Like many global hot spots of the twentieth century, the Andes is marked by its history of structural inequality, racial conflict, and legacies of poverty and violence. Tensions between urban and rural areas as well as between descendants of European and Andean ancestry still exist and remain a source of scholarly interest in the region.… Read More Surveying the Field: Peasant Power in Andean History
When historian James Lockhart published his renown article “Encomienda and Hacienda” in 1969, the modern historiography on haciendas was already more than forty-years-old.[1] Yet even after decades, historians were only beginning to understand these New World estates in terms of their origins and functions as colonial institutions. Early twentieth century scholars debated the extent of… Read More Between Two Worlds: Andean Haciendas in Colonial History
In 1503, the Spanish monarchy issued its first decree for the resettlement of indigenous groups in the Caribbean so that they would “live together” and “not remain or wander separated from each other in the backcountry.” [1]As the European conquest spread to North, Central, and South America, these new settlements – known as reducciones and… Read More Moving to the Suburbs: Reducciones in Recent Latin American Historiography
Martín de Murúa was a Basque Mercedarian friar who wrote the Historia General del Piru (c.1580-1616), an illustrated history of what are today the South American nations of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Murúa arrived in Peru in the early 1580s and traveled extensively as a missionary and translator of Quechua and Spanish in the… Read More Plotting Pachakuti: Incan Conquest Sites in the Galvin Murúa
