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Not Even Past

Iberian Subaltern Political Philosophies and The Radical Spanish Empire

This essay is part of The Radical Spanish Empire Roundtable, a series of review essays examining the book from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the introduction and explore the other contributions in the series below.

In The Radical Spanish Empire, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters offer an intriguing interpretation of the formation of the Spanish Empire across the Americas. They contend that from 1492 to the 1570s, the violence of conquest and the fall of pre-Hispanic rulers created openings for widespread questioning of social order and hierarchies. In this disordered period, various forms of political action emerged, which Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters describe as “radical.” This radicalism stemmed from wide-ranging and forceful critiques of the social order, the push for increased political participation across diverse social groups, and the rise of a “culture of doubt” unmatched in Europe at the time.

This was a period marked by intense political experimentation, in which multiple possibilities coexisted and the final outcome remained uncertain for a long time. As the Crown struggled to assert authority over the newly conquered lands, various forms of lordship emerged, the most notable led by conquistadors. Simultaneously, religious orders pursued their own project. Committed to “protecting” Indigenous peoples who had been Christianized, missionaries gained significant influence, while also becoming agents of far-reaching cultural change and of the destruction of Indigenous practices, beliefs, and institutions.

Within this context, numerous Indigenous, Ladino, and Spanish voices made themselves heard, each advancing its own vision of the society emerging from the violence and devastation of conquest. Critiques of established authorities, social hierarchies, new elites, and prevailing orthodoxies likewise proliferated. Many of these accusations employed the language of “tyranny,” a longstanding political idiom in Western Europe for criticizing abuses of power and illegitimate rule. Conquistadors and missionaries increasingly faced harsh criticism, as did native lords who had risen to prominence through their alliances with the Spanish.

Those opposing “tyranny” turned to the legal structures established by the Spanish and used officially recognized tools of opposition and resistance. This involved what the authors call “paperwork”: a range of practices for producing and circulating documents, which served both to expose injustices to the Crown and to seek reward for services. This bottom-up communication system enabled people from extremely diverse social and ethnic backgrounds to participate in political debates, thus contributing to the emergence of complex political factions.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters’s book thus makes a bold contribution to discussions of the formation of colonial Latin America. A key aspect of the study is its shift of focus toward the political participation driven by what they describe as “paperwork” and “lawfare” politics. The impact of accusations of tyranny, a central element of Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’s argument, takes on greater significance when understood in the wider legal and political context of the time. “Lawfare” was highly effective because of the pervasive importance of justice, a concept that occupied a central place in both lettered discourse and wider understandings of political order. Although its meaning could vary across contexts, justice and its associated language were omnipresent, as were ideals of governance directed toward the so-called “common good.” Conversely, tyranny was widely conceived as the antithesis of just rule.

In the context of the Spanish Empire, local populations adopted and adapted this language, thereby becoming coproducers of a society as legalistic as its European counterpart. Their primary aim, as Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters make clear, was to employ the language of justice as a strategic tool in conflicts. Furthermore, they used it to develop new conceptions of governance, ranging from complete independence to arrangements for coexistence under Spanish rule.

The authors of The Radical Spanish Empire appropriately use the term “vassals” to refer to the population that engaged in “lawfare.” In early modern Spanish legal thought and practice, the term “vassal” broadly described individuals, mostly men—not women—from diverse backgrounds, who were generally Christians, recognized the authority of the Spanish king, and were subject to his law. As in any lord–vassal relationship, this status entailed both obligations and rights. Among the latter, a key entitlement was the right to petition the Crown. It is precisely this dimension that Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’s book explores extensively.

Giving center stage to manuscript ‘paperwork’ and building on the work of Fernando Bouza Álvarez, Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters offer a new interpretation of the political significance of communication. In their view, the most “radical” features of the Spanish Empire were articulated and circulated chiefly through manuscript records rather than printed texts. In their relationship with the Crown, the “vassals” used the language of justice in manuscript communication to seek privileges, defend their autonomy, or involve royal officials in factional conflicts. Simultaneously, they sought to limit the Crown’s interference in local matters, preserving significant self-government in matters of justice, economic affairs, and defense.

Portugal unido y separado: Felipe II, la unión de territorios y la condición política del reino de Portugal by Pedro Cardim (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 2014).

The Radical Spanish Empire also shows that the destruction wrought by conquest opened opportunities for political participation distinct from those in Europe. Compared with Europe, where communities enjoyed long-standing autonomies, the post-conquest Americas saw the establishment of many new political institutions. The concrete experience of establishing new communities produced fresh perspectives on politics. A distinctly local worldview emerged, challenging the assumption that social and political structures naturally reflected divine creation. This is closely linked to the authors’ broader emphasis on the rise of a culture marked by skepticism, administrative uncertainty, and the persistent questioning of authority. The experience of colonization demonstrated that institutions and systems of governance were fundamentally human creations and therefore subject to change. People from diverse social backgrounds came to understand, in concrete ways, that collective life could be transformed through human action. Among the results were the foundation of many local self-governing bodies and episodes of intense republican experimentation.

This perspective is particularly important for reconsidering the role of ordinary actors in the production of knowledge about politics. As the authors acknowledge, archival sources largely preserve the viewpoints of authorities and elites. They often portray popular political action as disorderly and depict non-elite groups as incapable of developing coherent political ideas, let alone of executing rational, orderly political movements. Yet the cases studied by Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters show that larger segments of society reflected on the political order they inhabited, challenged it, acted strategically within it, and transformed it.

The book also stresses that participatory politics should not be equated with a political order based on equality. Its eventual outcome was a corporate and hierarchical society of orders that remained fundamentally elitist. Collective life continued to be shaped by a long-standing conception of the political community in which social order rested on inequality. Political power remained largely concentrated in the hands of local elites, while women, enslaved people, and other groups were effectively excluded from meaningful political participation. What emerged, therefore, was a form of participation aimed at preserving the influence of local elites and reinforcing their authority. Not surprisingly, the Crown sanctioned it.

This book also offers novel perspectives on the ongoing debate about how royal authority was strengthened. Traditionally, the strengthening of royal power in America has been attributed to several factors: the absence of intermediary powers comparable to those of Europe; the presence of populations even more disenfranchised than the popular classes in Europe; the prevalence of slavery and other forms of unfreedom among Indigenous peoples, Africans, and their descendants, which encouraged a more authoritarian form of rule that permitted more frequent recourse to brute violence; and a greater reliance, compared with Europe, on extraordinary forms of governance grounded in the delegation of authority to military officials. The Radical Spanish Empire offers a more nuanced explanation for why royal authority became more “absolute” in the “New World” earlier than in Europe. The authors suggests that the move toward an “absolute” form of power was the Crown’s reaction to the capacity of local populations in the Americas to produce their own knowledge about social order. The argument would gain still greater force if Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters were to weave their insights into ongoing debates about the reality of the “absolutist” project – an ideology that many early modern observers associated with the perils of unchecked rule, characteristic of tyrants. That association extended to the use of “absolute” itself as a pejorative label for rulers.  

Otomí neighborhood contracts from Cutzio, recording negotiated tribute obligations to both a seigneurial lord and the Spanish Crown. Códice Huetamo, Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavijero, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico. Public domain.

Comparing the picture presented in this book with that of colonial Brazil helps us evaluate how broadly this interpretative framework applies to other American contexts. Devastation, violent dispossession, and seigneurialization – mainly, but not only, in the form of donatary captaincies – were also early features of Portuguese conquest and colonization. However, the donatary captaincies were not merely a temporary stage soon superseded by royal authority. In many places, conquest was followed by prolonged seigneurial arrangements, with the Crown only gradually assuming a limited degree of control over the lands and their inhabitants. In some parts of Brazil, the seigneurial framework endured into the later colonial period, as illustrated by the Garcia d’Ávila family, whose extensive landed domain made them one of the principal regional powers in the Bahian hinterland well into the eighteenth century. Also noteworthy is the establishment of new captaincies throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in newly conquered territories in the deep backlands of South America.  

Naturally, the diversity and characteristics of Indigenous societies and cultures were crucial in shaping the distinctive historical trajectory of Portuguese America compared to that of the Spanish Empire. Factionalism within Indigenous groups was present in colonial Brazil from the very beginning. The first Portuguese settlements on the Piratininga plateau are a case in point: a complex political landscape, based on “alliances” with local Indigenous peoples, took shape there, and the settlement of São Paulo exemplifies such “alliances.” As John Manuel Monteiro, José Carlos Vilardaga and many others have shown, São Paulo sustained one of the most protracted experiences of autonomous self-government and resistance to missionary (Jesuit) and royal authority of the colonial period. Crucially, both Indigenous populations and mamelucos were not merely subject to this volatile environment but active participants in articulating distinct ideas of social order.

Additional patterns emerged in different parts of Atlantic South America. The Temiminó and Tupiniquim peoples, who allied with the Portuguese to expel the French and their Indigenous allies from Guanabara Bay in the mid-sixteenth century, rapidly adopted the Portuguese language of graça e mercê. As Regina Celestino de Almeida has noted, some Temiminó and Tupiniquim leaders even labeled themselves “conquistadors” in petitions to the Portuguese king seeking recognition and privileges. In doing so, the Temiminó and Tupiniquim were among the first Indigenous groups to enter a broader culture of “paperwork” akin to that highlighted by Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters. João Fragoso and Nuno Monteiro have likewise shown that the Portuguese Atlantic world became the setting for intense “paperwork,” involving petitions, confirmations of privileges, and efforts to draw the Crown into local disputes. However, both in Brazil and in Maranhão-Pará, Indigenous involvement in “lawfare” was much more limited and occurred later than across the Spanish Empire, mostly from the late seventeenth century onward. As for the creation of Indigenous municipalities in Portuguese America, this occurred only in the latter half of the eighteenth century, in the context of the “Indian Directorate” policy, which rested on a rationale entirely different from that of the cabildos de indios. Nonetheless, several of the so-called vilas de índios established at the time assembled some of the most comprehensive collections of legislation in Portuguese America. As Vânia Losada Moreira has shown, their goal was to use this legal material in “lawfare” to secure their lands against settler encroachment.

Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’s remarks regarding the instrumental role of history writing also apply to Brazil. From the early seventeenth century onwards, and especially after the end of the Dutch Wars in 1654, Brazilian elites sponsored chronicles that emphasized their loyalty to the Crown while simultaneously asserting their privileges and autonomy. Similar dynamics emerged in the aftermath of local rebellions against missionaries or royal officials in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, São Luís do Maranhão, Recife, Belém, and other colonial centers. In the eighteenth century, as Iris Kantor has shown, Brazilian history writing tended to soften the violence of the early conquest, commemorate the leading conquering families in each region, downplay the rebellions that had occurred in the meantime, and exoticize Indigenous peoples and their role in colonization.

Eighteenth-century Brazil, particularly Minas Gerais, was also the scene of many riots and intense debates over political rights, mostly due to the Crown’s aggressive fiscal and surveillance policies. Luciano Figueiredo and Kirsten Schultz, among others, have shown that Minas witnessed demands for more participatory forms of governance, broader consent in fiscal matters, and the articulation of political ideas that bear comparison with the “radicalism” identified by Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters.

Additional issues worth considering include the massive presence of Africans and their descendants (whether enslaved, freed, or free) in colonial Brazil. This raises significant questions about how political languages circulated and were adopted in a society where their presence was so widespread, especially from the late sixteenth century onward. What ideas of tyranny, justice, and political order arose from maroon experiences – the best-known example in colonial Brazil being the Quilombo dos Palmares, studied by Silvia Hunold Lara and others? How should we understand Jesuit concerns, examined by Ronaldo Vainfas or Carlos Zeron, regarding the political ideas and institutional arrangements developed within maroon communities? What forms of political thought took shape within Black brotherhoods and other Afro-Brazilian organizations through the manuscript communication studied by Luiz Geraldo Silva? Although the archival records sometimes make these questions difficult to answer, surviving traces in archives point to diverse and sophisticated vernacular political traditions.

A 1769 royal decree declaring all slaves from America, Africa, & Asia free once they reach Portuguese ports

As noted above, Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’s book highlights the diffusion of languages of contestation and cultures of doubt, thus converging with themes explored by Stuart Schwartz in All Can Be Saved. Importantly, Schwartz provides numerous examples of skepticism and questioning of contemporary order not only across the Americas but also in the Iberian Peninsula itself. His work is thus an important inspiration for reexamining the many riots of early modern Castile, Aragon, and Portugal, moving beyond the traditional view of these episodes as merely “anti-fiscal” protests. Historians should instead follow Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’s approach and examine the broader political claims and ideas that both fueled and emerged from these collective actions. Such an approach necessarily requires a critical reading of the archive, which has consistently portrayed these uprisings as chaotic, irrational, and devoid of political order.  

One thing is certain: by emphasizing the creative aspect of “lawfare” and its broad social engagement, The Radical Spanish Empire illuminates forms of republicanism cultivated across the Americas, often missing from narratives that portray republican thought as mainly European. Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters correctly argue that the local knowledge produced in the context of “paperwork” should be incorporated into the history of republican thought. This would help undermine the diffusionist views that see the evolution of political ideas as originating in Northern European lettered milieus and spreading outward. Such a move would also call into question the traditional contrast between Spanish and British colonization in the Americas, and would align the book with recent research that critically questions the image of early English America as the stage for the development of a representative political system built from below by allegedly virtuous settlers through a straightforward bottom-up process.

Equally certain is that we still have limited knowledge about the political languages produced by the majority of the population. This applies both to the colonial Americas and the Spanish Monarchy’s European territories. Very little is known, for instance, about the political thought produced in craft guilds across the Iberian Peninsula. James Amelang’s work, among others, has shown that these labor organizations developed their own discourses challenging social inequality, unequal taxation, and aristocratic privileges. They also advocated expanding political participation and fiercely criticized prevailing practices of consent and representation that excluded them. Some went further, contesting the ideas of consensus populi, arguing that they were a means of effectively disenfranchising the majority of the population.

Another productive line of inquiry would be to revisit moments of acute political crisis, during which archives, despite their many filters and limitations, often preserve a broader range of voices than in periods of relative stability. Records produced during episodes of upheaval, including in the Iberian Peninsula, contain not only numerous denunciations of tyranny or appeals to the right of resistance against unjust rulers but also recurrent traces of political thought, including republican ideas. In Portugal during the crises of 1580 and 1640, in Aragon in 1591, and in Catalonia both in 1640 and again during the War of the Spanish Succession, many took advantage of political turmoil to articulate – and in some cases attempt to implement – republican-leaning ideas, including proposals for regime change. It is highly significant that royal authorities, together with members of the high nobility and the clergy, invariably became deeply alarmed whenever they detected signs that republican ideas were gaining traction among broad sectors of the population. Overall, The Radical Spanish Empire’s key achievement is to highlight that Spanish imperial expansion, despite its violent methods of imposing power, also promoted a particular style of politics, negotiation, and conflict. By giving center stage to Indigenous and Ladino actors and focusing on the use of “lawfare,” accusations of tyranny, and a culture of doubt, Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters offer a compelling and innovative view of how colonial American societies took shape.

Pedro Cardim is Professor of History at NOVA University Lisbon. He is the author of Portugal unido y separado: Felipe II, la unión de territorios y la condición política del reino de Portugal (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 2014), and co-editor, with Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro, of Political Thought in Portugal and its Empire, c.1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). His research focuses on early modern Iberian political thought, imperial governance, and colonial Brazil.

Bibliography

Albareda Salvadó, Joaquim. 2023. Vençuda Pero No Submisa: La Catalunya Del Segle XVIII (Barcelona: Edicions 62).

Almeida, Regina Celestino de. 2001. Metamorfoses Indígenas. Identidade e cultura nas aldeias coloniais do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional).

Bandeira, Luiz Alberto Moniz. 2000. O feudo. A Casa da Torre de Garcia d’Ávila: da conquista dos sertões à independência do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira),

Bouza Álvarez, Fernando. 2001. Corre manuscrito: Una historia cultural del Siglo de Oro. (Madrid: Marcial Pons).

Figueiredo, Luciano. 2003. “Narrativas das rebeliões – linguagem política e ideias radicais na América portuguesa moderna»,” Revista da Universidade de São Paulo, 111 (mar/maio 2003): 6-27.

Fragoso, João & Nuno Monteiro, (eds.). 2017. Um reino e suas repúblicas no Atlântico. Comunicações políticas entre Portugal, Brasil e Angola nos séculos XVII e XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Record).

Gil Pujol, Xavier. 1998. “El discurs reialista a la Catalunya dels Àustries fins al 1652, en el seu context europeu,” Pedralbes, 18 (1998), vol. II: 475-487.

Gil Pujol, Xavier. 2002. “Republican Politics in Early Modern Spain: the Castilian and Catalano-Aragonese Traditions,” in Martin Van Gelderen & Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism. A Shared European Heritage, vol. I – Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 263-384.

Kantor, Iris. 2004. Esquecidos e Renascidos. Historiografia Acadêmica Luso-Americana, 1724-1759. São Paulo-Salvador: Hucitec).

Lara, Silvia Hunold. 2007. « Marronnage et pouvoir colonial. Palmares, Cucaú et les frontières de la liberté au Pernambouc à la fin du XVIIe siècle, » Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, vol. 67, n. 3, 2007: 639-662.

Monteiro, John Manuel. 2018. Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Moreira, Vânia Losada. 2014. “Cartografia de um conflito: reformas pombalinas e sobreposição de direitos em sesmarias de índios” in R. Chambouleyron & K.H. Arenz (eds.), Anais do IV Encontro Internacional de História Colonial. Terra e império: os direitos de propriedade na América portuguesa em perspectiva comparada (Belém: Açaí): vol. 2, 228-234.

Schultz, Kirsten. 2023. From Conquest to Colony. Empire, Wealth & Difference in 18th century Brazil. (New Haven-London: Yale University Press).

Schwartz, Stuart B. 2010. All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Silva, Luiz Geraldo. 2001. “Esperança de liberdade: Interpretações populares da abolição ilustrada (1773-1774),” Revista de História, São Paulo, (144-2002): 107-149.

Vainfas, Ronaldo. 2011. Antônio Vieira, Jesuíta do rei (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras). 

Vilardaga, José Carlos. 2014. São Paulo no império dos Felipes. Conexões na América Meridional (1580-1640). São Paulo: FAPESP- Intermeios.

Zeron, Carlos. 2011. “O governo dos escravos nas constituições primeiras do arcebispado da Bahia e na legislação portuguesa: separação e complementaridade entre pecado e delito,” in E. S. Souza & Bruno Feitler (eds.), A Igreja no Brasil. (São Paulo: Editora Unifesp): 323-354.

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Lawfare and the Legal Construction of Race in The Radical Spanish Empire

This essay is part of The Radical Spanish Empire Roundtable, a series of review essays examining the book from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the introduction and explore the other contributions in the series below.

Reading The Radical Spanish Empire made me reflect on the experience of two historical subjects. The first subject is Domingo, a natural of Goa in the Portuguese Indies who sued for his freedom in Lima’s royal court in 1561. The second is Manuel Quintín Lame, an indigenous, self-taught lawyer from southern Colombia who rose to fame in the early 20th century. Though separated by three centuries and across different lands, both men deployed the strategies of lawfare to demand freedom (in Domingo’s case), and communal land rights (in Lame’s case) through recourse to creative interpretations of property law and equity. In 1562, Domingo claimed that he had been wrongfully enslaved by the regent of Trujillo. Domingo put forth multiple and overlapping identitarian arguments: free soil, free womb, and the absence of bodily marks that would have designated his enslaved status.[1] Centuries later, Manuel Quintín Lame (1880-1967) penned numerous petitions to Colombian authorities demanding communal land rights. Lame based his demands on an idiosyncratic corpus of ideas about justice, statutory law, neo-scholastic jurisprudence and his visions and hallucinations.[2] His photo (reproduced in the Radical Spanish Empire, p.359), and his elaborate signature evoking the florid royal seal of Yo el rey paperwork, have become symbols of the contemporary indigenous movement and popular icons of resistance to unjust rule.

Domingo is less well known in the historical record. Yet his case is important for the insights about the foundational role of paperwork and race-making that the authors articulate in The Radical Spanish Empire. Domingo, a natural, subject of Goa, distanced himself from the enslaveability or personal service that accompanied African or indigenous (American) birth. In asserting a hybrid, oblique, free-soil-free womb claim, Domingo in fact created and demarcated a racialized legal space of wrongful enslavement and inter-imperial harm. His inter-imperial, Christian claim of wrongful enslavement would have made more sense in Oran than it did in 16th century Lima, and one wonders whether his notary had rescate (ransom) on his mind when he wrote Domingo’s petition. Ultimately, plaintiffs protesting their enslavement throughout the Spanish empire marshalled whatever arguments they hoped would resonate within the casuistic jurisprudential canon in order to prevail in their cases.[3] While Domingo’s case serendipitously fits into the five-decade timeline set out by the authors in the Radical Spanish Empire, it unfolded three years before the Spanish crown officially launched its transpacific enterprise in 1565. What was Domingo doing in Lima three years before the Manila Galleon sailed across the Pacific in 1565? What racialized and juridical category would have authorized his presence in the City of Kings besides enslavement?

Race, as we think about it today, was infrequently deployed in the sixteenth century. Historians and scholars of colonial racial formations have settled on casta and calidad, despairing of finding equivalent terms for racialization in the early modern world and the colonial Americas. Calidad, religious virtue, status, and gender also intersected powerfully with racialized identities. These intersections afforded individuals a measure of autonomy to choose among permissible racial identities—between the ascribed and the self-imposed.  Caste, more than race, determined one’s legal subjecthood and influenced an individual’s life options. Caste could predict where one lived, the sodality to which one belonged, the trade or profession one engaged in, and played an outsized role in social mobility. But did paperwork create race or caste?

Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 by Michelle A. McKinley, Cambridge University Press, 2016.

In responding to the Radical Spanish Empire, I have been tasked with discussing whether the historiography of racial categories and caste mirrors a kind of ontological Spanish racism. Extensive scholarly debates about Iberian notions of difference have largely pivoted around race before racialization. Scholars, particularly in literary and cultural studies acknowledge that the fields of Black Studies and Early Modern Studies are long overdue for an Afrocentric accounting of early modern studies of race. Other scholars of early modern Iberia insist that race is a modern construct that arose in tandem with the Atlantic slave trade. In my view, this latter temporal argument is insufficient. Afro-descendant people were active cultural agents driving a host of artistic, literary, and religious innovations in the Renaissance, and these innovations were foundational to race and difference in the early modern world. While the authors of the Radical Spanish Empire wisely refrain from wading into the minefield of racialization, presentism, whiteness and early modern studies, the questions they raise regarding ethnogenesis and documentary racial production highlight the limits of conventional accounts of race in the Iberian Americas.

The authors articulate two metanarratives: the cultural-civilizationist and the Hispanist, that have produced important, groundbreaking scholarship on racial formations in the Americas. The top-down culturalist view is that mestizaje affirmed racial mixing, but maintained white superiority through taxonomies of racial fractions, and encouraged social mobility through whitening (which was achieved through assimilation, religious conversion, and inter-marriage. What bothers me about this rendition is that whitening is assumed without darkening. A worms-eye-view in the dross of paperwork shows how ordinary men and women negotiated these classifications, how they dealt with each other, how they procreated, loved, hated, and fought both up and down the socio-racial scale. The mundane cases of ordinary men and women reveal how their understandings of their status reinforced and challenged elite notions of ordered hierarchies given the ambiguities of lived experience. As such, neither the cultural-civilizationist nor the Hispanist metanarratives account for Domingo as a racialized subject. So how could he emerge as a legal subject? Both authors would agree that both cultural and Hispanist metanarratives are insufficient. According to the culturalist model, Domingo would be a hybrid subject born out of a civilizational clash between Europeans and indigenous or African peoples. Yet, as a legal subject, Domingo was not arguing for his hybrid identity. Rather, he adamantly articulated a legal identity as a subject from another place and another empire who was illegitimately enslaved. Domingo used an idea of birthplace (naturaleza) that was favored by many litigants in the 16th and 17th century Philippines who argued that all indios were loyal vassals and that therefore they should be considered free.[4] However, Philippine litigants did not extend their privileged identity to include people from Goa. Thus, had Domingo tried that argument in situ it probably would have backfired. But the legal bricolage he demonstrated could only have emerged through the lawfare paperwork on display in the Radical Spanish Empire.

This does not mean that Domingo had no place within the heady hybridity of mestizaje and ethnogenesis. A famous 1613 census commissioned by viceroy Montesclaros to track down tax and tribute evading indigenous people did in fact equate indios from Goa with indigenous Andeans.[5] However, Domingo would not have identified himself as a hybrid mestized subject, especially since claiming that identity would have imperiled his case for freedom. Domingo’s claim to racial distinctiveness may sit more comfortably with contemporary Hispanists. Loosely organized under the theoretical umbrella of comparative studies of race, ethnicity, and citizenship, scholars examine a Spanish empire that “embraced racial mixing, allow[ed] manumission of slaved through self-purchase, and gave political rights to both Indigenous and free Black subjects” (p. 18). While I would locate my own scholarship in this stream, the authors take issue with its top-down emphasis on “civilizing harmonization…. and the inspiring story of integration and collaboration” (18). The authors are careful to acknowledge the breadth of nuanced scholarship that accounts for colonial violence that emerged in tandem with Indigenous and non-elite agency. However, they are concerned with the omission of politics from these two particular metanarratives. I don’t find myself persuaded by the currency of the other two metanarratives as I think the scholarly conversation has long moved on from the Black Legend or the liberal top-down frameworks. Scholars and students of the 16th century will be more interested in the book’s claims about paperwork and the making of race.

Petition to the Archbishop of Lima requesting a divorce, 1789.

The Radical Spanish Empire exhaustively traces the bottom-up usage of four types of paperwork: gracia, justicia, gobierno, and their respective offshoots that literally and figuratively joined the Americas with the peninsula. Each of these administrative processes generated reams of associated paperwork. One genre relied on (or mutually constituted) the other— criminal and civil lawsuits were integral to subsequent audits, gobierno petitions spawned administrative or ecclesiastical visits to extirpate undesired (tyrannical, heretical, fraudulent) behavior. As the authors point out, “Spanish imperial justice was deeply socially unequal by design, but it was also extraordinarily participatory” (p.8 my emphasis). Gracia petitioning was so “participatory and intuitive that virtually anyone could attempt a reinvention” (p.227). This emphasis on participatory, bottom-up petitioning “transformed paperwork into a raucous, radical affair” (p.9). To show how paperwork was both legal and lethal, the authors invoke the polysemic term “lawfare” that has been deployed in other martial and settler colonial contexts to link sovereign violence with legal forms of dispossession.[6] More often than not, the Radical Spanish Empire falls along the insubordinate side of lawfare rather than on the side of sovereign violence. As a reader, I prefer the lawfare framing over (yet) another empirical narrative of indigenous resistance or accommodation. Yet sometimes I wondered what paperwork was doing in the book—it was everything and everywhere all at once. The requerimiento was paperwork. It was also the harbinger of incredible violence.[7] The procedural omission of reading the Requerimiento was far more available as a remedy to religious dissidents than it was to Indigenous peoples. Native disputants did catch on that procedural omissions were arguments they could muster in their complaints, but they used different arguments about corporal punishment and overwork. Enslaved Africans also complained when their owners and overseers forced them to work on Sundays, framing their grievances in the register of faithful Catholics denied the sacraments by sacrilegious warlords. The requerimiento seemed far from their minds.

The fact that a complainant filed paperwork did not make their problems go away and could aggravate them. Often when people filed complaints it was for far more modest purposes than the authors suggest. True, most of the book focuses on much grander actors with genealogical and financial claims that interested the Crown. However, the authors query whether actions can be simultaneously “radical” and “traditional (p.166).” Can supplicants be radical? A case in point was the petition filed by a group of mulatos in 1570 in Mexico to establish a hospital where they could seek treatment.[8] Led by the tailor Juan Bautista, their petition called the King’s attention to the fact that Mexico City’s population of more than 6,000 mulatos did not have a hospital where they could receive treatment. In contrast, Spaniards and naturales (Indigenous) subjects had their own designated (segregated) hospitals and clinics. They used a merit-based argument as loyal vassals to legitimate their claim for a hospital on consecrated ground and strategically framed their petition to appeal to King Philip’s sense of spatio-racial order. The petitioner’s plea for a hospital makes sense in a world of disease and violence. But I do not think Juan Bautista’s petition “sustained the radical dismemberment of conquistador power” (p.73). Juan Bautista’s petition conformed to the medieval register of pleading, favors, and grace, but the petitioners’ potentially subversive status as mulatos needed to be overcome by establishing loyal vassalage. In the vein of invented traditions, radicalism could be traditional in that petitioners “mobilized tradition to their own ends” (p.166).

The authors acknowledge the problematic designation of the term “Indian” in the documents. Like the frustrated census taker in 1613 Lima, the distant Crown depended on paperwork to define who was Indio, what dispensation came with the term, and what privileges accrued to those designated as naturales after 1542. According to the authors, “Much hinged on how petitioners and litigants framed this legal construct; life or death issues like tribute, labor, slavery, and self-government were contingent on officials’ understanding of Indio-ness” (p.264). Once again, we should ask whether paperwork made race or created racial loopholes? In numerous divorce petitions that I have reviewed for 16th and 17th century Lima, ecclesiastical authorities decried Indigenous complainants as masquerading “mestizas en hábito de india.” Other Spanish defendants seeking to discredit their opponents in the nasty tactics of tacha lawfare claimed that enslaved or Indigenous status prevented deponents from understanding the solemnity of oath-taking. At times, peninsular-born Afro-descent petitioners were denounced as too “ladino” by Jesuits and other would-be confessors who sought to prevent African-born (bozal) parishioners from developing intra-ethnic solidarities.

Indigenous woman petitioning an Indigenous council (cabildo) after being accused of adultery by a priest, from Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615/1616). Det Kongelige Bibliotek (Royal Danish Library), GKS 2232 4°, p. 668.

Given how frequently racial anxieties surface in the judicial and legislative record, the authors claim that “In Mexico, Peru, and beyond, the result of archivalization was the rise of self-described communities of mestizos, mulatos, negros, and the Nacion indiana. … These terms …. did not come from prefigured and inevitable Hispanic racial traditions rooted in medieval and Reconquista privileges or from the logic of capitalism as it transplanted itself into the Indies’ tropical soil. Rather they emerged from factional petitioning” (p.285-288). This account of racial archivalization is a unique contribution of the Radical Spanish Empire. In many 16th century accounts, Domingo and Juan Bautista would occupy indeterminate Indigenous and Black identities. As many contemporary scholars of racial formations in Latin America point out, Black sovereign identity has only succeeded when it is tied to land. Indeed, don Francisco de Arobe could claim the privileges of territorial sovereignty in the same way that Afro-Ecuadorians and Afro-Colombians in contemporary Chocó can invoke land title in an indigenous register. This brings us back to our auto-didact jurisprude, Manuel Quintín Lame who used the law to reclaim communal land. Lame, like many of the historical subjects in the Radical Spanish Empire destabilized hegemonic legal thinking with subaltern interpretations of law and justice, grounded in the experience of suffering, and a claim to reparation. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters have provided a sweeping account of the administrative history of the 16th century Spanish empire that shifts our thinking to the important role of legal and political thought from below. The Radical Spanish Empire highlights the power of the pen as it worked in tandem with the sword.

Michelle McKinley is the Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law at the University of Oregon Law School. McKinley has extensively published work on public international law, Latin American legal history, and the law of slavery, including her monograph, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

[1] Archivo General de la Nación Real Audiencia-CI 1 Leg.6 Doc. 34, año 1561: Autos seguidos por Domingo, natural de la ciudad de Goa, en la India Portuguesa contra Francisco Pérez Lazcano, regidor y vecino de la ciudad de Trujillo porque siendo hijo de padres libres como lo son todos los naturales de aquella ciudad, Pérez Lazcano lo había privado de su libertad y se servía de él como esclavo; y lo había enviado al secretario de la real audiencia en la ciudad de los reyes Francisco de Carvajal para que lo vendiese como tal. El testigo Pedro Díaz, natural de los Algarves en Portugal decía que Domingo era libre, porque de otro modo estaría marcado con una cruz en el carrillo, como lo estaban todos los esclavos en Goa.

[2] The source of Lame’s knowledge of law remains a mystery. See, Fabio Gómez Cardona, “Manuel Lame en la confluencia del mito y la historia,” Historia y espacio 38 (Jan-June 2012), Joanne Rappaport, “Manuel Lame hoy.” In Los pensamientos del indio que se educó dentro de las selvas colombianas. Universidad del Cauca 2004: 51-109. Hallucinations are now de rigeur as sources of jurisprudence. See, Christopher Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History, Princeton University Press, 2020.

[3] See. e.g. Karen Graubart, “Pesa más la libertad, Legal claims and the history of Afro-Latin American ideas,” William & Mary Quarterly 78:3 (2021): 427-58; Casey Schmitt, The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025, Chloe Ireton, “Black Africans Freedom Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire,” Renaissance Quarterly 73:4 (2020), 1179-1234.

[4] See, Stuart McManus and Rômulo Ehalt, “Regimes of Bondage: The Encounter between Early Modern European and Asian Slaveries,” Itinerario 47:3 (2023), 289-296.

[5] See, Michelle McKinley “The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Black): Racial Constructions of Culture and Cultural Constructions of Race in Latin America.” In Racial Formations in the 21st Century, Daniel Martinez-Hosang, Oneka LaBennett, & Laura Pulido, eds., University of California Press, 2012), 116-42. See also, Diego Javier Luis, The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, Harvard University Press, 2024, Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians, Cambridge University Press, 2014.

[6] See eg. Jean and John Comaroff, “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony,” Social Anthropology 15:2 (2007), 133-152. The term “lawfare” is particularly popular among scholars and practitioners of the law of armed conflict. A well-established blog “Lawfare” provides commentary for “hard national security choices.” The term is also commonly used in alternative, Global-south histories of international Law and empire. See, e.g. Anthony Anghie, “Rethinking International Law: A TWAIL Perspective,” European Journal of International Law 34:1 (2023) 7-112.

[7] See Yanay Israeli, “The Requerimiento in the Old World: Making Demands and Keeping Records in the Legal Culture of Late Medieval Castile.” Law & History Review   40:1 (2022) 37-62.

[8] Si saben q[ue] en esta çiudad y fuera della ay mas de seys myll mulatos y muchos dellos estan pobres y necesitados q[ue] q[uand]o adoleçen y les çubçeden algunas enfermedades no tienen donde yrse a curar por no los querer recoxer los hospitales que en esta d[ic]ha çiudad ay porque tienen solamente de recoger en ellos españoles e yndios digan. AGI, Juan de la Peña, Petición de mulatos, 1568. See, Miguel Valerio, “The Spanish Petition System, Hospital/ity and the Formation of A Mulato Community in 16th-Century Mexico,” The Americas 78:3 (2021): 415-37.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Long Before the Field: Community, Memory, and the Making of Public History

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This article is part of the series: History beyond Academia

The term “public history” entered my vocabulary only after I moved to the United States, where it designates a well-defined professional field. In Latin America, by contrast, similar practices have long existed without requiring a defined institutional/formal designation. Communities have always engaged in the making and sharing of history through oral traditions, local museums, memory collectives, and neighborhood archives, public talks, among so many others. People have narrated their pasts, not necessarily within academic frameworks, but as acts of survival, resistance, and belonging. These longstanding traditions invite reflection on when and why the need emerged to name such practices “public history”, and what it means when collective forms of remembrance become institutionalized as fields or disciplines.

Public history, as a professionalized field, took shape in the 1970s in English-speaking countries, particularly the United States, as a means to bridge academic research and broader social engagement. As James Gardner and Paula Hamilton note, it encompasses both university-based training and work across museums, heritage sites, government agencies, and digital initiatives. Early definitions emphasized historical practice conducted “outside the ivory tower” for public audiences, but the field has since diversified to include participatory, activist, and civic-oriented approaches. Its growth has been shaped by national contexts, memory politics, and the expansion of heritage industries—each underscoring the social, political, and ethical stakes of historical work in public life.[1]

This institutionalization of public history resonates with ideas articulated much earlier by Carl Becker in his 1931 address to the American Historical Association, Everyman His Own Historian. Becker argued that all humans interpret the past through memory and imagination, and that historical understanding is not the exclusive domain of professionals but part of a shared human effort to make sense of experience.[2]  Recognizing this broader agency calls for humility rather than gatekeeping—a lesson that resonates with practices in Mexico, where the work of cronistas—local historians and chroniclers devoted to preserving the histories of towns and municipalities—has long been central to civic and cultural life.

An aerial view of Guelatao de Juarez, Oaxaca and its surroundings

An aerial view of Guelatao de Juarez, Oaxaca. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Within Latin America, scholars and historians—especially those working in public institutions—often see their research as part of a reciprocal relationship with the communities that ultimately fund and sustain their work. This reciprocation, and therefore responsibility, reflects a broader understanding that history is not produced solely by, and for, academic peers but also for the publics who inhabit and inherit its narratives. Such accountability offers an important lesson for public history internationally: that historical practice flourishes when it remains responsive to the people and places it seeks to represent.

This ethos is not unique to Latin America. Across the world, long before “public history” entered academic vocabulary, communities across the world were already generating their own forms of historical knowledge. The telling of history was never confined to universities or formal institutions. It lived in plazas, churches, community centers, and homes; it was sustained through storytelling, ritual, and collective memory. These practices were often carried forward by teachers, activists, Indigenous elders, and neighborhood leaders who understood history as a means of continuity, belonging, and survival.

Even within the United States, some of the earliest public history initiatives originated outside academia. African American museums such as the DuSable Black History Museum in Chicago, founded by Margaret Burroughs in 1961, or the African American Museum in Philadelphia, grew directly out of the civil rights movement and the effort to preserve histories neglected by mainstream institutions. These projects—grassroots, activist, and often underfunded—demonstrate that engagement with the past has long served as a form of political work as much as cultural expression. In many ways, it is the later institutionalization of public history—its adoption and formalization within universities and professional associations—that represents the anomaly. Yet this framework has been embraced, sometimes uncritically, in countries where community-based and independent initiatives had long flourished, often to the detriment of those same grassroots efforts and the pluralism they sustained.

The first home of the DuSable Museum of African American History was located in this house, built for Chicago contractor John W. Griffiths in 1892 and purchased by Charles and Margaret Burroughs in 1959, who opened part of their home for the public museum

The DuSable Museum of African American History began in this 1892 house, purchased by Charles and Margaret Burroughs in 1959, who opened part of their home to the public as a museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons

When the field of public history was formalized in the 1970s within U.S. universities, it offered institutional recognition, professional pathways, and a common language for collaboration. These developments were invaluable for advocacy and training. Yet they should not obscure the longer, global genealogies of community-based historical practice. The move to define and credential public history can, unintentionally, overshadow the traditions that preceded it—traditions that continue to challenge academic hierarchies and broaden understandings of who can produce and interpret history. Recognizing these antecedents reminds us that public history, at its best, is not an invention of the academy but an extension of longstanding efforts to remember, interpret, and claim the past.

In recent years, universities and cultural institutions have increasingly embraced public-facing projects—exhibitions, digital archives, oral history collections, and outreach programs designed to engage wider audiences. These initiatives have expanded access to historical knowledge and reinforced the social relevance of scholarship. Yet they often remain shaped by institutional logics: funding cycles, curatorial frameworks, and professional protocols that determine how stories are told and what counts as legitimate evidence. Their tone is often careful and curated, designed to invite participation while maintaining institutional authority.

Community-based projects, in contrast, frequently emerge from lived experience and collective need. They are sustained by urgency rather than funding, by care rather than formal mandate. Small local museums, cronistas municipales, and memory collectives exemplify such work. Their exhibitions may be improvised and their archives incomplete, yet they possess an immediacy and intimacy that make them vital spaces of historical continuity. They assert the right to self-representation and challenge the notion that only institutions can authorize history. These practices are not merely nostalgic; they are acts of preservation, repair, and political presence.

Our Famous people display at the Northeast Texas Rural Heritage Museum

Northeast Texas Rural Heritage Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Acknowledging these distinctions is not about opposing the academic and the communal, but about recognizing that they operate through different epistemologies and responsibilities. Academic public history often interprets the past for the public; community-based projects tend to interpret it with the public—or, more precisely, as the public. This difference shapes not only the narratives we construct but also the relationships of trust and authority embedded within them.

The term public history has opened many doors. It has enabled scholars to frame their work through collaboration, to reach broader audiences, and to affirm the social value of history within institutions that often privilege theory over practice. The label provides visibility, resources, and a shared vocabulary for those working at the intersection of history, education, and engagement. These are invaluable contributions, and the growing community of public historians has helped redefine what it means to be accountable to the public.

At the same time, it is worth remembering that the impulse behind public history—the desire to connect the past with everyday life—is not new. Long before it became a field, people around the world were already practicing it: telling stories, preserving memories, teaching, and caring for their histories in ways that were collective and deeply local. To name these practices public history is not to claim them as new inventions, but to acknowledge and learn from those who have sustained them all along.

If public history offers one enduring lesson, it is humility. Historians do not possess the past; we share it with everyone who remembers, narrates, and imagines. Our task is not only to speak, but to listen—to build spaces where many histories can coexist. Whatever name we give it, public history is ultimately about relationships rather than audiences, collaboration rather than outreach. Perhaps the most meaningful contribution scholars can make is to remember that we are joining a much older conversation. Public history did not begin with us; it began with the understanding that memory itself is a form of care. Our responsibility is to help sustain that care into the future.

[1] Gardner, James B., and Paula Hamilton, editors. The Oxford Handbook of Public History. Oxford University Press, 2017.

[2] Becker, Carl. “Everyman His Own Historian”, American Historical Review 37, no. 2, p. 221–36: https://www.historians.org/presidential-address/carl-l-becker/

Raquel Torua Padilla is a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a B.A. in History from the Universidad de Sonora and is currently a CONTEX Fellow. Her research focuses on the history of the Yaqui people in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Surgery and Salvation. The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico 1770-1940 (2023).

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In Surgery and Salvation, O’Brien traces the history of reproductive injustice in Mexico, taking a longue durée approach extending from the late colonial period through post-revolutionary state formation. She focuses on reproductive surgeries and how women’s bodies—particularly those of poor and Indigenous women—became laboratories for medical experimentation, religious morality, and eugenic population control. 

Much historical scholarship on reproductive control focuses on eugenics, a pseudo-scientific movement that flourished in post-revolutionary Mexico in the 1930s. It sought to “improve” the population for nation-building purposes by promoting the reproduction of the “fittest.” During this time, medical authority over the body was already well consolidated. O’Brien broadens the chronological scope and focuses on periods where claims of authority over definitions of citizenship, personhood, life, and death were being contested, such as the process of secularization during the Liberal Reform of the 1850s and state-making post-Revolution (1921-1940). 

Book cover of Surgery and Salvation

Structured in five parts, the book argues that surgical technology was seen as a means for salvation in three distinct and chronological ways: saving unborn souls under the Church’s rule during the late 18th and early 19th century; saving the honor of elite unwed women during the reform in the 1850s and the Porfiriato (authoritarian military dictatorship from 1876 to 1911); and saving the nation from the reproduction of “ undesirable” citizens in the aftermath of the revolution, from 1921 to 1940. 

O’Brien shows how reproduction was stratified along lines of race and class, resulting in marginalized women disproportionately subjected to coercive reproductive practices. She traces the performance of cesarean operations on dead and dying women to salvage the soul of the fetus, ovariotomy as a medicalized solution for hysteria, and experimental ‘therapeutic’ abortions (those performed for medical reasons). She also examines hysterectomies for unwed elite women, obstetric violence, vaginal bifurcation, tubal ligation, and eugenic sterilization to manage the size and composition of the population. Notably, she challenges the prevailing notion that state-led eugenic forced sterilizations were not widespread in Mexico.

The concept of reproductive governance—the entanglement of social, economic and political structures that produce and regulate reproductive practices— serves as a framework to understand how different powerful actors across centuries tried to control and surveil reproduction. Throughout the book, she traces a throughline that links women’s bodies to modernization, development, and state-building, showing how women were cast as the bearers of the nation, their bodies tasked with producing and embodying national aspirations. Accordingly, the fetus also underwent shifting symbolic meanings, from a religious subject in the hands of the Church in the late colonial period to a biological object as seen from the eyes of secularized technocratic elites to potential citizens that would build postrevolutionary Mexico. At each stage, women’s bodies were the tools, but their needs, desires for autonomy, and sheer personhood were rendered an obstacle—something to be managed, medicalized, and intervened in service of state goals. 

San Andres hospital

Hospital de San Andrés. 1905. Source: Wikimedia Commons

 The book draws from an impressive range of sources, from ecclesiastical and mission records to  medical students’ theses and hospital records. When describing her sources, she reflects on the voices they contain and the silences they produce, critiquing the fact that most represent the perspectives of elite men. In line with feminist history and methods, she relies on creative pathways to access patients’ voices and the “resistance echoes,” as she calls them, contained in her sources. In this case, resistance materialized in complaints women submitted about medical malpractice. She approaches these stories with care, empathy, and a historical sensibility that reminds us of these people’s lives beyond being reduced to patients of these surgical interventions. Her focus on resistance, pain, grief, and the harms of scientific racism—pseudoscience used to justify racial hierarchies—prevents the reader from becoming desensitized to the injustices she describes.

Challenging the assumption that Mexico was a mere receptacle of European scientific knowledge, practice, and ideologies, the author argues that powerful local actors crafted idiosyncratic yet transnational theories, techniques, and networks, particularly around race. For instance, she traces continuities between American anti-Black medical racism and anti-Indigenous discrimination in Mexican healthcare. This racist logic was not strictly biological. Mexico’s ethnic history and categorization made for medical epistemologies that had a slippery, flexible notion of race. It drew not only on biologized difference but on more diffuse notions of hygiene, class, culture, education, and language. In this context, it was not contradictory to romanticize indigenismo—a political ideology that seeks to celebrate Indigenous legacy while assimilating Indigenous peoples into the nation-state—as a cultural heritage while mistreating Indigenous women. 

Class and its entanglements with race emerges as another powerful stratifying line in O’Brien’s narrative. The growth of ‘therapeutic’ abortion, artificial premature birth, and hysterectomies for elite unwed women in the Liberal Reform period illustrates how women’s reproductive lives and medical intervention were enmeshed with gendered notions of middle-class feminine respectability. When these elite women asked for sterilization, they were met with refusal, while poor and Indigenous women were coercively sterilized. Doctors became gatekeepers of gender and agents of the state, using their expert authority to morph the population in line with the racial and class-based desires of the nation. 

Indigenous woman walking down the street

An Indigenous woman walking in Mexico. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Surgery and Salvation’s focus on technology illuminates how surgical knowledge developed hand in hand with racist, classed, and gendered notions of women’s bodies as sites of intervention. Technology became a means to turn subjective biases into objective, quantifiable “evidence” with the help of techniques such as craniometry or pelvimetry, giving social hierarchies the veneer of science. 

O’Brien ends the book by taking us to the present day, where reproductive injustice is still a reality with a history that stretches back well over 200 years. At the same time, she highlights how contemporary feminist advocacy and long-standing activist efforts have contributed to a tremendous wave of abortion legalization throughout Latin America. This transformation is currently afoot and redefining the reproductive justice landscape in the region. 

Surgery and Salvation. The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico 1770-1940 is an outstanding book that reminds us that reproductive injustice is not a thing of the past. It shows the dangers of thinking about women’s bodies as tools for science and state-building in a history that should serve as a cautionary tale for contemporary debates about fertility decline and shifting legal landscapes around reproductive rights in Mexico, the U.S., and around the globe. 

Daniela Sánchez is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. She is a Mellon/ACLS and Fulbright-García Robles fellow. Her research examines reproductive governance around abortion in contemporary Mexico. Before joining the department, Daniela was a consultant for UN Women-Mexico. 

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Hierarchies at Home: Domestic Service in Cuba from Abolition to Revolution (2022), by Anasa Hicks

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Anasa Hicks has written an engaging and chronologically ambitious study of gender, labor, and race in Cuban history with her book Hierarchies at Home: Domestic Service in Cuba from Abolition to Revolution. Hicks traces the effort to create and deploy the “black doméstica” stereotype—an association of domestic service with African-descended women—throughout late 19th and 20th century Cuba. Investigating the racial anxieties, economic power, and cultural practices of Cubans who employed domestics, as well as the efforts of domestic servants to achieve formal recognition as workers and win legal protections, Hicks illuminates an understudied history of class struggle in Cuba and across the Americas. As she argues, domestics were indeed workers, but the state’s persistent refusal to identify them as such, and the existence of domestic service as an extra-labor category, allowed racialized hierarchies to persist.

By analyzing such diverse sources as manuals on breastfeeding, sexual assault cases, novels, and newspapers articles, the first two chapters of Hicks analyzes the relationship of the domestic worker’s physical body to the Cuban state and the construction of respectable citizenship. Rooted in slavery and the plantation economy, domestic service was work in which African-descended women were over represented. Examining the regulation of prostitution and breastfeeding, as well as cases of sexual assault, Hicks shows how stereotypes about black and immigrant women domestics informed modern legal codes to control and manage their physical, cultural, and moral “hygiene” as Cuba transitioned from colony to republic, from slavery to free labor. Hicks then explores the response from black Cuban “aspiring classes” who rejected imagery of members of their race as only maids, laundresses, chauffeurs, and gardeners. Domestic workers—associated with tropes of servility, sexuality, and poverty—exemplified that which many black Cubans aspiring to the middle class “wanted to escape” (65). In contrast to the Partido Independiente de Color, which addressed structural impediments to black access to wages and education as part of their party platform, the black Cuban middle class promoted “respectable citizenship” predicated on traditional gender roles and family structures.

book cover for Hierarchies at Home

In chapters 3 and 4 of Hierarchies at Home, Hicks contemplates the struggle between liberal change and radical transformation. Hicks begins examining the 1919 establishment of “domestic economy” schools in Cuba, a government initiative framed as professionalization for women within traditional roles. However, Hicks points out that progressive sectors of the labor movement recognized domestic service as work. Despite the gradual decline of domestic service employment, the visibility of domestic workers as labor activists increased in the 1920s and 1930s, ultimately reaching a “golden age” in the 1940s. Domestic workers defied notions of docility and submission associated with such labor, forming unions and showing solidarity with striking workers in the sugar industry. For example, Elvira Rodríguez, a domestic servant and representative of the Union of Domestic Workers, decried the “fascists of the patio, the reactionaries and the descendants of black slavers” who “try to continue enslaving domestic workers and vigorously distort all that represents liberty, hygiene, organization and culture” (116). The emotional logic of domestic service, however, proved to be a powerful counterforce against domestic workers’ activism, precluding any possibility of their inclusion in the labor reforms achieved throughout the 1930s and in the 1940 constitution. Through an analysis of public reaction to a brief 1938 vacation decree, Hicks effectively illustrates how deeply ingrained social hierarchies and colonial-era racial biases influenced Cuban law, ultimately marginalizing domestic workers and excluding them from formal labor protections, since “formalizing such things as shelter, food, and paid rest would have confused and sullied the naturally intimate relationship between domestics and the families for whom they worked,” conservatives argued (105).

Photo of cuban home life.
Cuban home life
Source: Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b42700
Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-96596 (b&w film copy neg.)

The final two chapters of Hierarchies at Home traverses through the radically transformative events of the 1959 Cuban Revolution to assess how domestic servants fared under the revolutionary process of restoring democracy, protecting workers, and lifting millions out of abject poverty. As the revolutionary government embraced socialism, the need for domestic service was eliminated. In the revolutionary period, memories about domestic service focused on it as a symbol of the deeply racist, sexist, and unequal class society that had been overcome. Hicks, however, laments the declining memory of domestic worker activism pre-1959 in favor of a narrative that privileged the revolutionary transformations post-1959—when domestics in “unprecedented numbers…went to school…becoming doctors, teachers, politicians, and historians” (170). Importantly, Hicks integrates Miami into this study of Cuba, showing how memories about race and gender harkening back to plantation days, or a mythic mid-twentieth century ideal, promoted a vision of the past in which benevolent landholders generously bequeathed gifts to their “inferiors.” Nostalgia also rationalized paying the Black nannies who raised white children with food as an example of family love and affection, not unequal power and authority. Using a fascinating yet unlikely set of sources including interviews with Miami-based Cuban American women for a project about drug usage conducted by researcher Diana González Kirby, Hicks also shows that the loss of access to domestic servants was a regular component of the “economic backslide” experienced by middle-class Cubans who left the island after the revolution. Post-1959, memories about what Cuba was like before the revolution were supposed to bolster anti-Communist arguments, “insisting that race relations before 1959 in Cuba had been fine” (170). This connection between past and present, island and diaspora, offers a valuable perspective on racialized labor and its complex relationship to broader movements for social and gender equality.

Photo of Cuban rebel soldiers with machine gun guarding door of the Hilton Hotel.
Cuban rebel soldiers with machine gun guarding door of the Hilton Hotel, Havana, Cuba.
Source: Wikimedia commons

Hierarchies at Home provides a nuanced understanding of how deeply ingrained social inequalities can persist in new forms and, at times, be challenged, offering insights for contemporary discussions about labor, race, and social change. For readers interested in social justice and labor history, the book demonstrates how the creation of the “black doméstica” stereotype was not merely a reflection of existing inequalities but an active process that shaped economic power, cultural practices, and even the state’s legal frameworks. By centering the experiences of domestic workers and their struggles for recognition, Hicks unveils a vital, yet often overlooked, dimension of class struggle in Cuba and offers a powerful case study for understanding how race and gender intersect to define who is considered a legitimate worker and citizen across the Americas. While Hicks meticulously examines the experiences of domestic workers and their employers, the book does not primarily delve into the intimate personal relationships and individual motivations within specific households. Therefore, readers seeking a micro-history centered on specific families and their domestic arrangements will find Hierarchies at Home primary contribution lies in its macro-level analysis of the institution of domestic service and its profound implications for understanding the larger forces of race, class, and gender in Cuban history.

Daniel Delgado is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Southern California. His primary research interests include race, labor, migration, and U.S. empire in Latin America and the Caribbean, especially modern Cuba.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Agency and Resistance: African and Indigenous Women’s Navigation of Economic, Legal, and Religious Structures in Colonial Spanish America

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This essay was written as part of Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s course, Colonial Latin America. Hope Payton explores how Indigenous and African women—both free and enslaved—navigated the legal, economic, and religious institutions of colonial Latin American cities. Drawing on wills from Potosí and La Plata and a freedom suit from Lima, it examines how these women accumulated property, engaged with paperwork culture, and leveraged church tribunals to assert their rights. In doing so, the essay sheds light on the appeal of Catholicism in the Spanish Indies, particularly its role as a mediator of protection, legitimacy, and social mobility for marginalized communities.

The conventional narrative of Spanish colonization in the Americas typically portrays Indigenous and African peoples as passive recipients of European conquest and conversion. This perspective, however, overlooks the agency of these groups in shaping colonial society. In cities like Potosí—major economic centers of the Spanish Empire—free and enslaved indigenous and African people found opportunities to accumulate wealth, property, and legal knowledge. Contrary to the assumption that indigenous people were always relocated to cities by force or compulsion, many indigenous groups strategically used urbanization to consolidate power and to maintain authority within their own ethnic groups; securing leadership, controlling labor, and engaging in the colonial economy while preserving traditional structures—demonstrating their agency in shaping their own futures.

Despite their rigid social hierarchies, cities in the Spanish Empire allowed for certain flexibility that indigenous and African people, especially women, could exploit. Economic opportunities, particularly in large industrial cities like Potosí, created avenues for wealth accumulation, while the Catholic Church’s legal structures provided mechanisms for securing assets and negotiating social standing. Through participation in the marketplace, property ownership, and engagement with notarial culture, women actively shaped their own economic futures.

A reproduction on 12 linen canvases in the Edward Luther Stevenson Collection of the Geocarta Nautica Universale ("Worldwide Maritime Chart") or 1523 Turin Map believed to have been made by Giovanni/Juan Vespucci from the Spanish royal standard map (Padron Real).
A reproduction on 12 linen canvases in the Edward Luther Stevenson Collection of the Geocarta Nautica Universale (“Worldwide Maritime Chart”) or 1523 Turin Map believed to have been made by Giovanni/Juan Vespucci from the Spanish royal standard map (Padron Real).
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

At the same time, the Church’s bottom-up structure, reinforced by extensive bureaucratic systems and opportunities for petitioning, allowed marginalized groups to access legal protections and assert their rights. Church tribunals provided an alternative to colonial civil courts, allowing commoners, enslaved individuals, and indigenous peoples to challenge injustices and seek legal remedies. This accessibility contributed to Catholicism’s widespread appeal and deep entrenchment in colonial society. Indigenous and African women in colonial Spanish America exercised agency by leveraging urban economies, church legal structures, and Catholic institutions to accumulate wealth, secure property rights, access legal recourse, and shape both their personal and communal identities within the Catholic Church and the Spanish colonial system.

Cities in colonial Spanish America, particularly those like Potosí and La Plata, provided indigenous and African women with unique opportunities to accumulate wealth, property, and legal knowledge. Unlike rural areas, where economic mobility was more restricted, urban environments fostered commercial activity, offering women access to markets, trade networks, and financial transactions that could increase their economic standing. Cities also housed notarial offices and church institutions, which played a crucial role in recording contracts, wills, and property transactions. Through engagement with these legal and bureaucratic systems, women learned to navigate paperwork, ensuring that their assets were protected and transferred to future generations.

Cities as Sites of Agency

The will of Luisa de Villalobos, a free Black woman who migrated from Nombre de Dios in Panama to Lima and later Potosí, exemplifies how cities enabled women to accumulate wealth through diverse commercial ventures in cities. Villalobos, who drafted the will in 1577, trafficked and had investments in fine European clothing, perfumes, and silver. Villalobos left a considerable amount of her wealth to two other Black women, Francisca Godines and Maria Fula, declaring “that to Francisca Godines or her closest heirs [you] pay the value of nine glass bottles of orange blossom water and thirteen flasks of the said water” and “that one yellow skirt with velvet trim, another trimmed with velvet, one doublet of fine wool and one wool cloth in which it is wrapped belongs to Costanca, morena, of the falconer of the Villa Real.”[1] By drafting a will in 1577, Villalobos ensured the legal recognition of her property and debts while also making strategic donations or sales to other free Black or enslaved Black women that enabled them to accumulate wealth and property as well.

Potosí, Bolivia
Potosí, Bolivia.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Cities in colonial Spanish America were also home to cofradías, religious brotherhoods, that provided monetary support to enslaved individuals so they could purchase their freedom. These organizations were supported by the church and its administrators, such as the Jesuits. Villalobos supported cofradías by leaving a portion of her wealth to a Jesuit priest, Father Medina. In her will, she states that she has “in the possession of María Fula” a large number of expensive European textiles and that it is her “will that with all of this Father Medina does what he likes.” This donation to the Jesuit priest likely supported cofradías in Potosí, thereby reinforcing the economic and legal networks that benefited marginalized groups in urban centers.

Similarly, the will and codicil of doña Isabel del Benino, a free indigenous woman, drafted in 1601, show how urban economies enabled indigenous women to accumulate wealth. She owned a rural estate near Potosí and conducted agricultural business with clerics in Potosí, such as “Father Joseph de Llanos, priest and vicar of this valley” whom she stated in her will owed her “a remainder of thirty pesos from some goats that I sold him.”[2] Through her business with the clerics, she was able to accumulate wealth. In her will, she also leaves her remaining estate to her daughter, “my hija natural, doña María del Benino, whom I leave for my universal heir in all the remainder of my estate.” This statement in Benino’s will demonstrates yet another way cities and their legal framework allowed women to accumulate wealth and property, through knowledge of paperwork and the property rights granted to women in cities. Despite some racial and gendered restrictions, urban centers provided economic and legal opportunities that allowed African and Indigenous women to secure wealth and navigate the colonial system to their advantage.

The Church as a Legal Resource

The accessibility of church tribunals to commoners, enslaved individuals, and indigenous people played a crucial role in the widespread appeal of Catholicism in colonial Spanish America. Unlike civil courts, which often favored colonial elites and upheld rigid social hierarchies, ecclesiastical courts provided marginalized individuals with an alternative avenue for seeking justice. The Church’s willingness to hear petitions from society’s most vulnerable reinforced its image as the moral authority that protected the faithful and the followers, fostering loyalty and devotion among indigenous and African populations. By framing grievances in religious terms, petitioners could align themselves with the Church’s broader mission of upholding Christian values, further legitimizing Catholicism’s role in daily life.

Balck women laboring, Guiana, mid-19th century
Female workers in Guiana, mid-19th century.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The lawsuit filed by Natividad, an enslaved woman in Lima, against her master Doctor don Juan de la Reinaga  in 1792, focused on his sexual abuse against her, exemplifies how church tribunals provided enslaved individuals with a means of contesting their mistreatment. In her petition, Natividad requested her freedom, telling the judge, who is a member of the Church, “Your superior understanding will mean that you will have understood that this case compels me to act by in the very least soliciting that you grant me the freedom that corresponds to me.”[3] In a civil court, Natividad would have likely only petitioned to be sold to another master, as was dictated by the Spanish legal code of the time. However, due to her master’s position as a priest and member of the Church, she hoped that his immoral acts that violated the behavior expected of his position would cause the court to act in a more severe manner. At the beginning of her petition she states that “clearly my master forgot the obligations of his position, about Christianity and about authority when, on different occasions, he proposed his dishonest relations.”

Later, she once again appeals to the judge’s religious position, stating “I could very well lodge my appeal before the Señores of the Real Audiencia where the law of God has directed that slaves demand freedom whenever they seek the sanctuary and refuge that the law grants. But I wish that the secular courts should hear about the recklessness, indifferent, and tyrannies so foreign to leniency and self-restraint that an ecclesiastical priest professes. Thus, I renounce the indulgence of royal law and bring my case before the just commission of Your Most Illustrious Lord, who is very competent to reform the immoderate powers of a priest and decree what is in the interest of the pious cause of liberty that I claim.” In her language, Natividad clearly appealed to the religious nature of the court and the responsibility that they had for the behavior of a priest of their order.

Plan for the ports at Nombre de Dios, Panama, circa the 17th century
Plan for the ports at Nombre de Dios, Panama, circa the 17th century.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Cases like Natividad’s reveal how enslaved and indigenous individuals viewed the Church not only as a site of religious devotion but more importantly as a powerful political institution where they could seek justice and social mobility. The fact that enslaved women, despite their legal and social subjugation, turned to the Church for recourse demonstrates the faith placed in its institutions, reinforcing its central role in colonial society as well as its popularity.

The wills of commoners, enslaved individuals, and indigenous people in colonial Spanish America reflect the profound influence of the Catholic Church. These documents not only served as legal instruments for dispensing wealth and property but also demonstrated investment in Catholic beliefs, rituals, and institutions. The consistent inclusion of religious donations, burial requests, and provisions for masses highlights how individuals—especially indigenous and African women—sought to secure their afterlife through the Church while reinforcing its central role in colonial society. Wills served as a final testament to religious devotion, illustrating how Catholicism shaped personal identity, social obligations, and cultural traditions across different racial and socioeconomic groups.

The will of Ana Copana, an indigenous woman born outside the city of La Plata who later became a property owner in the Andean highlands, exemplifies this deep religious commitment. Drafted in 1598, her will contains explicit instructions for her burial. She “order(s) that my [her] body be buried in the church of our Lord Saint Sebastian in the chapel of Our Lady of Copacabana and the customary alms be paid for the burial.”[4] Her will also contains explicit instructions for the number of masses to be said for her soul. She orders that “a requiem mass be sung over my body…eight masses be said for my soul in the parish of Saint Sebastian…another six masses be said for my soul and my executors pay the customary alms…another six masses for my soul, by selling a little bit of corn that I leave in a pirua.” Her burial choice at a chapel of significance that is quite far from her deathbed and emphasis on masses reflect how indigenous individuals actively engaged with Catholic practices, reinforcing the Church’s importance in both life and death.

Catedral de La Plata.
Catedral de La Plata.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Similarly, the 1658 will of doña Ana de Barba y Talora, a divorced mestiza woman from Potosí, further illustrates the Church’s pervasive role in shaping individual legacies. In her will she orders “that my [her] body be buried in the principal church of this city” and “that one hundred low masses be said for my soul by the clergy that my executors wish and the customary alms be paid from my property.”[5] These requests indicate her desire for spiritual intercession. Beyond her own salvation, she left many religious paintings, statues, and cloths, such as “a statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception” and “a canvas of Saint Gertrudis without frame” to her daughter and niece. The number of items left to her family emphasize the importance of Catholicism in her everyday life and her desire that her family maintain the faith. Ana de Barba y Talora also paid for the continuation of her blind daughter’s care and musical education, charging her daughter’s new guardians with “continuing to teach music as he has begun with my daughter so that she is sufficiently skilled to procure her a place in a convent. There she can serve the choir, and be kept for this ministry.” This request emphasizes how convent life was seen as both a religious vocation and a form of security for women. Both of these women’s wills reflect the popularity and influence of Catholicism and the Catholic Church among commoners and the indigenous people of colonial Spanish America.

The experiences of indigenous and African women in colonial Spanish America challenge the notion of passive subjugation, revealing instead their agency in navigating economic, legal, and religious structures to their advantage. Cities like Potosí provided avenues for wealth accumulation, property ownership, and legal literacy, while the Catholic Church functioned as both a spiritual and political institution that reinforced social mobility. Through wills, lawsuits, and participation in religious organizations such as cofradías, these women asserted control over their assets, secured their family’s future, and engaged in Catholic traditions that reinforced the Church’s authority in their communities. The Church’s accessibility, particularly through its tribunals, further solidified its popularity, as marginalized individuals viewed it as an avenue for justice and social mobility. The examination of the legal and economic strategies of indigenous and African women highlights how they actively shaped colonial society, proving that even within a complex legal system and enslavement, they found ways to exercise power.

Hope Payton is a junior at the University of Texas pursuing a BA in history with minors in Spanish and UTeach Liberal Arts. While completing her undergraduate degree, she has been involved in the creation of an online exhibit examining modernity in nineteenth century Latin America with the Benson Latin American Collection. She looks forward to student teaching social studies at the high school level her senior year

[1] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 34.

[2] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 41.

[3] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 208.

[4] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 36.

[5] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 45.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico by Monica A. Jiménez (2024)

Banner for book review of Making Never-Never Land

In Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico, Caribbean historian, and Black studies scholar Mónica A. Jiménez offers a new interpretation of Puerto Rican legal and political history. In her first book-length project, Jiménez explores the intersections between law, and race in the creation of Puerto Rico. More specifically, Making Never-Never Land interrogates how these intersections have framed the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico since the territory was ceded by Spain in 1898. The book is shaped by Jiménez’s personal experience as a diasporic scholar moving from Puerto Rico to Texas. Jiménez’s family joined the first wave of Puerto Ricans who left for Houston, Texas in the mid-1980s in search of better economic opportunities which is part of a broader colonial history of forced migration, economic hardship, and discrimination. Jiménez seeks to answer the question: What is Puerto Rico for the United States? This is a question that many Puerto Ricans living in and out of the United States ask themselves every day. This question shapes Puerto Rican colonial history as a territory, historically and currently, especially following the imposition of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (also known as PROMESA).

Throughout Making Never-Never Land, Jiménez examines the larger history of U.S. settler colonialism and racial exclusion, using an analysis of the United States Supreme Court’s decisions to better understand the unincorporated territory’s current debt crisis and disaster capitalism situation. She argues that PROMESA, which was meant to take care of Puerto Rico’s outstanding debt, reaffirmed the United States Congress’ plenary powers over the island and “effectively stripped the territory of its ability to self-govern” (p.119).

Flags on the Coast of Puerto Rico. Source: Pexels

To understand the limitations of a group of US Supreme Court decisions known collectively as the Insular Cases and interrogate the “state of exception” created by them, Jiménez draws back to place the Insular Cases within a more extended legal history of racial exclusion towards Native Americans, and African Americans. By closely examining early legal precedents and analyzing these cases together, in Making Never-Never Land Jiménez invites us to consider how race functions within them, shaping Puerto Rico’s present and future. Through this critical reading, she positions herself as an anti-colonial scholar with a deep understanding of Puerto Rican politics. She does not believe that simply overturning the Insular Cases will resolve the island’s challenges. Instead, she urges the reader to think about Puerto Rico’s colonial status and its history of exploitation and subjugation more broadly, which are deeply tied to the racism embedded in those decisions, as a deliberate legal reality. Rejecting that legal logic as valid is, a crucial first step, for her.

Book cover Making Never-Never Land

Making Never-Never Land is divided into two parts. The first part, “Toward a Legal Genealogy of Racial Exclusion” looks at the US Supreme Court’s resolution of the Insular Cases, particularly Downes v. Bidwell (1901), a foundational case that first established the legal framework of U.S.-Puerto Rico relations, placing that decision within a longer historical context of legal decisions before the United States’ acquisition of the territory. Chapter 1 puts the focus on Downes because it was in that case that the US Supreme Court pronounced Puerto Rico to be “foreign in a domestic sense,” and created a new legal category, “the unincorporated territory,” for the island effectively placing it in a legal limbo—neither fully part of the U.S. nor fully independent (pp. 19, 20). That decision created a series of limitations for the territory, continuing to undermine its sovereignty.

Chapter 2 examines the Marshall Trilogy (1823-1832), United States v. Rogers (1846), and Dread Scott v. Sanford (1856) concerning the rights of Native Americans and enslaved Africans, respectively, who were among the first nonwhite populations with whom the U.S. legal system had to contend, to connect their logics and legal reasoning to Downes. In these cases, according to Jiménez, the U.S. Supreme Court engaged in critical moments of racial formation and exclusion, were we see the birth and growth of plenary powers, creating what the authors refers to as the “American state of exception”.

In the second part of the book, “‘American’ State of Exception: Puerto Rico in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries”, Jiménez traces the legal, political, and social effects and logics of Downes into the present with implications for the future. She does this by identifying three key moments that established the limits of Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United States. For example, chapter 3 examines the immediate changes implemented after the United States acquired Puerto Rico as an overseas territory, and the Court’s ruling in Downes. Jiménez describes this process as “the creation of Puerto Rico as an experimental station,” where the island became a testing ground for colonial policies, and its inhabitants were subjected to a process of “Americanization” and were taught how to become proper U.S. colonial subjects (p. 63).

President Theodore Roosevelt in Ponce, Puerto Rico 1906.
President Theodore Roosevelt in Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1906.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Chapter 4 examines the events that led to “the midcentury miracle,” which lifted many Puerto Ricans out of poverty and culminated in the establishment of the Estado Libre Asociado (E.L.A.), or Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, in 1952. While acknowledging the benefits this period brought to some, including her own grandfather’s success story, Jiménez highlights the limits of Puerto Rico’s political authority and the overarching control of Congress’ plenary powers over the archipelago, much like Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader Pedro Albizu Campos once did. In her effort to demystify archives of Puertorriqueñidad, the sense of Puerto Rican identity that became involved with the notion of E.L.A., she examines how Congress’ supremacy was reaffirmed in a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions from 2016 to 2020 concerning Puerto Rico’s current debt crisis. In Chapter 5, Jiménez further develops how the Court once again upheld the precedent set in Downes, reinforcing the island’s colonial condition.

Jiménez’s Making Never-Never Land makes a significant contribution to Puerto Rican Studies, American Studies, Legal Studies, and Caribbean Studies, by interrogating the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions through the lens of racial and colonial exclusion. Her work expands our understanding of unincorporated territories—Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa—and their relationship to the U.S. As a legal historian, Jiménez challenges the fiction that Puerto Rico holds real decision-making power, highlighting how Downes continues to justify the island’s exclusion and inequality. Her greatest scholarly intervention is tracing the genealogy of court decisions that have systematically stripped Puerto Rico of sovereignty, culminating in the imposition of PROMESA in 2016. By revisiting cases like Downes, she opens new avenues for understanding the present by rethinking Puerto Rico’s political and legal status.

Road Map of Puerto Rico, 1942
Road Map of Puerto Rico, 1942.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Jiménez’s Making Never-Never Land arrives at a crucial moment when Puerto Rican Studies scholars are examining critically how the United States treats its overseas territories. She not only expands these conversations but also moves beyond centering the debate on the Insular Cases, critically interrogating their lasting impact on Puerto Rico today. In doing so, she builds on the work of legal scholars like Efrén Rivera Ramos, David E. Wilkins, Maggie Blackhawk, Paul Finkelman, and Adam Arenson, among many others. Her research also engages with Ed Morales’ Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico (2019) and Rocío Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021), particularly in the context of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis and disaster capitalism, making it a timely and innovative contribution. Jiménez is also successful in expanding the conversation to other states of the U.S., as this book also helps us understand the colonial dynamics still present with Native Hawaiians.

Making Never-Never Land is well-suited for courses in Puerto Rican, and Caribbean Studies, American, African Diaspora, and Legal Studies, as it addresses race, discrimination, law, citizenship, U.S.-Puerto Rico relations, and colonialism while encouraging critical engagement with these legal precedents. Additionally, Jiménez’s intersectional approach to race and law makes her work relevant for students in Native American and Black Studies. Ultimately, this book challenges us to rethink legal narratives and their ongoing consequences, urging a more profound reconsideration of Puerto Rico’s political and legal status.

Nelson M. Pagán-Butler is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. His research explores Afro-descendant intellectuals in the Hispanic Caribbean, Black Caribbean feminist and Marxist thought, and Hispanic Caribbean queer archives.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Memories of War: Reflections on Japanese Borderlands Experiences and Nikkei Incarceration

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Introduction to Memories of War by Lucero Estrella, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Lawrence University

When developing my syllabus for ETST 110: Introduction to Ethnic Studies, I thought of ways to have students at Lawrence University engage with the themes of race, ethnicity, borders, gender, indigeneity, and migration beyond the United States. Each week, we discussed themes such as settler colonialism, racialization, criminalization, and resistance and how these appeared across various temporalities and global geographies.

For our week on resistance and exclusion during the mid-twentieth century, I decided to have my students read my NEP piece “Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII,” alongside Karen M. Inouye’s article “No Simple History: Nikkei Incarceration on Indigenous Lands.”[1] My goal was to have students engage with alternative histories of Japanese internment that they might not have encountered in the past. While my NEP piece approaches Japanese incarceration and family separation through a hemispheric lens and discusses Japanese wartime experiences on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, Inouye’s work centers Nikkei women’s narratives of incarceration on Indigenous land to highlight the interconnections between racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and wartime incarceration. Both works discuss the importance of memory in historical studies of the wartime period as a way of uncovering the continuing legacies of state violence.

Japanese internment detainees, 1942.
Japanese internment detainees, 1942. Source: Wikimedia Commons

For my class, students were expected to write one weekly, in-class free writing exercise based on a few guiding questions. During the week we read both works, students were required to tackle one or more of the following questions: How do Estrella and/or Inouye use memory in their works? Who do these memories belong to? What new perspectives and possibilities emerge from the use of memory as a historical source?

The four reflections below are from four Lawrence University students who took my Fall 2024 term Introduction to Ethnic Studies course: Tahlia Moe, Niranjana Mittal, Nicholas Lubin, and Riya Jehangir Stebleton. Their short preces include reflections on some themes and methodologies that structured our class discussions for the term, such as relational race, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and incarceration.

Student Reflections

Tahlia Moe

Memory serves as the gateway to a hidden archive. Employing memory as a historical source unearths relations, stories, intimacies, and experiences that traditional historical methods often overlook. “Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII” by Estrella and “No Simple History: Nikkei Incarceration on Indigenous Lands” by Inouye explore the hidden archive as they prioritize memories as primary sources. Estrella highlights memories from Japanese families and activists in the U.S. and Mexico to display the legacies of violence and anti-Asian exclusion on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, Inouye writes about Nikkei incarceration on Indigenous lands in Arizona, featuring memories from Japanese women who were imprisoned as children in Poston. The memories of these women reveal legacies of racial capitalism and settler colonialism that are downplayed, erased, or otherwise not found in the archives. Their memories reveal interactions between the Japanese prisoners and the Indigenous people as they created their own economies and forms of resistance. A relational race approach becomes significant to understanding the interactions between the groups and the effects of state-sponsored violence and settler-colonialist ideologies and policies. Compiling these memories helps form a fuller, more empathetic picture that cares about and honors subjects of violent histories. Emerging perspectives from people involved thus introduce the personal perspective and intimate value, combatting traditional historical methods.

Poston, Arizona, 1945
Poston, Arizona, 1945. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Niranjana Mittal

Estrella’s piece titled “Memories of War: Japanese Borderlands Experiences during WWII,” explores lived experiences from the Texas-Mexico borderlands through the lens of memory. By using oral histories and personal recollections, Estrella centers the humanity of these historical events, presenting an intimate narrative that contrasts with more traditional archival sources. Memory in her work becomes a vital tool for uncovering some overlooked aspects of history. Estrella’s use of memory is particularly powerful in reconstructing histories that lack extensive documentation or have been marginalized in mainstream narratives.

The memories she draws upon belong to individuals who lived through the upheaval of war. These are ordinary people whose voices are often absent from official records but whose experiences illuminate the complexities of war beyond its grand strategies and political machinations. For example, recollections of displacement and resource scarcity challenge the monolithic view of Japan as solely a wartime aggressor, adding nuance to our understanding of suffering in Japanese Mexican communities during the war. Estrella uncovers the brutality of imperial policies and how individuals navigated and survived these oppressive systems.

One of the most significant effects of Estrella incorporating these memories is how it opens up new perspectives on history. Memory, unlike official records, is subjective and malleable, shaped by individual experiences and the passage of time. This fluidity allows us to reveal dimensions of history that might otherwise remain hidden. For instance, memories often preserve emotional truths and everyday experiences that are absent in traditional state sources. They bring to light stories of resilience, survival, and moral ambiguity that challenge simplistic narratives of victimhood or villainy. Estrella shows how the memories of those at the margins, such as borderland communities, challenge nationalistic accounts that erase the interconnected and often contradictory realities of the war.

A dentist's office at the Granada Relocation Center, Amache, Colorado, 1942.
A dentist’s office at the Granada Relocation Center, Amache, Colorado, 1942. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Moreover, memory as a historical source opens up possibilities for reconciliation and healing. By including voices that have been silenced or ignored, Estrella’s work fosters a more inclusive understanding of history that acknowledges shared pain and loss across national and cultural boundaries. This approach humanizes history and highlights how memory itself is contested and politicized as individuals and communities negotiate their relationship with the past.

Ultimately, Estrella demonstrates that memory is not just a supplement to traditional historical sources but a vital means of understanding the complexities of human experiences. By foregrounding memory, she shifts the focus from the macro-level forces of war to the lived experiences of individuals – offering a richer, more empathetic perspective on the past.

Nicholas Lubin

In both Estrella’s and Inouye’s works, memory functions as a significant tool for recovery from the deterioration of Native American and immigrant narratives. Due to the United States’ history of isolation and displacement, many families are left with gaps in their history. However, memory functions to fill this gap. Although instances of displacement and isolation are not always documented, memory and oral histories help fill this gap. Memory in Inouye’s piece serves as a connector for the experiences of Japanese Americans who were subjected to incarceration following Executive Order 9066 and those of Native Americans who were displaced from their lands.

Inouye illustrates this overlap through the locations of campsites on Indigenous reservations mirroring the state-imposed limits and borders for the “allowed” spaces for Native peoples. Despite the differing circumstances of the two groups, the process of isolation and extermination is one and the same. Both works feature minority groups that were forcibly relocated because of the unsettling habits that hegemonic powers hold onto, such as settler colonialism and xenophobia. In Estrella’s work, she details this, showing the reader the widespread cross-border relocation of Japanese nationals following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Families across the Americas were torn apart, and many never returned to their homes, causing this impactful moment to fall under the radar. Estrella’s inclusion of oral history and memories of a Japanese Mexican family illustrates how the attempt to silence these voices with equivocation can be combated by preserving the narratives and memories of those who experienced violence and displacement during the wartime period.

Riya Jehangir Stebleton

The erasure of immigrant and Indigenous stories in the United States is a constant theme within hegemonic white narratives. Many families are unable to retrace the steps of their ancestors due to the history of exclusion, internment, and forced separation of ethnic groups. In the works of Estrella’s “Memories of War” & Inouye’s “No Simple History,” memory and empathy are used as powerful mechanisms to bridge historical gaps in the lives of both Japanese and Indigenous communities in the Americas. Although these communities endured different forms of injustice, an overarching system of racism in incarceration and exclusion can be seen through a relational race lens.

Civilian exclusion order #5, posted at First and Front streets, directing removal by April 7 1942 of persons of Japanese ancestry, from the first San Francisco section to be affected by evacuation
Civilian exclusion order #5, posted at First and Front streets, directing removal by April 7 1942 of persons of Japanese ancestry, from the first San Francisco section to be affected by evacuation.
Source: Library of Congress, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-34565. 

Estrella discusses the mass displacement of Japanese immigrants after WWII, as well as the obscured and unknown history of Japanese Mexicans. In addition to the criminalization of Japanese migrants following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, working-class migrants in Mexican states such as Coahuila encountered discrimination through forced relocation. Similarly, Inouye highlights the misconstrued narrative of the Nikkei community in the U.S., which is made up of Japanese descendants who have permanently settled abroad. These communities were placed in incarceration camps under the War Relocation Authorities on land where native tribes’ reservations were located. Wartime systems of relocation and incarceration draw direct comparisons to the processes of settler colonialism. Due to the consistent reinforcement of white power, the stories of Japanese migrants and the entanglement of injustices are left unheard of in social spheres, education, and sometimes within families. So, how can these narratives be retold and amplified? For many, the answer lies in the ability to convey memory and empathy in a historical context. 

Fragments of memory, combined with empathy, can be utilized to translate and preserve the overlooked histories of both immigrant and Indigenous communities. The usage of memory as a historical source allows for these stories to be retold, drawing connections between systems of incarceration, racialization, and dispossession that affected numerous non-white populations in the United States. For example, there are major gaps in the poorly documented history of Japanese Mexican families, and the usage of empathetic agency can bridge connections across the divide. Narrating history through a first-hand perspective also allows for the descendants of those affected to share the intergenerational impacts of settler colonialism and exclusion, demonstrating the long-term impacts. The preservation of these hidden narratives offers new perspectives on the underrepresented history of Japanese migrants while also integrating emotional analogy, remembrance, and personal influence. Incarceration rooted in white dominance continues to be a relevant issue in the United States. Consequently, it is crucial to remember and extend the narratives of Japanese migrants through mechanisms of memory, empathy, and knowledge, to break the cycle of ethnic erasure and carceral systems of injustice.

Lucero Estrella is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Lawrence University

[1] Karen Inouye, “No Simple History: Nikkei Incarceration on Indigenous Lands,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 15(1), 2024.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

“Muhammad’s Law” in Latin America: Outlining Historiographical Legacies of Early Modern Atlantic Islam

“Muhammad’s Law” in Latin America invites readers to explore Islam in the early modern Iberian Atlantic—a historiographical field examining the interconnected histories of Islam across the Atlantic world. It is rooted in the lived experiences of Muslims who crossed the ocean, the metaphorical uses of “Muslimness” in Iberian colonial thought, and the material and intellectual legacies of the Islamic world that shaped the Americas. The six foundational books discussed here seek to disrupt traditional narratives of Atlantic history and highlight Latin America as an active participant in global modernity, shaped by cultural exchange and intellectual collaboration.

This exploration is a deeply personal one. My fascination with the legacies of Al-Andalus and the Middle East—metaphors for an Islamic continuum linking Spain, the Maghreb, the Sahel, and the Levant—has profoundly shaped how I understand the Americas. This intellectual journey began with my first reading of Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples, a book that sparked my passion in history. The possibility of connecting the stories of Islam to Latin America captivates me, as it reframes the region as a global crucible for understanding modernity.

Al-Andalus, with its imperfect but real interreligious coexistence, continues to challenge us to rethink Latin America’s colonial history—not only as a story of vertical oppression but also as one marked by the incorporation of cultural difference, often through contested processes. These Muslim legacies, often referred to as alborotados (noisy and persistent), remain subtly yet powerfully visible in ways we often overlook. They complicate our understanding of the complex interplay between Christianity, native cultures, and the specters of Islam in the Americas. The following books, central to my comprehensive exams and my master’s thesis, The Alborotado Caribbean: Archiving Rowdy Gentes and Specters of Islam in the Long 16th Century, have helped me unravel these connections and reveal a more complex and interconnected Atlantic world.

African Muslims and the Atlantic World: Sylviane A. Diouf and Michael A. Gomez

Together, Sylviane Diouf’s Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (1998) and Michael A. Gomez’s Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (2005) provide a comprehensive exploration of the role of African Muslims (mainly Wolof, Mandinka, and Fulbe) in shaping the Atlantic world. Diouf’s work emphasizes the resilience of Islamic faith and practices among enslaved Africans, while Gomez extends the discussion to encompass the broader social and cultural legacies of African Muslims across the Americas.

Diouf’s study highlights the enduring presence of Islam in West Africa, particularly in Senegambia, and how it influenced the identities of enslaved Muslims who crossed the Atlantic. Her meticulous analysis of primary sources, such as colonial decrees and inquisitorial records, reveals how African Muslims preserved their faith through practices including the use of protective talismans, dietary restrictions, and acts of resistance, such as the 1522 Wolof rebellion in Hispaniola (Enriquillo’s revolt). Diouf positions Islam not merely as a religion but as a framework for resilience and cultural survival in the face of dehumanizing conditions.

Gomez builds on this foundation by situating the experiences of African Muslims within a broader historiographical context, incorporating both Latin America and the United States. The narrative spans from West Africa to the Americas, examining how Islamic traditions adapted to different colonial contexts. For instance, Gomez explores how African deity names containing the particle Allah such as Ọbatala, the presence of Marabouts (Sufi holy people) and the practice of Taqiyya (religious dissimulation) facilitated the survival of Islamic practices in the early colonial Americas. He also delves into the intersections between African Islamic traditions and syncretic religions in the Americas, such as Lukumi in Cuba.

Both authors underscore the significance of African Muslims in shaping the cultural and religious landscapes of the Atlantic world, but they also diverge in their emphases. Diouf focuses on cultural retention and the religious practices of enslaved Muslims, while Gomez extends the discussion to the legacies of these practices, particularly in North America. Together, these works correct a long-standing historiographical neglect by emphasizing the centrality of African Muslims to the history of the Atlantic world. They reveal how Islamic traditions, both as faith and cultural practice, shaped the identities, resistance practices, and legacies of enslaved Africans and their descendants across the Americas.

Dialogues Between Symbolic and Material Legacies: Barbara Fuchs and Judith Carney

Barbara Fuchs’ Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (2001) and Judith Carney’s Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (2001) approach the legacies of Muslim cultures in the Atlantic world through distinct yet complementary lenses. Fuchs examines how symbolic anxieties about Islam shaped Spanish colonial ideology, while Carney focuses on the environmental and agricultural transformations that were driven by the knowledge and practices of African Muslims. Together, these works demonstrate how the material and symbolic practices descended from Muslim people endured and adapted in the Americas, persisting despite colonial efforts at erasure and invisibilization.

Fuchs focuses on the literary and ideological constructions of “Muslimness” in Spanish colonial thought, showing how Spain’s long history of conflict with Islam informed its treatment of indigenous peoples and other non-Christian groups in the Americas. Her analysis reveals how anxieties about Islam—rooted in centuries of confrontation with Muslim powers in Iberia and North Africa—were projected onto the New World. Drawing on literary works such as Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana and Lope de Vega’s La Dragontea, Fuchs illustrates how Spanish authors used the figure of the Muslim in the Indies to articulate fears about rebellion, idolatry, and cultural otherness. For example, Ercilla’s portrayal of the indigenous Mapuche in La Araucana draws on tropes of Muslim resistance, likening indigenous leaders to Morisco rebels. Similarly, Lope de Vega conflates Protestant and Muslim enemies in La Dragontea by portraying Francis Drake and his crew as “Dracárabes” (Drake-Arabs). These representations reveal how Spanish anxieties about Islam shaped their perceptions of all non-Catholic groups, blurring the lines between religious, cultural, and political adversaries. Fuchs’ reliance on literary sources underscores how deeply embedded these anxieties were in Spanish intellectual and cultural production and demonstrates how the symbolic legacies of Muslimness were instrumental in shaping colonial narratives of conquest and suppression.

In contrast, Carney’s Black Rice foregrounds the material and environmental impact of African Muslims, particularly through their agricultural knowledge and practices. Carney highlights how enslaved Africans from Muslim regions of West Africa, especially Senegambia, brought sophisticated expertise in rice cultivation that transformed the landscapes and economies of the Americas. The rice of Senegambia was a clear expression of the Old-World interconnectedness provided by the Islamic world, from East Asia to West Africa. We cannot think about the typical Caribbean diet nowadays without considering the importance of this rice agricultural knowledge brought by Senegambians. The cultivation of rice, a crop long associated with Islamic agricultural traditions, became central to the economies of South Carolina, the maroon communities of Brazil, and other Atlantic regions. By adapting their agrarian knowledge to new environments, these enslaved peoples ensured both economic viability and cultural continuity. Carney’s work challenges Eurocentric narratives of the Columbian Exchange by revealing the critical role African Muslims played in shaping agricultural landscapes, effectively redefining the Americas as spaces marked by their contributions to environmental knowledge.

While Fuchs reveals how Spain’s anxieties about Muslims were projected onto indigenous peoples and other colonial subjects, Carney demonstrates how African Muslim agricultural expertise reshaped the ecological and economic foundations of the Atlantic world. Together, these works highlight the dual dimensions of Muslim cultural legacies—symbolic and material—and how they endured even in the presence of colonial systems that sought to suppress them. By placing Fuchs and Carney in dialogue, we see a fuller picture of how Muslim-descended peoples and traditions intersected with colonial life. Whether through literary anxieties about rebellion and heresy or the cultivation of rice fields that sustained enslaved communities, these legacies remind us of the profound ways the Islamic civilization influenced the Americas.

Muslim Identities in Individual Flux and Collective Stasis: Karoline Cook and Karen Graubart

Karoline Cook’s Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America (2016) and Karen Graubart’s Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World (2022) offer two different but complimentary perspectives for understanding the dynamics of Early Modern Atlantic Islam. Cook emphasizes the forbidden mobility of individuals marked by “Muslimness” (Turks, Arabs, Berbers, Moriscos, and West Africans), while Graubart focuses on the stasis and semi-autonomy of disenfranchised communities (Jews, Moors, Indians, Africans) within the framework of the Spanish Empire. Together, these works illuminate how both individuals and institutions navigated and reinvented the imperial Atlantic, showcasing microhistories of personal adaptation alongside broader histories of collective self-governance.

Cook’s exploration centers on the movement of Moriscos and other Muslim-marked individuals within the Spanish Empire, particularly their migration to the Americas despite legal prohibitions. Her work uncovers how individuals circumvented colonial restrictions, forging paths that challenged the rigidity of imperial legislation. Through inquisitorial records mainly from Mexico, Cook reveals the liminal spaces these individuals occupied, adapting between Muslim and Christian identities while carrying memories of their prayers in Arabic and material markers of faith, such as talismans and amulets. This “forbidden mobility” underscores the agency of individuals navigating the Atlantic system, even as their movements were surveilled and constrained. Cook’s narrative highlights how the specter of Muslimness shaped the legal, social, and rhetorical frameworks of the empire, with Moriscos often cast as symbols of contamination or rebellion—anxieties that were projected onto indigenous uprisings in the Americas.

Graubart, in contrast, shifts the focus from individuals to communities, examining how disenfranchised groups used the institutional framework of the república to assert forms of self-governance and negotiate their place within the imperial system. By analyzing urban spaces and corporations in Seville and Lima, like alhamas (Moorish communities), cofradias de negros (Black brotherhoods), and Indigenous pueblos, Graubart demonstrates how the Spanish Empire operated as a constellation of overlapping jurisdictions, where legal pluralism allowed for a limited collective autonomy (working as republics). Her use of GIS mapping to study the spatial organization of these communities reveals how they adapted imperial institutions to maintain cultural and religious identities while asserting their collective needs. This framework of collective semi-autonomy contrasts with Cook’s focus on individuals facing persecution or concealing their Muslim identity, highlighting two distinct ways marginalized populations engaged with the empire: through individual strategies of evasion or dissimulation, or by collectively adapting to imperial institutions to assert their communal presence.

By placing these works in dialogue, we see two sides of the same coin: the tension between mobility and stasis of identities within a proto-racial Atlantic world. Cook’s focus on individual trajectories reveals the fluidity and adaptability of particular identities, even in the face of systemic religious oppression. Meanwhile, Graubart’s analysis of micro-corporations highlights the endurance and reinvention of communal structures that facilitated collective action and cultural resilience. Both perspectives underscore how both institutions like the república and individuals traveled and transformed across the Atlantic, shaping the imperial world in reciprocal ways. The broader implication of this dialogue is a realization that the Atlantic world was not a monolithic system but a dynamic space of (re)invention of human difference. Institutions such as alhamas and cabildos evolved as they crossed the Atlantic, just as individuals like Moriscos navigated their roles within shifting social and legal frameworks. Cook’s microhistories and Graubart’s community-focused lens converge to show how Muslimness, both as a lived experience and a conceptual spectral category, was central to the development of the Spanish Atlantic world. Together, they offer a nuanced understanding of Early Modern Atlantic Islam, revealing how people and institutions alike negotiated the complexities of empire.

Final thoughts

Single-volume Qur’an. Ink, color, and gold on paper.
Ottoman single-volume Qur’an (1517). Source: Wikimedia Commons

The field of Early Modern Atlantic Islam opens a window into the complicated and interconnected histories of the Atlantic world. The works examined in this article collectively reveal how Islam shaped this world across multiple dimensions: through the resilience of African Muslims in the Americas, the metaphorical frameworks of “Muslimness” in Iberian colonial thought, and the tangible legacies of Islamic cultural, technological, and intellectual practices. Despite these contributions, there is much work to be done.

These six books disrupt conventional narratives of the Atlantic world as a space defined solely by European dominance. Instead, they reframe it as a region shaped by cultural intersections, shared histories, and dynamic reinventions of identity that go beyond the histories of a top-down successful Catholic spiritual conquest. They challenge us to recognize the complexities of Latin American colonial history, not merely as a story of exploitation and racialization but as one marked by contested incorporation by conversion or mestizaje, and transformation of difference—whether cultural, religious, or institutional. By tracing these legacies, we uncover shared histories that transcend cultural and geographical boundaries. From the rice fields of Senegambia to the “republican” institutions of Lima, these stories illuminate the interconnectedness of the Atlantic world and challenge us to rethink the narratives we take for granted. In doing so, we can see Latin American history was profoundly influenced by the specters and experiences of Atlantic Islam.

Additional Recommended Readings

  • Deardorff, Max. A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
  • Gruzinski, Serge. ¿Qué hora es allá? América y el Islam en los albores de la modernidad. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015.
  • Hamann, Byron Ellsworth. Bad Christians, New Spains: Muslims, Catholics, and Native Americans in a Mediterratlantic World. London: Routledge, 2019.
  • Hourani, Albert. A History of the Arab Peoples. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
  • Rappaport, Joanne. The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
  • Reis, João José. The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
  • Schwartz, Stuart B. Blood and boundaries: the limits of religious and racial exclusion in early modern Latin America. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. 2020.

Acknowledgment
This reflection first began to take shape during the seminar “Islam in Europe and America” taught by Dr. Denise Spellberg, to whom I am deeply grateful for her generosity and encouragement to further explore these understudied and often overlooked connections. Dr. Spellberg has herself had the fascinating opportunity to examine some of these connections, particularly in relation to the United States, in her book Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders (2013)—a work that also contributes to broader efforts to understand the complex histories of Atlantic Islam.

Rafael David Nieto-Bello is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at The University of Texas at Austin and a historian from Bogotá, with a double bachelor’s in History and Political Science from Universidad de los Andes and a master’s degree in History from UT Austin. His research examines the intersections of the history of human sciences, race, religion, and the environment in the colonial Caribbean and the Atlantic world. He is currently writing his dissertation and working on digital humanities projects that analyze cartographic and textual representations of the colonial Caribbean.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Empire of Poverty. The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire, by Julia McClure (2025). 

In Empire of Poverty, Julia McClure presents an innovative approach to the study of the Spanish Empire. The book analyzes how poverty was conceived in the early years of the Spanish colonization of the Americas, and how it was transformed as attitudes towards the poor were changed by a series of economic, political, religious and social factors. Julia McClure argues that the transition to colonial capitalism in the sixteenth century modified previous attitudes towards poverty and modelled a new approach that shaped the very same institutions of empire.  

The most innovative aspect of this work is the analysis of this ideological change. Rather than emphasizing the material aspects of poverty during the transition to capitalism, as previous Marxist analysis have done (in the case of Europe see: Karls Marx’s Capital and Catherina Lys and Hugo Solis’ Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe), McClure analyzes how the moral-political concepts of empire-building changed and intertwined with social, political and economic factors, eventually influencing the governing models of imperial institutions. As the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the New World and amassed wealth and riches, new theories of monetary value emerged. These theories were accompanied by framing notions of indigenous people as impoverished and ‘‘uncivilized’’, which were constructed to justify Spanish colonization and the subsequent subjugation of these communities. This also explained the emergence of new theories of sovereignty. 

Debates regarding the natural rights of Indigenous people and their role in colonial society as well as discussions led by scholars of the School of Salamanca followed the scholastic tradition but also inspired new models of governance. McClure demonstrates how poverty was used as an instrument for the control and subjugation of Indigenous people in the Americas. She identifies this period as the genesis of what she calls ‘‘colonial capitalism’’, marked by the emergence of moral-political values that helped shape new theories of empire and expand sovereignty claims over additional individuals and territories.  

Picture of University of Salamanca
University of Salamanca. Source: Wikimedia Commoms

Taking a first look at the Iberian Peninsula, the book first delves with the Spanish arbitristas, intellectuals who wrote treatises to the King on the social, political and economic state of the kingdom. It analyzes the impact the New World wealth had in Spanish society at the time, rejecting previous analysis that regarded Spain as an impoverished kingdom. McClure argues that it was the sudden flow of wealth and riches from the New World that helped construct this idea of decline and poverty at home, with the arbitristas being the first to introduce and articulate this concept.  

The book then takes the reader to America to first analyze the economies of pre-Columbian societies such as the Maya, Inca or Aztec. McClure argues that these indigenous political entities had their own mechanisms to face poverty and scarcity. She defines these economic systems as ‘‘moral ecologies’’, characterized by their interactions with their surrounding environment and resources. These systems developed their own mechanisms to reduce poverty and scarcity at times of risk, whether that be it as a result of a natural disaster or harvest failure (pp.54-67). Despite the existence of these mechanisms, the author shows how Spanish officials and intellectuals constructed Indigenous people as poor, and began classifying them in different social ranges, often denoting their economic status and racial features. This only mirrored the developments that were happening at the same time in the Iberian Peninsula.  

Picture of Codex Mendoza folio 64r. The top two lines of the page on display here depict the training of a priest (which involved public works such as the repair of temples and bridges). The remaining images feature warriors, and illustrate the importance of war captives in the acquisition of social rank.
Codex Mendoza folio 64r. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Focusing again in Europe, McClure stresses the importance of the new theories of state and government that were emerging at the time. She defines them as contractual and collaborative in nature, emphasizing the negotiated relationship between vassals and rulers, despite the increasing power of European monarchs. These new theories of state –often embedded within the ‘mirror for princes’ literature– actively supported the provision of the poor and the existence of welfare systems as the monarch was regarded as the main benefactor and provider of the poor and those in need. As a result, intellectuals from the School of Salamanca legitimized the Spanish colonization of the Americas, and with it, the emergence of colonial capitalism. Their theories of sovereignty and government framed the King as the main supporter and provider of welfare and charity in the kingdom, stressing the contractual nature of this negotiated sovereignty.  

At the same time, attitudes towards poverty shifted. These shifts in approaches to poverty and poor relief formed part of a wider trend in Europe where the poor began to be increasingly policed and controlled by government institutions. Treaties such as Juan Luis Vives’ De Subventione Pauperum (1530) or Miguel de Giginta’s Tratado de remedio de pobres (1579) offered new solutions to relief poverty and advocated for a tighter control toward vagrancy. New classifications emerged between deserving and undeserving poor, which further widened the gap between legal and illegal forms of poverty. Moreover, the issue of new poor laws during the reigns of Charles V (1516-1556) and Philip II (1556-1598) meant the further criminalization of poverty, and an acceleration in state-controlled legislation (p.126). 

Additionally, the construction of poverty toward Indigenous people often meant their appropriation of their land and labor, which helped further cement the colonial project. McClure analyzes the various forms of labor appropriation and exploitation, including the encomienda system, the repartimiento, and the capture of individuals in combat through just war rhetoric (pp.138-142). In addition, as a result of the creation of novel forms of debt and tributary legislation, new forms of poverty emerged that widely affected Indigenous communities. The appropriation of lands and the legal mechanisms used to claim ‘empty’ lands or legalized already occupied ones, formed a model that ultimately favored Spanish colonists (p.164).  

At the same time, the categorization of Indigenous people as ‘‘childish’’ and in need of protection helped Spanish officials to implement further governing structures in the Americas, strengthening the visualization of the Spanish Monarchs as the benefactors of these communities. The Crown exploited this discourse to build around its institution the myth of protector of the Indians and dispenser of justice. Yet, McClure also shows that Indigenous people navigated through the intricate system of Spanish colonial law, and often sought rewards and compensation for their miseries and poverty. This bottom-up system of petitions, rewards, and amparos also shaped the imperial institutions of the Spanish empire in the New World, and created a precedent for a passive resistance and cemented the survival of pre-conquest privileges and rights among Indigenous people and communities (pp.172-173). 

In conclusion, Empire of Poverty shows how moral and political concepts of poverty influenced the governing institutions of the Spanish empire while also laying the foundations for the modern unequal systems that affect the exact same societies that were first colonized in the sixteenth century. Simultaneously, the monograph shifts attention from the Anglophone historiographical tradition that has usually overemphasized the Protestant models to study poverty and charity (highly influenced by Weber’s thesis on the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) to explain early modern attitudes towards poverty. This offers a new paradigm to explain the role and impact of Catholicism in poor relief and poverty management.  

As a result, McClure concludes that scholars and officials of the Spanish Empire ‘reinvented poverty’ to legitimize their expansion of sovereignty in these new territories. In doing so, they created new forms of poverty through alien systems of labor extraction, tribute collection, and land appropriation. Despite this, the negotiated and participative nature of the Spanish empire also enabled its vassals to negotiate and even lobby for their own interests. At times, this led to the preservation of their rights and status, or the obtaining of rewards, in the newly created colonial society, evidencing the participatory and contractual nature of this system of rule and government. Finally, McClure stresses how the colonial capitalist model that developed over the sixteenth century paved the way for modern inequalities that continue in these territories, often shaping Indigenous ways of life and survival. 

Jorge García-García is a first-year PhD History student at the University of Texas-Austin. He studied History as an undergraduate at the University of Glasgow (United Kingdom), obtaining a MA with Honors of the First Class. He then studied a postgraduate degree in World History at the Pompeu Fabra University (Spain). His research focuses on Colonial Latin America and the Spanish Empire.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

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