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The Association of Communitarian Health Services (ASECSA) and the Role of Religion and Health in Central America  

Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens

The Association of Communitarian Health Services (ASECSA) is a transnational, religiously influenced health program in Central America created during the Cold War. ASECSA was founded in 1978 by a small group of international health professionals with ties to programs started by Catholic and Protestant clergy and laity in Guatemala’s western highlands in the 1960s. It introduced a model of healthcare in which Maya health promoters and midwives became partners in healing rather than objects to be cured. Support for the health programs and ASECSA came from secular and religious international agencies, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), German Misereor, Catholic Relief Services, and the World Council of Churches. ASECSA was founded to disseminate knowledge of popular health education strategies used by health promoters and midwives to provide preventive and curative medical services to their communities. The education methods grew from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and its use by religious agents influenced by liberation theology. Although it was founded in Guatemala, ASECSA’s publications and meetings attracted participation by health professionals and paraprofessionals from Mexico, Central America, and even the Caribbean. Ecumenical religious centers affiliated with liberation theology in the 1960s and 1970s facilitated the development of popular health programs that played a defining role in the region.

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Black Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods: Participatory Christianity in New Spain’s Mining Towns  

Nicole von Germeten

Free and enslaved Africans played an important role in developing a unique form of participatory Christianity in New Spain’s mining towns, especially Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, and Parral. Afro-Mexicans founded, organized, and led religious organizations, called cofradías, shaping them to their own needs and understandings of the sacred and its connections to social ties, gatherings, and celebrations. The practical goals of cofradías included helping sick members and paying for burials and funerals. Historians observe a kind of Latin American African-influenced Baroque piety in cofradías, with embodied practices concentrating on annual flagellant processions held during Holy Week, and an evolving internal gender dynamic, which suggests assimilative goals, even as cofradías strengthened Afro-Mexican communities.

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Black Brotherhoods in the Iberian Atlantic  

Miguel A. Valerio

Black confraternities or lay Catholic brotherhoods were colonial Afro-Latin Americans’ main site of social action and expression, striking a balance between rebellion and flight and assimilation. Modeled on the Roman collegia, burial of deceased members was a central preoccupation. Black brothers and sisters cared for infirm cofrades (confraternity members) in their own hospitals and other hospitals of colonial Latin America. They commissioned, fashioned, and maintained ornate altars and shrines for their saints, thereby engaging in artistic patronage and art collecting. They staged lavish festivities for their patron’s feast and other holidays, so dazzling that they were incorporated into local public festivities. But their festive practices were also seen by colonial authorities as unorthodox and even subversive. Yet, despite all opposition, colonial Afro-Latin Americans managed to avail themselves of religious brotherhoods to fashion meaningful existence in the diaspora through community formation, mutual aid, and religious and festive expression. Brotherhoods thus allowed Afro-Latin Americans to fashion group cohesion and a sense of belonging they would translate into political action in future generations. As colonial Afro-Latin Americans’ principal site of social action, confraternities offer us important avenues for studying black subjectivities and ways to account for black vocality in Latin America.

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Black Brotherhoods in the Portuguese Atlantic  

Alicia L. Monroe

Lay Catholic brotherhoods constituted important religious, social, and civic associations among African-origin and African-descended people in Portugal, West Central Africa, and Portuguese America in the early modern period (1450–1850). Lay Catholic brotherhoods (irmandades), also known as confraternities (confrarias) and sodalities, functioned as spaces of devotion oriented around one or more patron saints. In the Portuguese Atlantic world, free and enslaved people of African origin and descent utilized the associations to prioritize collective devotion, mutual aid, and burial rites for members. Mutual aid could include small payments during illness, assistance with manumission process completion, and internment of deceased members under the auspices of the sodality. Lay Catholic brotherhoods functioned as critical sites of transculturation and belonging for people of African origin and descent in the 1490s in Portugal, by the early 1500s in areas of West Central Africa with an entrenched Portuguese presence, and in Brazil beginning in the colonial period (1500–1822). Confraternities became a common facet of lived experience and religiosity for African and African-descended Catholic devotees across the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic world. Associations were governed by organizational charters generated by founding or elected directorate members that required approval from Catholic Church leaders, the Crown, and provincial-level state authorities. Confraternities had juridical personality and recognition from ecclesial and state officials as semi-autonomous entities or corporate bodies. Members could exercise and experience limited levels of autonomy, even in slave-holding colonial environments. Within brotherhoods in Portugal and in its overseas imperial territories, ethnic and racial stratification was predominant, but not absolute. Confraternities acted as institutional sites where West, West Central, and Southeastern African ethnic group identities held importance and deep social meaning across several centuries. Confraternity participants engaged baroque Catholicism, which emphasized collective action including celebration of the saints and related rites relying on music, movement, and festivities. Brotherhoods functioned as critical sites of proselytization, but also came to serve as spaces for local member imperatives that incorporated African cultural expression, esthetics, and worldviews.

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Catholicism in Mexico, 1910 to the Present  

Matthew Butler

The history of Mexican Catholicism between 1910 and 2010 was one of successive conflict and compromise with the state, latterly coupled with increased concern about religious pluralism, secularization, and divisions of both style and theological and ecclesiological substance within Catholicism. The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) represented a particular threat to the church, which was identified by many revolutionaries as an institution allied to the old regime, and hence persecuted. In the same period, and until 1929, the church was openly committed to implementing its own social and political project in competition with the state. Religious conflict reached a tragic peak in the 1920s and 1930s, as revolutionary anticlericals waged political and cultural campaigns against the church, provoking both passive and armed resistance by Catholics. With some exceptions, the period from the late 1930s to the late 1960s was one of comparative church–state conciliation, and a period of institutional collaboration that began when both institutions stood down their militant cadres in the 1930s. In subsequent decades, an over-clericalized and socially conservative church and a theoretically revolutionary but undemocratic state made common cause around the poles of civic and Catholic nationalism, economic stability, and anti-communism. From the later 1960s, however, the church grew increasingly vocal as a critical interlocutor of the state, in terms of both the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s failing socioeconomic model and, especially in the 1980s, its authoritarian political practices. In places, radical strains of Liberation Theology helped to guide indigenous and urban protests against the regime, while also posing an internal, ecclesial problem for the church itself. The rise of economic neoliberalism and qualified democracy from the 1980s onward, as well as the political reorientation of Catholicism under the papacy of John Paul II, saw the church assume a frankly intransigent position, but one that was significantly appeased by the 1992 constitutional reforms that restored the church’s legal personality. After 1992, the church gained in political prominence but lost social relevance. Should the church cleave to an unofficial corporatist relationship with a generally supportive state in the face of rising religious competition? Should Catholics assert their newfound freedoms more independently in a maturing lay regime? A cursory view of Catholicism’s religious landscape today reveals that the tension between more horizontal and vertical expressions of Catholicism remains unresolved. Catholics are to be found in the van of rural self-defense movements, leading transnational civic protests against judicial impunity, and decrying the abuses suffered by Central American migrants at the hands of border vigilantes. At the same time, the mainstream church seeks official preferment of Catholicism by the state and lends moral support to the PRI and PAN parties alike.

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Catholics, Evangelicals, and US Policy in Central America  

Michael Cangemi

During the Cold War’s earliest years, right-wing governments and oligarchic elites in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua fostered closer relationships with the Catholic Church. Dictatorial leaders like Guatemala’s Carlos Castillo Armas and dynastic regimes like Nicaragua’s Somoza family regarded the Church as an ally against supposed Marxist influence in the region. Those ties began to fray in the late 1960s, as the Second Vatican Council’s foundational reforms moved Catholicism farther to the political and social left around the globe. This shift was especially prominent in Central America, where Catholics like El Salvador’s Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero and Guatemala’s Father Stanley Rother were among Central America’s most visible critics and reformers as political violence increased across the region during the 1970s. Relatedly, evangelical Protestants, particularly Pentecostal groups based in the United States, flooded Central America throughout that decade. Their staunch anticommunism and established ties to influential policymakers and political lobbyists in the United States, among other factors, gave evangelical Protestants greater influence in US-Central American relations. Their influence was strongest during the early 1980s, when José Efraín Ríos Montt, an ordained Pentecostal minister with Eureka, California’s Verbo Ministries, seized Guatemala’s presidency via a coup in March 1982. Notable US evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson praised Ríos Montt’s regime for its rabid anticommunist ideology, while President Ronald Reagan claimed that the dictator had received a “bum rap” in the global press. Concurrently, some US evangelical missioners and pastors also foregrounded the Sandinista government’s anti-Protestant activities as additional justification for US support for Nicaragua’s Contra forces. Religious actors were also instrumental to Central America’s peace processes after the Cold War, as Catholic and Protestant leaders alike worked closely with regional governments and the United States to end decades of political violence and enact meaningful socioeconomic reforms for the region’s citizens.

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The Central American Guerrilla Movements  

Dirk Kruijt

With the exception of Costa Rica, Central America was governed by long-term dictatorships or repressive military governments for many decades in the 20th century. Between the late 1950s and the mid-1990s, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras, a confrontation between the dictatorships and guerrilla movements became theaters of profound political violence with distinctive military and political environments and different outcomes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras. Resistance movements and armed guerrilla organizations, initiated and led by urban young professionals and students, attempted to overthrow dictatorships to be replaced by socialist societies. The guerrilla movements included dissidents of communist and other leftist parties, urban workers, and (generally) forbidden peasants organizations. Other contributors to the guerrilla movements included Latin American intellectuals and students at universities who used dependency theory as a conceptual framework to explain poverty and underdevelopment. Most Central American insurgency movements paid homage to Marxism (the Cuban Revolution of 1959 was a source of inspiration). The student movements at universities and secondary educational institutions became a source of recruitment. However, the most important influence on the radicalization of the general population—working-class neighborhoods and the peasant associations—was the liberation theology of Catholic-based communities and small groups of lay preachers who interpreted the Bible on matters of justice and injustice. The guerrilla movements in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua were clearly influenced by these leftist-Catholic organizations. In Guatemala, indigenous movements sympathized with the guerrillas and sometimes joined their ranks. The bitter conflicts between the insurgents and the counterinsurgents (they army, paramilitary forces, and death squads) became proxy wars between the then military superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, in the context of the Cold War. Finally, peace negotiations ended the armed conflicts, restored parliamentary democracy, and transformed the guerrilla movements into political parties. Organizations of the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) facilitated the transition.

Article

Contextualizing the Popol Wuj from Friar Ximénez to the Digital Age  

Néstor Quiroa

Regarded as an ethnohistorical treasure, the Popol Wuj narrative has been read exclusively as a freestanding, self-contained text used to inquire into a history far removed from when it was actually created. Consequently, the colonial context of the text itself has been minimized, including the central role of Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez as transcriber and translator of the only copy in existence. The present study delineates a historical trajectory of the Popol Wuj, reframing the narrative within its colonial ecclesiastic context. It explores the physical structure of Friar Ximénez’s 18th-century manuscript, preserved as MS 1515 by the Newberry Library in Chicago, to demonstrate that his work was first and foremost a series of religious treatises intended to carry out the conversion of the K’iche’ to Christianity. As a cautionary word, rather than revisiting the old, biased approach of questioning the authenticity and authorship of this Popol Wuj narrative, the current study suggests a broader reading, addressing the complexities intrinsic in this text, particularly the fact that the narrative was the result of the cultural contact between mendicant friars, whose main objective was to evangelize, and indigenous groups, who strived to maintain their cultural continuity by recording their oral history in the face of such a threat. Finally, this study invites scholars to ponder on the implications that the present structure of Ximénez’s manuscript (MS 1515) presents for future Popol Wuj studies as the narrative enters the age of electronic information and digital imaging.

Article

Convent and Family Property in New Spain  

Rosalva Loreto López

The process of establishing women’s convents in Hispanic America must be understood as the result of converging expectations from the crown, the church, and important laypeople who were interested in re-creating a Catholic world in the cities of the New World. The importance of women’s convents depended on the regular clergy as well as the secular, both of whom were invested in replicating their own religious identity. The role of families was also critical in the processes of establishing and populating the fifty-eight convents, as it was the nun’s families who expanded their networks of power, pedigree, and the reproduction of their own lineage by way of these institutions. Finally, the study of convent wealth is also essential to understanding the mutual dependence between the urban growth of cities and the expansion of these women’s institutions.

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Digital Resources: Christianity in New Spain (Mexico)  

Kristian J. Fabian and David T. Orique

A variety of useful digital resources provide material for enriching the study of Christianity in New Spain (colonial Mexico). Such records, covering the period from the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521 until Mexico achieved its independence from Spain in 1821, reside in the growing digital collections in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. These repositories—such as the national archives in Mexico and Spain; specialized libraries in the United States, like the Library of Congress or the Newberry Library, university-based collections; and Mexican religious institutional sources—have searchable databases to help users in their research of Christianity in New Spain. Knowing how to navigate these databases and which keywords to use will help users find their way through the morass. Some collections also have a thematic organization around such topics as colonial art and architecture (where one can find information about churches, convents, and monasteries), indigenous pictorial manuscripts (which will illustrate the constructions of community churches, baptism activities, and the like), printed texts of all kinds (doctrine, sermons, information about indigenous religious beliefs and practices, and so on), and Inquisition records.

Article

Ecclesiastical Geography of Colonial Brazil  

Evergton Sales Souza

For many years Brazil was a mission land, a space for evangelization mostly occupied by non-Christian peoples and targets of the conversion work of Catholic missionaries. Furthermore, the slowness of the colonizing—and missionary—advance toward the vast sertões of Portuguese America meant that a large part of the territory remained outside the principal organizing institutions of the colonial space, among which was the diocesan church. However, by confusing the space effectively occupied by colonization with what would eventually form the extension of the territorial possessions of the Portuguese monarchy, the field was opened to mistaken perceptions about the presence and importance of the diocesan Church in colonial Brazil. Since 2000, the proliferation of studies about the episcopacy and different aspects of the structures and actions related to episcopal power has contributed to a change in the understanding of its role and relevance in the development of the Church and the Luso-American colony. Contemporary historians, more attentive to documentary sources related to diocesan administration, have sought to show that the diocesan geography of Portuguese America had greater complexity and importance than has been attributed to it by incautious researchers convinced they were aware of the limitations of the role played by secular clergy in the construction of the Church and Catholicism. Emerging out of recent 21st-century studies is a better knowledge of diocesan structures—bishoprics, ecclesiastic administrations, parishes, chapels—and the functioning of the mechanisms of pastoral vigilance and the punishment of deviants, whether they were clerics or simple believers. This demystifies the idea that the royal Padroado was a nefarious obstacle to the development of the diocesan church in Brazil and shows the importance of the study of diocesan geography not only for the understanding of the history of the Church and Catholicism but also for the development of colonial society.

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Espiritismo and Urban Planning in Cuba: Envisioning Regeneration in Havana and Oriente after 1898  

Reinaldo L. Román

Espiritismo refers to the practice of communicating with the spirits of the dead by means of especially disposed and trained persons known as mediums. Linked in origin to the Spiritualist movement that swept through the United States and Europe after 1848, espiritistas in Cuba drew primarily from French and Spanish sources, especially the writings of French systematizer Allan Kardec (1804–1869). Following Kardec, espiritistas asserted that spirits survived death, progressing over numerous incarnations until they attained perfect knowledge and morality. Kardec, who described his pursuits as an experimental science rather than as a faith, was less influential among Anglo-American spiritualists. Among other differences, spiritualists questioned Kardec’s notion of reincarnation, the key to what he called the “law of [spiritual] progress.” In Cuba, a Spanish colony until 1898, espiritismo grew in popularity in the last third of the 19th century, a period of wrenching anti-colonial and anti-slavery struggles that led separatists to denounce the Catholic Church for its support of Spanish colonialism. Communications with spirits persuaded non-conformists, mostly literate town and city residents of the middling classes, that a new age of technological and moral progress was dawning. In Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Barcelona, and Madrid, espiritistas challenged the Church for its refusal to recognize evidence derived from spirit communications. Practitioners maintained that knowledge acquired from superior spirits could renew Christianity, heal the sick, and open up new vistas of the cosmos. Generally associated with liberalism, espiritistas contested the doctrinal authority of the Church and its public functions. Persuaded of the essential equality of all spirits, espiritistas advocated civil marriage, lay schools, hospitals, cemeteries, the end of capital punishment, the abolition of slavery, and reforms favoring individual freedoms for men and women. Fearful that espiritismo could fuel anti-colonial dissent, Spanish officials in Cuba sought to limit the circulation of espiritista texts. Clerics condemned the practice in vehement terms. The Ten Year’s War (1868–1878) marked a turning point in the development of espiritismo. Following the decade-long nationalist insurgency, espiritista groups multiplied. Espiritismo gained adherents among campesinos and people of color, including those in eastern Cuba, where the separatist movement had its most ardent supporters. Although espiritistas were not all revolutionaries, practitioners were well represented in the multi-racial army that waged the War of Independence (1895–1898) with the aim of establishing a sovereign and racially egalitarian republic. The 1890s and early 1900s also witnessed the rise of ritually and nominally distinct forms of espiritismo. In eastern Cuba, a communal healing practice known as espiritismo de cordón became popular. Practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions, including Regla de Ocha (Santería) and Palo, incorporated espiritista practices of medium communication. Espiritismo cruzado, a practice inspired by African and espiritista sources, also gained adherents across the island. In 1898, when the United States intervened in Cuba, bringing thirty years of recurrent warfare to an abrupt end, much of the island was in ruins. The Cuban insurgent army had destroyed plantations to deprive Spain of revenue. Spain, for its part, had pursued a policy of reconcentración (1896–1897). These were measures aimed at denying separatists the support of rural Cubans. Hundreds of thousands of campesinos were forced to relocate to garrisoned camps established in cities and towns under Spanish control. As Spanish officers had anticipated, reconcentrados and refugees overwhelmed the fragile urban infrastructure. The results were widespread hunger, epidemics, and the deaths of a 150,000 to 170,000 people, according to a recent estimate by historian Guadalupe García. When the United States installed a military government in Cuba in 1898, the reconstruction of war-ravaged cities, restoration of agriculture, and resettlement of the displaced population were among its most pressing priorities. Havana’s urban periphery alone counted 242,055 indigent residents in 1899. Espiritistas responded to the neocolonial government’s urban planning with designs of their own. After witnessing the expansion of El Vedado, a Havana suburb lauded for embodying the virtues of the nascent order, an otherwise unknown espiritista named Antonio Ojeda y Cabral launched a quixotic campaign. In a free pamphlet, Ojeda proposed a blueprint for the construction of a new kind of city, one purpose-built to promote material and spiritual regeneration of society. Painstakingly articulated as the vision was, El que entienda, recoja: A que os libertéis vosotros sois llamados (1908) was remarkable for its silence on matters of race, a fault line that cut across politics and urban planning alike. Ojeda’s rhetoric aligned him with the predominant strain of Cuban nationalism. Advocates, including José Martí, defined Cubanness as transcending racial differences, but decried race-based mobilizations as threats to national unity and sovereignty. In the eastern province of Oriente, espiritistas de cordón responded to neocolonial plans with the construction of healing compounds. These centros espirituales challenged the schemes for urban renewal and agro-industrial expansion that the government promoted in Santiago de Cuba’s suburb of Vista Alegre and in newly established sugar plantations. The centers afforded a small number of insurgent veterans access to housing and plots of land, and gave victims of the war a chance to build communities in line with their aspirations of eastern insurgents. Their regional understanding of national liberation called for racial equality without demanding silence. Despite such differences, early 20th-century espiritismo offered Cubans in Oriente and Havana futures beyond those that government officials and developers sought to build.

Article

The Guaraní Missions in the Jesuit Province of Paraguay, 1609–1800  

Eduardo Neumann

The establishment of the Jesuit Province of Paraguay in 1609 expanded upon the “spiritual conquest” of the Guaranís of South America. The liminal position of this territory, located between the southern boundaries of the dominions of the Iberian monarchies in America, conditioned the policy of conversion applied to the indigenous peoples who inhabited this region. Missionaries sought to attract the attention of indigenous leaders to catechesis to ensure evangelization, but much of their positive results stemmed from a convergence of mythical and historical motivations. Along with the use of firearms, used to repel the attacks of the bandeirantes from the captaincy of São Paulo, these factors contributed to a political alliance forming between the Jesuits and the catechized Guaraní. This alliance, in turn, allowed for the creation of a successful social, political, and cultural arrangement. The foundation of these Christian Indian settlements—known as missions—was one of the variants of the “Republic of Indians,” a framework for limited indigenous self-government codified in Spanish law, which enabled the Guaranís to overcome increasing social fragmentation and reorient their cultural activities. Since teaching “arts and crafts” was a leading vehicle for evangelization, many indigenous people also became literate. Lessons in reading and writing taught in the Guaraní language, through seminars, catechisms, and dictionaries, familiarized the population of the missions with written culture. Daily life in these Christian communities allowed the natives, under the tutelage of the Jesuits, to overcome the precariousness of the conditions to which they were subjected as exploited workers. It also afforded them an opportunity to recreate a semblance of their way of life (ñande reko) adjusted to colonial parameters.

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Heresies, Religious Persecution, and Intolerance in Colonial Brazil  

Bruno Feitler

Portuguese America, or colonial Brazil, was a world of multiple cultures and peoples, integrating Amerindians, Europeans and enslaved Africans. However, this integration was carried out under the exclusive dominion of the Portuguese, for whom religious unity within Roman Catholicism was a political necessity. This fact was not apparent in the early decades of the 16th century when they first landed in what would become Brazil; however, with the beginning of effective colonization and the presence of missionaries in the 1540s, while religious strife in Europe was in ascension, there was no doubt. Although a local Inquisition tribunal was never established, intolerance was the norm, and religious persecution of acts and beliefs deemed heretical (or associated with them) was a reality. This search for Catholic orthodoxy and exclusivism was ensured in colonial Brazil mainly by three ecclesiastic institutes or organizations: Inquisition representatives, members of the secular clergy, and missionaries (Jesuits, but also Capuchins, Carmelites, and members of other regular orders). While not all had the primary objective of persecuting heretics, they considered religious homogeneity as essential and thus struggled to uncover and punish potential Protestants or crypto-Jews. They also confronted practices and beliefs of local origin on a much more regular basis, such as the santidade of Jaguaripe and the mandinga pouches and calundus of African origin, associating them with devilish customs and calling those practices and beliefs “inventions,” “abuses,” or “errors” rather than a more theologically established “heresy.”

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The History of Emotions in Colonial Latin America  

Jacqueline Holler

The history of emotion is one of the strongest currents in contemporary historiography. Historians and the public have always considered emotion important, but it has become a topic in itself only in recent decades. The history of emotion now has its own lexicon and key concepts, including emotionology (emotional standards of a community) and emotional communities (the multiple and shifting communities, each with its own standards and practices, within a society). The historiography of emotion in colonial Latin America can trace its origins to colonial works that framed Iberians as emotionally pathological. While this derogatory stereotype is clearly invalid, the notion of a distinct colonial emotional regime is worth investigating. Distinct indigenous emotional standards and understandings, the emotional performances and practices associated with colonial domination, and the relationship between emotion and honor may all be key features of a uniquely Latin American, and uniquely colonial, emotional regime. Similarly, the manifestations of more recognizably “interpersonal” emotion had a distinctively Latin American character. To a great degree, the Catholic Church exercised hegemony over the definition and regulation of emotion, though medical and humoral understandings of emotion were common both to colonial clerics and to the laity; at the same time, however, the emotions associated with sexuality—love, desire, jealousy, and hatred—are testament to the limits of the Church’s control. Moreover, 18th-century cultural and social changes further altered the balance of the colonial emotional regime; reformers criticized what they viewed as the extreme, inauthentic, or violent emotions of the Latin American population, while the authority of psychological and medical explanations of emotion grew, producing “hybridized” understandings.

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Huguenots in the Atlantic  

Bryan A. Banks

Huguenots refer to the group of French Calvinists in France, those expelled from France into the wider European, Atlantic, and global diaspora, and those descendant from either of the first two groups. Driven by faith, religious factionalism, and dynastic rivalries, Huguenots enflamed the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). Henri IV ended the war by extending a degree of toleration to the Huguenots in 1598 with the Edict of Toleration. Despite the king’s royal edict, the first wave of Huguenots (1530s–1660s) continued to leave France well into the 17th century. The second wave (1670s–1710s) occurred in the second half of the 17th century, when Louis XIV’s persecutory policies began to limit Huguenot communal activities, meeting spaces, available professions, and then with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), the ability to be Calvinist legally at all. Following 1685, those who remained in France entered into what is often called the Désert period, when French Calvinists continued to practice their faith in clandestine settings, away from the French dragonnades. Those who rode the two waves out of France, settled in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Great Britain, Ireland, and many of the German states. Some used other European states to ride successive waves of diaspora movement out further into Europe and the Atlantic World, relocating to North America, the Caribbean, Suriname, Brazil, South Africa, and then later on into the Indian and Pacific oceanic worlds. Huguenots took advantage of Atlantic spaces in order to prove their value to the French state, but when France no longer proved safe for Huguenots, the Atlantic offered them a refuge, wherein a complex diaspora community emerged in the early modern period.

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Islam in Latin America  

Silvia Montenegro

Muslim presence in Latin America is associated with migration processes, with the transnationalization of interpretations of Islam spreading to the region, and with varying stages of institutionalization and growth of the communities in each of the countries involved. There are two previous records of a modest Muslim inflow: Moriscos (i.e., crypto-Muslims who arrived in the Americas after the conquest) and the expressions of Islam brought by enslaved Africans transported to the continent to serve as labor from the 17th century onward. In the Southern Cone, it was Arab immigrants who reinvigorated the presence of Islam; in the Caribbean and the Guianas, indentured laborers from India and Indonesia. In some countries, there have been communities institutionally organized around centers and associations since the early 20th century; in others, the institutionalization process started in the late 1980s. In predominantly Catholic Latin America, Islam has always taken on the form of a religious minority, composed of immigrants of various backgrounds and later also of Latin American converts. Latin American countries have been recipients of expansion projects by certain branches of Muslim tradition, including Shi’ism, promoted by Iran after the 1979 revolution; Saudi Wahhabism; the transnationalization of Sufi orders coming from Asia, such as Naqshbandiyya-Haqqaniyya and Halveti-Jerrahiyya. Worldwide Islam-spreading movements, such as Tablighi Jamaat, Ahmadiyya, and the Murabitun World Movement, also became global, reaching some Latin American countries.

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Jesuit Missions and Private Property, Commerce, and Guaraní Economic Initiative  

Julia Sarreal

The mission economy supported tens of thousands of Guaraní Indians and made the Jesuit reducciones (1609 to 1767) the most populous and financially prosperous of all the missions among native peoples of the Americas. The communal structure of collective labor, shared ownership, and redistribution of communal property formed the basis of the mission economy and seemed to leave little room for the possession of private property, independent trade, and economic initiative on the part of the resident Guaraní. Late 18th century Jesuit authors reinforced such an understanding in an attempt to defend their order and its actions in Paraguay. They argued that the Guaraní were incapable of managing their own affairs and that Jesuit management of the communally structured economy was indispensible for the wellbeing of both the missions and the Guaraní. Such accounts overlook evidence to the contrary. Mission Guaraní did in fact own private property—yerba mate, horses, clothing, and jewelry—and Jesuit leaders repeatedly issued orders for the missionaries to allow the Guaraní to independently trade yerba mate. Furthermore, although Jesuit authors repeatedly denied that they paid mission Guaraní wages—to do so would go against the communal structure that they so vehemently defended—the missionaries acknowledged that they paid mission Guaraní bonuses as a reward for their skills or extra labor. These bonuses served as a way to motivate individual economic initiative or agency within the framework of the missions’ communal structure. In sum, the communal structure allowed for more flexibility in the ownership of private property, independent commerce, and economic initiative by the Guaraní than has been portrayed in both the 18th century writings of Jesuit authors and much of the current literature.

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Liberation Theology in Latin America  

Douglass Sullivan-González

Liberation theology is a critical reflection on the workings of God in the history of humankind that emphasizes the active, divine redemption (liberation) of humans from the sinful bonds of political and economic oppression. The biblical Exodus narrative became the core metaphor for the theological understanding of liberation and freedom. The Latin American bishops, during their second meeting at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, coined a signature tenet of liberation theology: “the preferential option for the poor.” Liberation theology emerged formally among theologians in South America in response to rising expectations produced by two key external factors: the successful Cuban revolution (1959) and the ecumenical zeitgeist associated with Vatican II (1962–1965). The movement spread quickly while increased literacy among the faithful inspired lay leaders, trained by sparse clergy and women religious, to organize Christian base communities (CEBs), to “read” their own reality in light of the Exodus story, and to campaign for social justice in alliance with secular political actors. The swift repression and assassination of clergy, nuns, and lay activists by security forces hostile to democratization of the political economy in the 1970s and early 1980s fueled international awareness of liberation theology. Heightened internal opposition within the Vatican in the 1980s to some of liberation theology’s fundamental tenets culminated with the ten-month silencing in 1985 of the Brazilian theologian and Franciscan priest Leonardo Boff. Liberation theology has since inspired other marginalized social actors to explore what liberation means for those forced to live on the periphery due to racial, ethnic, and/or gender-based discrimination; homophobia; and a rapidly deteriorating environment threatened by unsustainable development models.

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Magic and Healing in Colonial New Spain  

Anderson Hagler

Belief in the supernatural permeated the fabric of rural life in colonial Mexico (officially the Viceroyalty of New Spain), particularly in areas where Indigenous peoples outnumbered Spanish clergy, Spanish officials, or American-born criollos of Iberian descent. Colonial testimony from commoners and local Indigenous leaders in criminal and Mexican Inquisition case files offers much detail about popular views of healing and magic in diverse places such as Chiapas, Central Mexico, and New Mexico. Criminal cases from southern New Spain in Chiapas show how the belief in tonalli, an Indigenous concept of the soul, continued to thrive locally among Maya peoples like the Zoque. Other sources reveal a continued belief in a local deity known as Poxlon among the Tzotzil peoples in the 17th and 18th centuries. Clerical writings such as sermons, treatises, and missives, including those of Bishop Francisco Núñez de la Vega, also provide insight into agrarian rituals and their cosmological importance. Belief in the efficacy of prayers, spells, divination, and other forms of magic placed many Indigenous ritual specialists in direct competition with parish priests who might negatively label traditional healing practices as “idolatry,” “superstition,” or “false beliefs.” For example, clerical writings from New Mexico reveal ongoing traditional dances in public spaces in the 17th century. Here, the Pueblo peoples danced the catzinas (modern-day kachina) to provide bountiful harvests and to ensure prosperity for future generations. Priests and friars worried that these traditional forms of spiritual engagement would invite divine retribution like the condemned cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Consequently, Native ritual specialists who inhabited traditional spaces like caves in Chiapas and kivas in New Mexico seemingly lured erring neophytes to perdition.