Overlooked Places and Peoples

Indigenous and African Resistance in Colonial Spanish America, 1500-1800

Dana Velasco Murillo, Robert C. Schwaller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032721392
• eBook ISBN: 9781040029664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This book examines the hemispheric histories of overlooked peoples and places that shaped colonial Spanish America.

This volume focuses on the experiences of Native peoples, Africans and Afro-descended peoples, and castas (individuals of mixed ancestry) living in regions perceived as fringe, marginal, or peripheral. It covers a comprehensive geographic range including northern Mexico, Central America, the Circum-Caribbean, and South America, as well as a sweeping chronological period, from the earliest colonization episodes of the sixteenth century to the twilight of Spanish rule in the late eighteenth century. The chapters highlight the diverse peoples, from semisedentary and nonsedentary Native groups and Mosquito captains to free African governors—who lived, labored, fought, ruled, and formed communities across Spanish America. The volume examines how these overlooked peoples navigated colonial processes of conquest, displacement, and relocation, while drawing attention to local factors that influenced these experiences including ecological change, rivalries, diplomacy, contraband, time and distance, and geography. Through their analysis of the local and temporal contexts, the studies in this volume offer new insight into why the protagonists of these places responded contentiously—through resistance or flight—or cooperatively—by accepting treaties or alliances.

Non-specialists-undergraduate students, booksellers, and librarians will be drawn to the individuals case studies, while scholars will find this collection to be an indispensable research tool.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Filling in Overlooked Places, Magnifying Overlooked Peoples
• 2 The Spanish Conquest of Panama and the Creation of Maroon Landscapes, 1513–1590
• 3 Inconvenient Voices in the Archives: Indios de Campana, Indios Idólatras, and the Maya Dilemma of the Spanish Concept of the “Pagan Frontier,” 1565–1700
• 4 Native Spanish Frontier Conflict and the Politics of Empire: Viceroy Don Luis de Velasco in New Spain and Peru
• 5 Taking on Sedentary Life: Reducción and the Reorganization of Chichimeca Lifeways, New Spain, 1590–1596
• 6 “Free Though They Are Yanaconas”: Spanish Frontier Policy and the Conflict Over Indigenous Labor in the Audiencia of Charcas
• 7 Spanish Colonialism, the Mosquito Confederation, and Territorial Expansion in Eighteenth-Century Central America
• 8 “Usted manda en la Plaza de Cartagena … el manda en el Palenque hasta la puerta de la Media Luna”: Geographies of Freedom and the Governance of Space in Colonial Colombia
• 9 Problematizing the Peoples and Places Without Historiography
• Glossary
• Index