This fourth issue of Colonial Latin American Review for 2020 begins with an article by Andrzej T. Antczak and co-authors Horacio Biord Castillo, Pedro Rivas, and María Magdalena Antczak. In ‘History of the indigenous peoples of the sixteenth-century province of Caracas, Venezuela,’ Antczak et al. shed new light on the numerous indigenous groups inhabiting northern Venezuela at and soon after European arrival. Many remained independent well into the sixteenth century. Who were they? What can we know about them from colonial records, archaeological findings, and other sources? And what happened to them?
Next is an article by Catalina Andrango-Walker: ‘Female fashion, divine punishment, and local pride in the accounts of the 1698 Ambato earthquake.’ Disasters stimulate moral reflection, and the 1698 earthquake that devastated part of highland Ecuador was no exception. Andrango-Walker asks what was peculiar about the discourse surrounding this particular disaster, and how did female piety and alleged impiety clash? Could they cancel each other out?
Jeremy James George, in ‘Bordering the imagination, or reading into the center of Guaman Poma’s drawings,’ examines the famous Andean polemicist as formal artist, one determined to pull the viewer into the fiery core of his mental world. How did Guaman Poma use the center of his frame to spotlight and dramatize harsh colonial realities as well as abstract ideals?
In ‘Gendered expressions of popular piety: devotionals, education, and the development of the new readership of women and children in Mexico City, 1750–1821,’ Shayna Mehas focuses on the surging production of popular libritos in the last decades of colonial rule. Most of these little books emphasized religious devotion, but what do they teach us about shifting trends in readership? Did lay female readers influence their content, or were they simply a top-down male attempt at ‘outsourcing’ moral education?
Alex Borucki, in ‘The U.S. slave ship Ascension in the Río de la Plata: slave routes and circuits of silver in the late-eighteenth century Atlantic and beyond,’ shows how by the late 1790s shippers based in the United States (north and south) were entering the South Atlantic slave trade, mostly in search of the fabled silver of Potosí, used in the China trade. How did the voyage of the Ascension expose the tensions and promise of this nefarious global business?
This issue of Colonial Latin American Review also includes a remembrance of historian R. Douglas Cope by his former student Charles Beatty, plus reviews of important new books in the field of colonial Latin American studies.