This second issue of Colonial Latin American Review for 2018 begins with an article by María Luisa Domínguez Guerrero and José Miguel López Villalba. ‘Una institución española en el Nuevo Mundo: el cabildo de Cuzco en el siglo XVI’ asks how a Castilian institution, the town council, was adapted to an American environment. Specifically, how did the cabildo take shape in one of the Americas’ most celebrated pre-Columbian capitals: Cuzco? Could such a venerable Hispanic institution really be transplanted or simply grafted onto an Andean imperial capital, or was the attempt subverted by indigenous institutions and ways of organizing territory, people, and resources? What of the vicious disputes among Peru’s early Castilian city founders themselves?
Rossend Rovira-Morgado and Simone Fracas, in ‘From huey altepemeh to civitates christianae: a Franciscan collective agency project on Indian cathedral cities in post-Tridentine Central Mexico (1567–1585),’ explore early colonial urban dilemmas from a different angle and in a different space. Turning to New Spain, they focus on the shift from pre-Hispanic altepemeh to indigenous Christian ‘cathedral cities.’ Who had most control over this transitional urban project, indigenous leaders or Franciscan missionaries? What did indigenous petitioners have to argue to win ‘city’ status? Why did Franciscans such as Jerónimo de Mendieta and Miguel Navarro work so hard to gain King Philip II’s support for their plans, and why did many of these projects fail?
Missionary voices cry out from remoter territory in Roberto Chauca’s ‘Missionary hydrography and the invention of early modern Amazonia.’ Chauca examines how Franciscans and Jesuits working along the Amazon drainage conceived of their watery world. How did ‘fluvial’ ideas change over time, how did Franciscan views differ from Jesuit ones, and what role did all of these ‘missionary scientists’ play in creating a lasting image of this mother of all rivers, the Amazon? How much of what these men said derived from indigenous informants and ways of seeing? Most importantly for the disputants, what did all this knowledge have to do with power?
In ‘De memorias y profecías: tres jesuitas en el exilio italiano,’ Alfredo Cordiviola shines new light on missionary remembrances from exile, including one from the Amazonian district of Mainas. Manuel de Uriarte’s recollections from his years spent here in the South American interior are compared to those of José Manuel Paramás reflecting on golden years in Paraguay and of Manuel Lacunza on Chile and many broader concerns having to do with biblical prophecy. When compared with better-known exiles such as Francisco Javier Clavijero or Juan de Velasco, what might we learn from these three South American Jesuits whose works have mostly remained obscure?
Fernando Aguerre Core, in ‘Comercio libre y redes transatlánticas: la emigración española a Montevideo —de 1790 a 1810— y el tránsito de la autonomía a la independencia,’ keeps us in the fast-changing world of the Southern Cone on the eve of independence. Joining a wave of new studies of late-colonial commercial networks in the South Atlantic, Aguerre Core homes in on the consequences of the Bourbon policy of comercio libre, decreed in 1778. What did this policy offer to emigrants from northern Spain, many of them junior merchants and apprentices, and how did Montevideo’s big merchants compete with their counterparts in Buenos Aires? Finally, how did these late migrants from Cantabria, the Basque Country, and Catalonia align themselves when the region split and entered the long wars ending in independence?
Finally, Luis Ángel Sánchez-Gómez, in ‘Un gigante americano en el palacio (y su esqueleto en un museo),’ examines the strange case of Pedro Antonio Cano, a celebrated ‘American giant’ born in northern New Granada in the last quarter of the eighteenth century who was sent by a viceroy to Madrid at age 21 to impress the king and his court scientists in 1792. What became of the NBA-sized Cano, who traveled with his brother and promoter, and why did it matter that this man was a creature of the Indies? As a postscript, in what closet did the American giant’s skeleton hang?
This issue of Colonial Latin American Review also includes reviews of important new books in the field of colonial Latin American studies.