Introduction

Author(s):  
Sherwin K. Bryant ◽  
Ben Vinson ◽  
Rachel Sarah O’Toole

This book expands the framework for charting the African Diaspora to Spanish America. Drawing upon a variety of texts from the Spanish American colonies, it explores the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires. It examines what Leo Garofalo calls the “shape of Diaspora,” tracing its early extension into Iberia in the fifteenth century and its reach beyond the Atlantic basin into the Pacific/Andean territories ever since. The book is organized into three sections. Part 1 discusses voluntary and forced migrations across the Atlantic, focusing on three distinct cases of identity construction that intersect with ongoing debates in African Diaspora scholarship regarding the models of continuity and creolization in the Americas. Part 2 considers how enslaved and free people used their rights as Catholics to present themselves as civilized subjects, loyal Christians, and resisters to slavery. Part 3 shifts the discussion to the family and professional lives of free blacks in nineteenth-century Cuba, with particular emphasis on how they claimed categories of inclusion.

2019 ◽  
Vol 99 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-429
Author(s):  
Alejandro García-Montón

Abstract This article analyzes the rise of Portobelo as the most important center of the Spanish American slave trade from the 1660s to the 1730s. Portobelo's emergence was one of the most striking results of the structural transformation that the slave trade to Spanish America underwent between the 1640s and the 1650s. In these years, intra-American transimperial shipping displaced direct slave voyages from Africa to the Spanish Caribbean. By focusing on the elements that underpinned Portobelo's emergence, this essay shows how shifting transimperial connections affected the making and unmaking of the intraimperial circuits that supplied slaves to Spanish America. This approach reveals the inner workings, evolving links, and disputed hierarchies that interlocked port towns with inland cities and also structured the African diaspora in Spanish America and the emergence of a black Pacific.


This book expands the Diaspora framework that has shaped much of the recent scholarship on Africans in the Americas to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires. While a majority of the research on the colonial Diaspora focuses on the Caribbean and Brazil, analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation diaspora framework that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. This book is arranged around three themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Across these broad themes, the chapters offer probing and detailed studies of the place and roles of people of African descent in the complex realities of colonial Spanish America.


2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 149-174
Author(s):  
Eugenia Houvenaghel

The Mexican diplomat Alfonso Reyes (1889––1959) was notable in the cultural panorama of Spanish America in the first half of the 20th century for his acquaintance with classical rhetoric, a discipline rarely studied at that time in that part of the world. This article distinguishes four aspects of rhetoric throughout Reyes' oeuvre: (i) a vulgar sense, (ii) an erudite sense, (iii) classical theories, (iv) and modern applications. In his early work, Reyes uses rhetoric in a pejorative and vulgar sense. Around the year 1940, Reyes starts to show a lively interest in rhetoric, opts definitively for an erudite sense of the term, and initiates the study of the classical art of persuasion. In his third phase, Reyes gains deeper knowledge of rhetoric, lectures on the subject, and explains his favorite orators andtheorists. Finally,his use of rhetoric reveals a commitment to the reality of Spanish America. Reyes' rhetoric is an "actualised" and "Americanised" version that shows the possibilities of the classical art of persuasion in Spanish American society.


1972 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-440
Author(s):  
Randolph Campbell

It is well known that the initial task of interpreting the Monroe Doctrine as a functional policy in international relations fell largely on John Quincy Adams. Somewhat ironically, the noncolonization principle in Monroe's famed Annual Message of 1823 for which Adams, then Secretary of State, was most responsible, received relatively little attention in the 1820's. Leaders in the United States and Spanish America alike were more concerned with the meaning of the other main principle involved in the Message—nonintervention. What were the practical implications of Monroe's warning that the United States would consider intervention by a European power in the affairs of any independent American nation “ as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States ” ? John Quincy Adams laid the groundwork for an answer to this question in July, 1824, when Colombia, alarmed by rumors of French interference in the wars for independence, sought a treaty of alliance. The President and Congress, Adams replied, would take the necessary action to support nonintervention if a crisis arose, but there would be no alliance. In fact, he added, it would be necessary for the United States to have an understanding with certain European powers whose principles and interests also supported nonintervention before any action could be taken or any alliance completed to uphold it. The position taken by the Secretary of State cooled enthusiasm for the Monroe Doctrine, but Spanish American leaders did not accept this rebuff in 1824 as final.


2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-246
Author(s):  
Rukhsana Qamber

History has so far paid scant attention to Muslims in the earliest phase of colonizing the Americas. As a general policy, the Spanish Crown prohibited all non-Catholics from going to early Spanish America. Nevertheless, historians recognize that a few Muslims managed to secretly cross the Atlantic Ocean with the European settlers during the sixteenth century. Later they imported African Muslim slaves but historians considered both Africans and indigenous peoples passive participants in forming Latin American society until evidence refuted these erroneous views. Furthermore, the public had assumed that only single Spanish men went to the American unknown until historians challenged this view, and now women’s role is fully recognized in the colonizing enterprise. Additionally, despite the ban on non-Catholics, researchers found many Jews in the Americas, even if the Spanish Inquisition found out and killed almost all of them. In line with revisionist history, my research pioneers in three aspects. It demonstrates that Muslim men and women went to early Spanish America. Also, the Spanish Crown allowed Muslims to legally go to its American colonies. Additionally, the documents substantiate my new findings that Muslims went to sixteenth-century Latin America as complete families. They mostly proceeded out of Spain as the wards or servant-slaves of Spanish settlers after superficially converting to Catholicism. The present study follows two case studies that record Muslim families in early sixteenth-century Spanish America. Paradoxically, their very persecutor—the Spanish Church and its terrible Inquisitorial arm—established their contested belief in Islam.


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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 191558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael B. Herrera ◽  
Spiridoula Kraitsek ◽  
Jose A. Alcalde ◽  
Daniel Quiroz ◽  
Herman Revelo ◽  
...  

Chickens ( Gallus gallus domesticus ) from the Americas have long been recognized as descendants of European chickens, transported by early Europeans since the fifteenth century. However, in recent years, a possible pre-Columbian introduction of chickens to South America by Polynesian seafarers has also been suggested. Here, we characterize the mitochondrial control region genetic diversity of modern chicken populations from South America and compare this to a worldwide dataset in order to investigate the potential maternal genetic origin of modern-day chicken populations in South America. The genetic analysis of newly generated chicken mitochondrial control region sequences from South America showed that the majority of chickens from the continent belong to mitochondrial haplogroup E. The rest belongs to haplogroups A, B and C, albeit at very low levels. Haplogroup D, a ubiquitous mitochondrial lineage in Island Southeast Asia and on Pacific Islands is not observed in continental South America. Modern-day mainland South American chickens are, therefore, closely allied with European and Asian chickens. Furthermore, we find high levels of genetic contributions from South Asian chickens to those in Europe and South America. Our findings demonstrate that modern-day genetic diversity of mainland South American chickens appear to have clear European and Asian contributions, and less so from Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Furthermore, there is also some indication that South Asia has more genetic contribution to European chickens than any other Asian chicken populations.


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