Almost eleven of the twelve million Africans who survived the trauma of enslavement in Africa and the horrors of the Middle Passage, remade their lives in territories claimed by Spain or Portugal. Drawing on a wealth of previously unused sources, the authors show that although plantation slavery was a horrible reality for many Africans and their descendants in Latin America, blacks experienced many other realities in Iberian colonies.

Paul Lovejoy analyzes a treatise by a seventeenth-century Muslim scholar in Morocco and argues it shaped the slave trade to Latin America. John...

Malintzin was the indigenous woman who translated for Hernando Cortes in his dealings with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma in the days of 1519 to 1521. "Malintzin," at least, was what the Indians called her. The Spanish called her dona Marina, and she has become known to posterity as La Malinche. As Malinche, she has long been regarded as a traitor to her people, a dangerously sexy, scheming woman who gave Cortes whatever he wanted out of her own self-interest.

The life of the real woman, however, was much more complicated. She was sold into slavery as a child, and eventually given away to...

Bahia is a province of Brazil on its northeastern coast and is the size of the country of France. From the sixteenth century through the 1850s, at least 1.2 million African slaves entered Brazil through Bahia, many of those through the major port city of Salvador.

Dale Graden's study is divided into four parts. He first examines the cause of the demise of the slave trade to Bahia by 1851. International political pressures combined with internal slave resistance forced an abrupt decline in slave importations into the province. Second, he traces Bahia's abolitionist movement through the...

The only comprehensive history of Andean South America from initial settlement to the present, this useful book focuses on Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, the four countries where the Andes have played a major role in shaping history.

Although Henderson emphasizes the period since the winning of independence in 1825, he argues that the region's republican history cannot be explained without a clear understanding of what happened in the pre-Hispanic and colonial eras Henderson carefully explores the complex relationship between the Andean peoples and their land up until the fall of...

The history of emotions is a new approach to social history, and this book is the first in English to systematically examine emotions in colonial Mexico. It is easy to assume that emotions are a given, unchanging aspect of human psychology. But the emotions we feel reflect the times in which we live. People express themselves within the norms and prescriptions particular to their society, their class, their ethnicity, and other factors. The essays collected here chart daily life through the study of sex and marriage, love, lust and jealousy, civic rituals and preaching, gambling and...

In the flow of drugs to the United States from Latin America, women have always played key roles as bosses, business partners, money launderers, confidantes, and couriers--work rarely acknowledged. Elaine Carey's study of women in the drug trade offers a new understanding of this intriguing subject, from women drug smugglers in the early twentieth century to the cartel queens who make news today. Using international diplomatic documents, trial transcripts, medical and public welfare studies, correspondence between drug czars, and prison and hospital records, the author's research shows...