes hidden ways they were integrated into social institutions. Powers's...

The government-sanctioned killing of student protesters in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, continues to haunt the city and the nation. Elaine Carey's "Plaza of Sacrifices" is the first English-language book-length study to situate this watershed event in an analytic framework. She provides a gendered analysis of the protest movement that culminated in the killing of as many as 700 students (estimates are still disputed) and looks at the movement's ongoing effects on relations between the state and the individual, between parents and children, and between men and women in Mexico.

Carey...

The last New World countries to abolish slavery were Cuba and Brazil, more than twenty years after slave emancipation in the United States. Why slavery was so resilient and how people in Latin America fought against it are the subjects of this compelling study.

Beginning with the roots of African slavery in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iberian empires, this work explores central issues, including the transatlantic slave trade, labor, Afro-Latin American cultures, racial identities in colonial slave societies, and the spread of antislavery ideas and social movements.

A...