This fourth issue of Colonial Latin American Review for 2018 begins with an article by Astrid Windus: ‘“Y yo, con buen celo y ánimo, tomé los pinceles del oleo … ”: dynamics of cultural entanglement and transculturation in Diego de Ocaña’s Virgin of Guadalupe (Bolivia, 17th–18th centuries).’ Windus asks how a ‘certified copy’ of the humble Extremaduran Virgin painted by an itinerant alms collector around the turn of the seventeenth century managed to not only take root in Charcas but then to take flight like a creolized superstar. The answer? By creating a multi-media empire.
Studies of slavery in colonial Central America’s provinces are scarce due in large part to poor archival preservation, but Russell Lohse exploits lawsuits from the Audiencia of Guatemala in ‘Deathbed and other whispered promises: masters, slaves, and contested manumission in colonial Nicaragua.’ Lohse finds that several factors helped create a peculiar slave/master dynamic in this non-plantation colony, and that a second tug-of-war, a legal one, arose between local authorities and the judges of Guatemala’s circuit court. How did enslaved Nicaraguans learn to thread these needles in the fight for freedom?
Some marginal colonial territories only draw interest from central authorities when challenged, perhaps never more so than when those challengers are pirates. Sabrina Guerra Moscoso, in ‘Las Galápagos: piratas y mapas de las islas en los márgenes del imperio,’ reveals how maps made territory visible to Spain’s distant kings and distracted royal officials. Here the ‘Islands of the Great Tortoises,’ later to become a naturalist’s playground, were up for grabs. Who would claim and hold them?
In ‘Piratería, historia y épica en Quarta y Quinta parte de La Araucana de Diego Santisteban Osorio,’ Raúl Marrero-Fente examines how a sequel to the epic tale of Spanish-Mapuche frontier battles shifted to Pacific shores under a new pen in 1597. Whereas ‘The Empire’ had fared poorly against the Mapuche, and would do even worse in a few short years, Philip II’s faithful subjects held out against English corsair Richard Hawkins in 1594. What did it mean to memorialize this successful capture of a ‘pirate heretic’ when so much else was stalemate or worse?
In ‘The aftermath of the John Narborough Expedition (1669–1671) in the Viceroyalty of Peru,’ Clayton McCarl turns to another pirate incursion into the Spanish South Sea, this time in the age of buccaneers. Under Narborough, an alleged shipwreck salvage operation failed miserably, yet the interlopers still managed to sow lasting fear among Spanish subjects throughout Greater Peru, largely by way of a multilingual charlatan of uncertain nationality. What accounts for this outsized legacy of fear amid more serious events, such as Henry Morgan’s fabled sack of Panama?
Finally, in ‘Eloquence and ethnohistory: indigenous loyalty and the making of a Tagalog letrado,’ Stuart McManus and Dana Leibsohn explore the complex and dangerous world of Tagalog priest Bartolomé Saguinsin. Saguinsin wrote in Latin amid the Seven Years War that saw Manila, like Havana, fall to the British. Given the humiliating loss, how was Saguinsin able to pick up the pieces and fashion heroes for a new age? What made his voice resonate, and how did his work reflect the global experiences of indigenous subjects of Spain's seemingly shaky empire?
This issue of Colonial Latin American Review also includes reviews of important new books in the field of colonial Latin American studies.