Petty Capitalism in Spanish America: The Pulperos of Puebla, Mexico City, Caracas, and Buenos Aires. By Jay Kinsbruner. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987. Pp. xv, 159. Figures. Tables. Appendixes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $19.50.)

1988 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 390-392
Author(s):  
Kevin Gosner
1978 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-237
Author(s):  
J. Manuel Espinosa

The centuries-old Spanish folk heritage of our Southwest, and its many faceted and enduring influence on the cultural life of the region, has been written about from various rims of observation. This article describes the pioneer studies of Aurelio M. Espinosa on Spanish folklore in the Southwest, with special emphasis on northern New Mexico. Although he made important contributions to the study of Spanish folklore of southern Colorado, Arizona, and California, and to that of Spain, Mexico, and other parts of Spanish America as well, he devoted most of his research and field work to the upper half of New Mexico which is the richest field of Spanish folklore in the Southwest.In viewing the cultural history of New Mexico, Espinosa reminded his readers that its first century as a Spanish colony, the 17th, was the second great century of Spain's Golden Age of arts and letters. With the vigor of Spain's sense of mission in those centuries, her Golden Age radiated to all parts of Spanish America via Mexico City, Lima, and the other principal colonial capitals. At the same time, from the bookshelf and the store of knowledge of the humble missionary, and the folklore of the Spanish settlers, passed down from generation to generation, the spirit of the Golden Age was reflected on the most remote settled frontiers.


Author(s):  
D.A. BRADING

This chapter demonstrates that while Spain had a clear vision of what the conquered Aztec city should be, the city of the conquistadors was relatively short for it was soon transformed by its Creole inhabitants who made their own identity pronounced on its building and culture. For 300 years, the city of Mexico was the capital of viceroyalty. It was the capital of New Spain and was the seat of the metropolitan archbishopric of Mexico. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, a generation of young Creoles entered the secular priesthood and the religious orders. They challenged the predominance of European Spaniards, affirmed their talents and identity, and started looking back to the glorious past the conquistadors had destroyed. However, the development of the city was constrained and limited by the city’s status as the viceregal capital of New Spain. Its status hence meant that the city depended on the political decisions and cultural influences emanating from the Spanish. Out of this tension, a creative process of change emerged in which different ethnic groups and cultures intermingled and conflicted to ensure that the social composition and character of Mexico City would be different from the other cities in Spanish America. However, these changes were not brought without due loss. Due to the conquest and the Old World diseases the Mexico population fell to the near brink of oblivion. These epidemics and natural calamities continued to afflict the city throughout the colonial period.


Author(s):  
Dagmar Vanderbosch

Ultraísmo is an early twentieth-century art movement which developed in Spain around 1920 and was introduced to Argentina by Jorge Luis Borges in 1921. It was strongly influenced by European avant-garde movements, particularly Cubism and Dadaism, and by the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s Creationism. The poets of Ultraísmo rejected the fin de siècle aesthetics of Spanish and Spanish-American modernism and experimented with the graphic and acoustic dimensions of poetry, emphasising rhythm over rhyme. The origins of Ultraísmo go back to late 1918, when Vicente Huidobro visited Madrid for a short period, and Rafael Cansinos Assens, host of a literary circle in the Café Colonial, wrote the first Ultraist Manifesto, published in the magazine Grecia in January 1919 (Videla 1963: p. 27). Other founding texts of the movement are El movimiento ultraísta español and Manifiesto Vertical, both written by Guillermo de Torre in 1920. The movement of Ultraísmo was oriented both toward Europe and Spanish America. Ultraísmo adopted ideas from different European avant-garde movements in an effort to reduce the cultural distance between Spain and the rest of Europe, rather than develop an original programme. Their poetry gives importance to images and metaphors, experiments with typography and calligrams, rejects punctuation and often rhyme, and focuses on poetic rhythm. Ultraísmo developed in Spanish America when Jorge Luis Borges, who had spent several years in Spain and had published poems in Ultraist magazines, introduced the movement in the literary circles of Buenos Aires upon his return to Argentina in 1921.


1996 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Harris

On August 31 1832, when news arrived of the death of the English utilitarian philosopher and jurisconsult, Jeremy Bentham, the Guatemalan Statesman José del Valle introduced a resolution to the congress of the Central American Republic requesting all its members to wear mourning as a mark of respect. He also took the opportunity to bestow fulsome praise on Bentham, not only as the sage who had taught the art of legislation and government, but also as the defender of Spanish-American independence.Few would dispute the first claim. Bentham’s work on the science of legislation, Traités de législation, had been translated into Spanish and was widely read throughout Spanish America. Francisco Santander was said to have always had a copy open on his desk and it was adopted as a basic text for study at University level in Buenos Aires and Santiago. Many of Bentham’s other works enjoyed similar esteem and his opinions on what constituted good government were constantly cited and debated in the assemblies of the new republics.


2013 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberto Di Stefano

Abstract Beginning with the dissolution of colonial Christendom, the development of church property has been closely tied to processes of secularization in Latin American countries. This process is to be understood not as the marginalization of religion but as the restructuring of religious matters in modern societies. The practice of lay patronage—which was common in America, as it was in Europe for centuries—channeled family wealth into the financial support of certain institutions, which in turn allowed lay patrons to intervene in decisions about religious life. In the case of Buenos Aires such properties were absorbed or expropriated during the nineteenth century as part of a process of centralization, in which local church authorities, the papacy, and the state all participated. Thus in Buenos Aires the process of disentailment of church property did not involve the transfer of property from the church to the state, as might be supposed by extrapolating from the liberal reforms that took place in other countries. Rather, there was a process of appropriation by the state and by the church of property and managerial authority that had previously been held by families and various local institutions. It is worth asking if this phenomenon was unique to Buenos Aires, or if it can be generalized in some measure to other parts of the Hispanic world.


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