Dangerous Speech
A Social History of Blasphemy in Colonial Mexico
Javier Villa-Flores
Dangerous Speech is the first systematic treatment of blasphemous speech in colonial Mexico. This engaging social history examines the representation of blasphemy as a sin and a crime, and its repression by the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish colonists viewed blasphemy not only as an insult against God but also as a dangerous misrepresentation of the deity, which could call down his wrath in a ruinous assault on the imperial enterprise. Why then, asks Villa-Flores, did Spaniards dare to blaspheme? Having mined the period’s moral literature—philosophical works as well as royal decrees and Inquisition treatises and trial records in Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. archives and research libraries—Villa-Flores deftly interweaves images of daily life in colonial Mexico with vivid descriptions of human interactions to illustrate the complexity of a culture profoundly influenced by the Catholic Church. In entertaining and sometimes horrifying vignettes, the reader comes face to face with individuals who used language to assert or manipulate their identities within that repressive society. Villa-Flores offers an innovative interpretation of the social uses of blasphemous speech by focusing on specific groups—conquistadors, Spanish settlers, Spanish women, and slaves of both genders—as a lens to examine race, class, and gender relations in colonial Mexico. He finds that multiple motivations led people to resort to blasphemy through a gamut of practices ranging from catharsis and gender self-fashioning to religious rejection and active resistance. Dangerous Speech is a valuable resource for students and scholars of colonialism, the social history of language, Mexican history, and the changing relations of gender, class, and ethnicity in colonial Latin America.
Dangerous Speech is a valuable resource for students and scholars of colonialism, the social history of language, Mexican history, and the changing relations of gender, class, and ethnicity in colonial Latin America.
JAVIER VILLA-FLORES is an assistant professor in the Department of History and the Latin American and Latin Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Carlo Ginzburg: El historiador como teórico.
November 248 pp., 7 illus. 6 x 9
ISBN-10: 0-8165-2556-0, ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-2556-0 $50.00s cloth
ISBN-10: 0-8165-2563-3, ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-2563-8 $24.95s paperBuilding the King's Highway
Labor, Society, and Family on Mexico's Caminos Reales, 1757-1804
Bruce A. Castleman
The importance of the silver trade to the Spanish colonial effort is well documented, as it opened up an exchange of goods with Europe and Asia. Lesser known is the story of the roads on which this trade moved and the people responsible for building them.
Focusing on the camino real linking Mexico City and the port of Veracruz, Bruce Castleman has written a social history of road construction laborers in late Bourbon Mexico. He has drawn on employment and census records to study a major shift in methods used by the Spanish colonial regime to mobilize the supply of unskilled labor--and concomitant changes in the identities those laborers asserted for themselves.
Through a close analysis of wages actually paid to named individuals from one week to the next, Castleman opens a new window on Mexican history. In the 1760s, a free-wage labor regime replaced a draft-labor system, and by examining records of road construction he traces both this transformation and its implications. During this time, free-wage artisans saw their earnings reduced, and they were pushed into the labor pool, and Castleman reveals how a shift occurred in the way that laborers identified themselves as the Spanish casta system of racial classification became increasingly fluid.
In his study, Castleman introduces some of the principal players of eighteenth-century Mexico, from viceroys to tobacco planters to military engineers. He then fleshes out the lives of working persons, drawing on a complete set of construction records from the construction of the Puente de Escamela at Orizaba to forge a collective biography that considers their existence apart from the workplace. By linking census and employment records, he uncovers a host of social indicators such as marriage preference, family structure, and differences over time in how the caste system was used to classify people according to ancestry.
As Castleman shows, roads did not so much link Mexico to the global economy as forge regional markets within New Spain, and his work provides an astute analysis of struggles between the Bourbon colonial state, the important consulados of Mexico City and Veracruz, and more localized interests over road policy. More important, Building the King's Highway provides a valuable new perspective on people's lives as it advances our understanding of labor in late colonial Latin America.
Bruce A. Castleman is a lecturer in history at San Diego State University.
April184 pp., 3 halftones
6 x 9
ISBN 0-8165-2439-4 $39.95s cloth
January 2, 2007